Welcome to Defenders, the teaching class of Dr. William Lane Craig, today, and excurses

on Natural Theology, Part 30.

For more resources from Dr. Craig, go to Reasonablefaith.org.

We have now come to the most important argument in support of atheism that needs to be examined,

and this is the argument from the suffering and the evil in the world.

This goes by different names.

Sometimes it's called the problem of pain or the problem of innocent suffering. Among philosophers, however,

the problem usually goes under the name the problem of evil. And so I'll often refer to it

under that title, but it needs to be understood that it's not technically just about moral

evil, but natural evil as well. That is to say the suffering that results from disease,

accident, natural disasters, and so forth. Now undoubtedly the problem of evil or suffering is the most important argument in support of atheism.

When you consider the extent and the depth of human suffering in the world, whether it's due to natural disasters or to man's own

inhumanity to man, then I think we have to admit that it's hard to believe in God. The horrible

suffering in the world certainly seems to be evidence of God's absence.

To illustrate, in 1985, when Jan and I were living just outside of Paris, the problem

of evil came home to me in a new and powerful way through two incidents that were shown

on French television.

In the first of these, a terrible earthquake

occurred in Mexico City, which devastated blocks of high-rise apartment buildings. And as the rescue

teams in the aftermath of the quake searched through the rubble for survivors, they came across a 10-year-old boy who was trapped alive

somewhere in the recesses of a collapsed building. And during the next several days, the whole

world watched as the rescuers attempted to clear away the rubble to try to get to the boy.

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