Hi, this is Hank Hanegraff, president of the Christian Research Institute and host of the Bible

and Saman broadcast with another Hank unplug short.

Today I want to talk about the problem of evil.

And the reason is self-evident. We've seen horrendous evils take place in Afghanistan.

We've been alerted again and again to the problem of evil that is manifest through abortion. Politicians today

undergirding the notion that we should allow abortion during the entire nine months of a woman's

pregnancy. That is a horrendous evil. Imagine someone willing to

terminate a child, a preborn child at eight months. The only difference between that child in the womb and outside the womb is,

of course, location. So the termination of that life is a horrendous evil. And then there are

natural disasters like the hurricanes. New Orleans is a great example of people

experiencing natural disaster as I speak. So what about this problem of evil? It may seem as though there are many responses to this problem.

In reality, however, there are only three basic responses. The response given by pantheism,

philosophical naturalism, and theism. Now, pantheism's response really doesn't help because it denies the existence of good and evil

because in this view, God is all and all is God.

Philosophical naturalism doesn't help either, even though it is very popular in the West today. This is the worldview undergirding evolutionism,

which supposes that everything is a function of random processes, and thus there is no such thing as good

and evil. That leaves us with only one possibility, and that is theism.

And theism alone has a relevant response to the question of evil.

And I would give further to say that only Christian theism answers the problem satisfactorily.

Christian theism acknowledges that God created the potential for evil because God

created humans with freedom of choice.

And of course, without choice, love is meaningless.

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