What Worldview Can Hold You Up?
By Rick Carver
“I don’t believe in a god that lets young children starve to death or allows people to contract horrible diseases for no apparent reason. I just can’t accept a god like that.”
That is a response I received while in a dialogue with someone who rejected the Christian worldview because he surmised that a loving God would not allow such things to happen. In fact this is a major obstacle for many people. How can we assert that God loves and cares for humanity when we see such injustice and suffering in the world? Shouldn’t He stop all the wrong in the world today? Belief in the God of the Bible would be easier to take if we did not claim that He loved us, right?
Sometimes the answers to such difficult questions are actually staring us right in the face. Yet we do not perceive them; we are too often blinded to the realities that we already take for granted. The objection presented above makes a few assumptions that are worth a closer look. Let’s consider a couple.
First assumption: God shouldn’t behave that way, if He actually exists.
Why not?
I would certainly agree that suffering children and starving people are terrible outcomes and that humanity should seek to alleviate such trials. But why would both of us assume that these sorts of things are “wrong” and “should” be alleviated? Where does our sense of justice and benevolence come from? Does it simply come from within us? Consider this - anyone invoking the words ought orshould, is assuming a moral standard of some kind.
Our assumptions regarding right and wrong can’t spring out of a vacuum. But the person I spoke with rejected the notion of God in favor of an atheistic worldviewexactly because of a moral standard that he perceived God to have violated, supposing that He actually existed. Since the proposition of a loving God was contrary to his sense of justice in God’s creation, he concludes that God could not exist (or at least is not worthy of our allegiance). At this point he overlooks a critical issue.
What is his alternative philosophy? Atheism?
Atheism cannot account for the existence of justice or any objective moral standard, and yet this person comes to the idea that suffering children was something that God should not permit? Think about it. He has to borrow from a theistic worldview (in this case Christianity) in order to refute it. If we are merely cosmic accidents with no ultimate purpose in life then the suggestion that any injustice is objectively wrong is baseless. The irony here is that his option to embrace an atheistic worldview makes no sense given his own convictions regarding justice, right and wrong. In light the existence of our sense of justice and equity, we actually have a strong argument for the existence of God. His atheistic worldview is the one that makes no sense and consequently is not true.
Before a person rejects Christianity on the basis of suffering and evil in the world, he or she would do well to consider what worldview will be adopted in its place. We cannot live or reason without a basic set of presuppositions that make up a worldview. The question is, “Which worldview?”
Second assumption: That there is no answer to the question “Why?”
It is likely that most people, who reject the Christian worldview on the basis of suffering and evil in the world, will never get to the point of seriously considering that there is a Biblical answer for why these things exist in the first place. That’s too bad because Christianity makes the most sense of what we see.
The Bible teaches us that humanity is caught up in what is called “The Fall.” All people, who were intended to reflect God’s own nature (righteous, just, good, etc), have been damaged through sin and are now incapable of bearing the true Image of God (Imago Dei). We still understand goodness and justice, but are not capable of being what we know we should be. This is what it means to be sinful and ultimately guilty before God having violated His moral law. Incidentally, this underscores the need for human accountability in governmental affairs.
It could be said then that God doesn’t allow starvation…we do. God doesn’t allow war…we do. In fact the doctrine of the Fall of Man presents the case that the order of the cosmos itself was affected negatively so that now we must endure what we could call Natural Evil such as decay, calamity (earthquakes, tsunamis, etc), birth defects and such. The Law of Entropy (order tends toward disorder) is also understood to be a product of the Fall. As Daryl Witmer would say, “The world is temporarily out of order.”
The Bible also teaches that God will not let this sinful order of things persist forever. He will one day set things right. We look forward to that Day with great anticipation.
So, where will you stand?
A person may reject our Christian hope of redemption and deliverance from sin through Jesus Christ. He or she may reject our worldview because things like an invisible God, the Fall of Man and a risen Savior seem too hard to believe. But I must ask, “What worldview can hold you up if Christianity is rejected?” Does an atheistic worldview make more sense than Christianity? The answer is simple, “No.”
So the issue becomes one of willingness to accept the truth, not that the truth of Christianity is actually rational. Now we get to the “rub.” A person cannot accept the cross of Christ and remain guiltless in his or her own mind. Reason is not the most significant factor in the rejection of the Christian worldview; it is often just a “smokescreen.”
Isn’t it comforting to know that the God of the Bible is loving, forgiving and proved it by stepping into our world to make right what we could not do ourselves?
Yes, the world is full of brokenness and evil. But these things actually point us to the answer to the very problems we face. Let us not grow weary in the contention for the Truth of the Gospel in the world today. We have the “best news” in town. Take every opportunity to share it.
Rick Carver is the Associate Director for the AIIA Institute
