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

on Natural Theology, Part 34.

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

We're going to wrap up our discussion today of the problem of evil and suffering. And I initiated

this problem by saying that there are really two versions. There's the intellectual version

of the problem of suffering, which comes in both a logical and a probabilistic form, and then

there's what we could call the emotional problem of evil.

And I've argued over the last couple weeks that the intellectual problem of evil ultimately fails, that the atheist is unable to show that the evil

and suffering in the world is either inconsistent with or improbable with respect to God's

existence, and that therefore the intellectual version of the problem of evil fails.

I indicated that I think for most people the problem of suffering and evil is not really an intellectual problem.

It's really an emotional problem. They've never really thought very deeply about this problem, but they just emotionally

react to God's permitting the terrible evil and suffering in the world. So we need to address

this emotional problem. Now, you might be thinking, well, then why go through all of this

intellectual material if this is really

just an emotional problem?

Well, I think there are two reasons why it's important to have dealt with this intellectually.

First, people think that their problem is intellectual.

And so by working through the intellectual problem of evil, we can show respect for their opinion

and try to help them to see what the real problem is. We take their objections and arguments

at face value and deal with them intellectually.

But secondly, I think also that what we've seen can be of tremendous help to us when we are

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