This is Stan Terresens, hashtag STRASK podcast. Welcome to you. I'm Amy Hall, and I'm here with Greg Kokel.

We are here.

We are here.

We are here.

Greg, we're going to start with a question from Ashley.

How would you best respond to a dear friend, atheist slash agnostic, who doesn't believe evil exists and that evil actions are done by people just trying to get by with the circumstance they've been given,

such as childhood abuse, past trauma, etc.

Well, I'm pausing here because I think – well, there's two things going on here. It is a denial of objective morality and evil that is

evidence for objective morality because the problem of evil requires that morality be a feature

of the universe that is outside of us. It's not mind-dependent.

That, therefore, acts themselves are wrong. It isn't that acts that take place are things that we feel bad about ourselves or think

that in our own private morality are wrong.

We wouldn't do that or something like that.

So I'm just making the distinction between relativistic morality and objective morality. If there's

evil in the world, then morality is objective. If there is no objective morality, then there's

no evil in the world. Rape isn't wrong. People might not like it.

That's a different matter. So there's a denial of objective morality in the denial of the problem of evil.

And the second thing is, sounds like an explanation of what drives people to do things that others say are actually evil.

And I guess I can, I'm trying to think of what order I want to deal with this, I guess start at this simplest spot.

I have said this many times because I think it's a great, accurate, sound generalization.

There is something everybody knows, no matter where they lived or when they lived, and that is

that there's something wrong with the world. Okay? That's just another way of saying there's evil in the world and everybody knows it.

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