Like jigsaw puzzles, our stories can have missing pieces or pieces that don’t fit. One of the biggest missing or misfitting pieces in the secular story is how to account for evil. Most modern secular stories are optimistic about finding and living the good life, but don’t have a place for the piece called ‘evil’ that always appears to wreck our stories and our puzzles. How do we explain the problem of evil?  

INSIDE THE SECULAR STORY

• Suffering and pain are the result of physical or psychological problems.

• Everything is getting better as suffering and pain is removed with more knowledge, technology, and therapy.

• Improving our lives and our world is up to us.

This story raises more questions than it answers:

• How do you explain terrorism, mass shootings, genocide? Simply social and genetic factors? Does that match the deep human instinct that there is evil in the world and in our hearts?

• Have knowledge, technology, and therapy improved matters or made things worse?

• What in history gives you hope for world improvement?

OUTSIDE TO THE CHRISTIAN STORY

• Evil is “anything that slanders God and harms the creation he loves” and results from our first parents’ rebellion against God, disordering us and our world in every way.

• “Naming evil gives us hope and points us to the answer of the cross, where Jesus absorbed evil and suffered with us and for us, paying for our evil and defeating the cosmic powers of evil.”

• Victory over evil was declared by Christ’s resurrection and evil will be fully defeated and replaced at the final judgment.

How do we explain the problem of evil? Evil is the result of rebellion against God and therefore requires God to defeat it