Evil and Suffering Disprove God

The moral argument is constantly misheard, so state it precisely. It does not claim that unbelievers cannot be good, cannot tell right from wrong, or cannot raise decent families. They plainly can and do. The argument is not about moral knowledge (how we come to recognize right and wrong) or moral practice (whether we live up to it). It is about moral ontology: what kind of reality could make moral obligations genuinely binding on us in the first place.

The Stanford Encyclopedia survey describes this whole family of arguments as reasoning from some feature of morality to God as its best explanation. The Christian is not insisting that atheists have no morals; he is pressing a question the atheist must also answer: when you say an act is truly wrong, not just unfashionable or forbidden by your tribe, what makes that true?

Two features of moral life resist easy reduction.

The first is binding obligation. Most people, on reflection, hold that torturing a child for entertainment is not just distasteful or socially counterproductive but really, mind-independently wrong, even if every society came to approve of it. That is a claim about how things are, not about how we happen to feel. A standard form of the argument grants exactly this: there are objective moral facts, and then asks what best explains them.

The second is human worth. We treat persons as having a dignity that does not rise and fall with their usefulness, their power, or the consensus around them. The weak, the unborn, the enemy, and the prisoner each retain a worth that forbids certain treatment. But if a human being is finally just rearranged matter, it is hard to locate where that non-negotiable worth could come from. Christianity grounds it in persons being made in the image of God: a dignity conferred by the Creator, not earned by achievement or assigned by society.

The unbeliever has real answers here, and they deserve real engagement rather than caricature.

• Morality is an evolved instinct. Very likely our moral feelings did emerge through evolution. But that explains the feeling, not the obligation. If “do not betray your friend” reduces to a useful impulse inherited from our ancestors, then in the cases where betrayal would actually pay, the impulse carries no authority to bind me. Explaining why we have moral sentiments is not the same as showing those sentiments answer to anything true.
• Morality is a social contract. Useful, but it makes the majority the measure. A society that agreed to exterminate a minority would, on this view, be doing nothing objectively wrong; only something others dislike. Almost no one truly believes that. The reformer who stands against his entire culture is often right against the consensus, which means the consensus was never the standard.
• Moral facts simply exist, with no God. This is the most serious option: a non-theistic moral realism on which values are real, abstract features of reality. It should be weighed honestly. But it strains to explain how an abstract value could obligate a person or issue anything resembling a command. The atheist philosopher J. L. Mackie felt this so acutely that he judged objective moral facts would be metaphysically “queer,” too strange to fit a purely physical world, and so denied they exist at all. That is consistent, but notice the cost: moral outrage at real evil becomes, strictly, a useful illusion. Theism lets us keep the conviction that some things are really wrong.

The classic counter is the Euthyphro dilemma: is something good because God commands it (then goodness is arbitrary; he could have commanded cruelty) or does God command it because it is good (then goodness stands above God, and we never needed him)?

The Christian answer declines both horns. Goodness is neither an arbitrary divine decree nor a standard hovering above God; it is grounded in God’s own necessary and unchanging character. He does not consult an external rule of love and justice, nor invent one on a whim. He is love and justice, and his commands express what he is. Cruelty was never a live option, because it contradicts his nature.

Here the argument turns pastoral. The same moral law that lets us name evil for what it is also turns and indicts us, which is the honest weight underneath every appeal to the problem of evil. If there is a real moral law, we have all broken it. Christianity does not flinch from that verdict; it answers it with a cross. The God who grounds the law is the God who bore its penalty.

The Gospel writers go out of their way to rule out a phantom. When the disciples think they are seeing a spirit, Luke records Jesus answering the fear head-on: “a spirit does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have.” He shows them his hands and feet, invites them to touch him, and eats a piece of broiled fish in front of them. The scene is not decorative; it is deliberately anti-ghost.

The point throughout is continuity. The body that is raised carries the marks of the body that was crucified: the same hands, the same feet, the same wounds. This is why the resurrection is the natural sequel to the crucifixion: not a different being who replaces Jesus, but the very Jesus who died, now alive.

John tells the story of Thomas, who refuses to believe on report and demands to see the wounds for himself. A week later Jesus offers him exactly that, and Thomas answers with the highest confession in the Gospel: “My Lord and my God!” A bodily encounter produces worship of the risen Christ as God.

These were not fleeting private impressions. The appearances are repeated, physical, and communal: meals shared, conversations held, wounds inspected, a commission given. Whatever else the first witnesses were doing, they were not describing a comforting inner feeling. They claimed to have met a person.

The earliest written testimony, Paul’s creed in 1 Corinthians 15, says Christ “was buried” and “was raised.” The body that went into the tomb is the body that came out, now the “firstfruits” of a coming harvest. Paul stakes the entire Christian hope on it: because Jesus was raised bodily, those who belong to him will be too.

The usual objection cites Paul’s own words: he speaks of a “spiritual body,” and says “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God.” But this misreads the grammar. Paul contrasts a “natural body” with a “spiritual body,” and as many New Testament scholars note, those adjectives name the animating power, not the material. A “natural body” is not made of soul; just so, a “spiritual body” is not made of spirit; it is a body fully animated and empowered by the Holy Spirit, imperishable and glorious. As for “flesh and blood,” the phrase is a Jewish idiom for frail, mortal humanity. Paul’s very next lines call for “the perishable” to be “clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality.” That is transformation of the body, not escape from it.

Two careful versions of this objection deserve a careful answer.

Some groups teach that Jesus was raised as a spirit creature, his fleshly body disposed of, and that the appearances were materializations. This reads the texts against their grain: the wounds, the eating, the “flesh and bones,” and the empty tomb. The full response is at Jesus rose as a spirit creature.

Other readers, more sympathetic, propose that the first Christians had visionary experiences later dressed up in physical detail. But a vision does not empty a tomb, and Paul, who lists his own encounter alongside the rest, grounds the believer’s future bodily resurrection in the pattern of Jesus’ own. Strip the body out and the physical scenes, the empty grave, and the entire logic of 1 Corinthians 15 become inexplicable.

Concede what is true: Paul does not teach a mere resuscitation of a corpse that will die again, but a transformed, glorified body. Transformed, however, is not the same as immaterial. The risen Jesus is continuous with the crucified Jesus: changed, deathless, but unmistakably him. This is what makes the public apostolic witness a claim about history rather than private comfort.