Before we deal with the more personal issues of evil and suffering, I thought it might be helpful to quickly summarize what is called the Evidential argument. What this argument entails is that basically, there is no good that we can know of or do that justifies God in permitting any type of evil to exist. Notice that this argument is built upon probability. The evidence of evil shows that there is no God. What good can possibly come out of the allowance of evil?
One does not expect evil and God to co-exist and so therefore, he or she concludes that there is no God. Notice that one gets what they expect in this argument. If it turns out that you do not believe in God, you have got good reason not to believe. But is this very helpful?
What if I have more reasons to believe in the existence of God than I do in the non-existence of God? True, it appears that evil could rule out the existence of God, but there are so many other things that point to their being a God. The reasons for God's existence are greater than believing he doesn't exist. Remember, this argument holds that God "probably" doesn't exist because of evil in which case I say that there is more probability that he does exist than he doesn't. Make sense?
I realize there is much more to the evidential argument than what I have written. But I wanted to share some of the basics about it so it can help us affirm one again the God and evil can co-exist. The question that now emerges is why? And to that question we will defer to another post.
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