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

on Natural Theology, Part 31.

For more resources from Dr. Craig, go to reasonable faith.org.

Last time we began to look at the logical version of the problem of evil.

And you'll recall this version of the problem claims that the coexistence of God and the

suffering in the world is logically impossible.

Given the suffering and evil in the world, it is logically impossible that God exists.

Now, the statements that an all-powerful, all-loving God exists and that evil and suffering exist

are not explicitly contradictory to each other. So the atheist must be assuming some

hidden premises if he thinks this is an implicit contradiction, premises which would bring out

the contradiction and make it explicit. And we identified two such premises. The first one

was that if God is all powerful, as Christians claim, then

he can create any world that he wants, including a world with no evil, no suffering. Secondly,

that if God is all good, then he would prefer a world without suffering over a world with suffering.

And since God is all powerful and all good, it would follow, therefore, that suffering

does not exist.

And since suffering does exist, one can conclude that therefore God does not exist.

Now we began to look at those hidden assumptions and ask ourselves,

are they necessarily true? And we saw first of all that that assumption that if God is all

powerful, he can create any world that he wants is not necessarily true. Because if it's even possible that human

beings have freedom of the will, then there may be worlds that in and of themselves are logically

possible, but they're not feasible for God to create because people would not freely do what God wants them to do.

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