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

on Natural Theology, Part 32.

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

We've been talking about the logical version of the problem of evil, and I explained last time that the burden of proof that it lays upon the atheist's shoulders is simply too heavy to be sustained, and that this fact is now widely recognized by both atheist and theist philosophers alike.

And therefore, this is not really an issue of hot debate anymore.

Those of those people who say that philosophy never makes any progress can be refuted by simply pointing

to this problem.

For hundreds of years, from the time of Epicurus, hundreds of years before Christ until the

1970s, the logical version of the problem of evil was the standard statement of this problem and objection.

And now it has been widely recognized that this problem, in fact, is bankrupt, that it's been

resolved, that in fact no one is able to show that the coexistence of God and the suffering and evil in the world

are logically incompatible with each other. But that then throws us on to the probabilistic

or the evidential problem of evil, which does remain very much a matter of debate among philosophers today.

And this is a much more powerful version of the problem.

Since its conclusion is more modest, namely it's improbable that God exists, the burden of proof

that it lays on the atheist is much lighter and therefore can be said

to be an easier argument to sustain. So how might we respond to the atheist claim that the

evil and the suffering in the world makes it improbable that God exists. Well, I want to make three

points by way of response to this argument. First, we're not in a good position to say that it's

improbable that God has good reasons for permitting the suffering in the world.

We're not in a good position to be able to say that it's improbable

that God has good reasons for permitting the suffering in the world.

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