J. D. Amley

What Does Evil Prove About God? J. D. Amley

Believers say that God is perfectly good, and that he's all-powerful. They also say he created the whole world and everything in it. But the world is filled with evil. Everywhere you look there's violence, corruption, injustice, poverty, starvation, and disease. If there really were a perfectly good and all-powerful God who created everything, how could he allow the world to go so bad? If he were perfectly good then he wouldn't want evil to exist, right? And if he were all-powerful then he could prevent evil from existing, right? So either he's not perfectly good, or he's not all-powerful, or he just doesn't exist. So goes the old "Problem of Evil" argument. With its own unyielding logic, it insists that the existence of evil proves that Christians just can't be right about God. Either God isn't everything that Christians say he is, or he isn't there at all. Case closed-right? Wrong. A careful, skeptical analysis of this argument-the kind of analysis that this book provides-reveals that the argument is hiding not one, but several, logical fallacies. Fallacies that ultimately show it to be little more than a clever brain teaser. J. D. Amley offers a compelling case that evil does not rule out the existence of a perfectly good, all-powerful God. Along the way he covers issues such as "gratuitous" evil, divine mercy, and eternal punishment. And from there, "It's up to you to decide what that means when it comes to God and Christianity."