Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look, and an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth.

For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street.

In this world, you will have trouble.

Those words, which Jesus said to his disciples, are actually true for all human beings at all times.

But at certain times, like the last few months, they seem to be even more apt. The ongoing

war in Ukraine, a hunger crisis in Gaza, last week's shooting at a target store in Austin, which

took three lives, including a grandfather and his granddaughter. These things only punctuate

what has been a summer of suffering. that began with devastating floods in Texas.

We all shuddered at the reports of what those girls at Camp Mystic endured,

and we all mourn the news that 27 campers had lost their lives.

Tragedies expose our deepest beliefs about life in the world.

Not only do they reveal what those beliefs are,

they test whether or not those beliefs are big enough to sustain us. Skeptics often talk as if

the problem of evil and suffering is only of concern for Christianity, but every single religion,

every single worldview has to explain why the world is the way that it is. Naturalistic

explanations of reality deny that God exist. The world is a product of purely material causes

and processes. In this view, there's no way things ought to be. There's only the way things are.

Therefore, what happened to those girls in Texas wasn't really evil, it's really

just bad luck. Eastern religions, like Buddhism and Hinduism, as well as the new age ideas that share

the same basic worldview, deny the existence of real evil altogether. In this view, the physical

world is an illusion. And if that's true, then the evil that inflicts the physical world has to be an

illusion as well. Now, that, of course, is more of a deflection than an explanation. Instead of asking,

...