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

on Natural Theology, Part 33.

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

We've been looking at the evidential or probabilistic version of the problem of evil and suffering.

And I suggested last time two responses to this problem. First, that we're simply not in a good

position to say with any confidence when some instance of evil

or suffering enters our lives that God probably doesn't have a morally sufficient reason

for permitting that. Given our finitude in time and space, our cognitive limitations and intelligence and insight,

we simply aren't in a position to make those kind of probability judgments with any confidence.

But secondly, I also suggested that probabilities are relative to background information and that even if God's

existence were improbable relative to the evil and suffering in the world alone, that doesn't

mean God's existence is improbable because when you can skitter the full scope of the evidence,

God's existence may be very probable. To illustrate, relative to the

facts of reproductive biology, my existence is enormously improbable. Of all those hundreds of millions

of sperm, what are the chances that just that one would unite

with my mother's egg to make me? Relative to the facts of reproductive biology, my existence

is incredibly improbable. So should I believe that I do not exist? Well, obviously not,

because I have very good reason to think that I exist,

even given any improbability that my existence might have relative to the facts of reproductive

biology taken in isolation. And in exactly the same way when we consider the full scope

with the evidence, God's existence,

is probable even given any improbability that evil and suffering might be thought to cast upon God's

...