 The great thinker C.S. Lewis dealt with many of the common objections against Christianity that are still heard today. Lewis once compared the atheist's arguments against God to an inmate in an asylum, writing the word darkness over and over on the wall. The arguments framed against God succeed in blotting him out to the same degree that the insane person's fixation on darkness shuts off the reality of the sun. In other words, one of the most common reasons that skeptics give for rejecting God or the Gospels relates to the problem of pain, evil and suffering in the world. Does the horribleness in this world mean there is no God? Hello, weirdos! I'm Pastor Darren. Welcome to The Church of the Undead. Here in The Church of the Undead, I can share ideas which are relevant to those who suffer with depression, need some encouragement, and for those who love or are just curious about the God of the Bible. And it doesn't matter if you are a weirdo in Christ or just a weirdo, everybody is welcome here at The Church of the Undead. And I use the word undead because here we are dead to sin and alive in Christ. If you want to join this weirdo congregation, just click that subscribe or follow button, and visit us online at WeirdDarkness.com slash church. Full disclosure, I might use the term pastor because I've branded this feature as a church, but I do not have a theology degree nor did I ever go to Bible college. I'm just a guy who gave his life to Christ in 1989 and has tried to walk the walk ever since and has stumbled a lot along the way. Because like everybody else, I am an imperfect, heavily flawed human being. So please don't take what I say as gospel, dig into God's Word yourself for confirmation, inspiration and revelation. That being said, welcome to The Church of the Undead. Writer Alex McFarland, who wrote the article on basing this week's message on, I'll link to it in the show notes, he personally interviewed dozens of atheists and agnostics over the years including recent luminaries of unbelief such as Christopher Hitchens, Michael Shermer, Bart Ehrman and others, and he heard the subjection raised in many ways. The problem of evil is often stated like this, if God were wise, good and powerful, the world would not be the way it is. But the world is full of violence, suffering, injustice and sickness, and very often those who suffer most are innocent victims. So the atheist reasons this world of deceit, danger and death would be different if God were truly real. Either he, one, doesn't know how to fix it, or perhaps, two, he is malicious and doesn't want to fix it, or maybe three, God wants to fix it but is unable to. Think about this, if the cause of evil is number one, that he doesn't know how to fix it, then God is not truly wise. If it's number two, that he's malicious and doesn't want to fix it, then God is not wholly good. If evil exists and persists because of number three, that God's not able to fix it, then he's not all-powerful. In any of those three cases, atheism assumes that a classically orthodox view of God cannot be maintained. Pain and suffering must prove God is not omniscient, omnibenevolent or omnipotent. Therefore, the skeptic says the biblical God must not exist. In order to respond to objections based on the problem of evil, we have to ask ourselves, how is it that we humans are able to judge anything as good or bad? Let's reign in the hubris and be honest here. Without an objective standard from which to measure, all we say about good or evil is mere oblivion. Erase God, the ultimate standard of good by which we measure, erase God from our logic tree, and can we meaningly recognize something as right or wrong? I don't think so. When we say one thing is good or another thing is bad, what we're really doing is assessing their value as it relates to something else. And that something else that we measure by is God. Deep down, we understand that God is the ultimate, the ultimate foundation of goodness, love, power, virtue, beauty, wisdom, mercy, holiness, etc. Put together every positive characteristic you can think of and multiply to the nth degree and that conglomeration of everything good is God. When we say that Mother Teresa was good and Osama bin Laden was bad, what we're really saying is this, her life and actions conformed more closely to any ultimate standard of good than did his. Think about these contrasts. It is better to care for orphans than to torture them. Or feeding the hungry is moral, whereas placing bets on how long it would take them to starve to death is immoral. We know that the first proposition conforms more closely to an ultimate standard of goodness than the second proposition, by a long shot. In a world without God, nothing could be beautiful or ugly. Each of us regularly makes value judgments about morals and aesthetics. We say, this was heroic or that was treasonous. We may observe this song is beautiful, whereas that jackhammer noise is horrid. We can only make such value judgments because there is an ultimate and unchanging standard against which we measure. Herein lies the problem for atheism. If there is no God, how can you legitimately praise the good and condemn the evil? The answer is, if you're honest, you can't. Not in any legitimate objective sense. Without God, all we are left with is a noisy room full of opinions and in that context, why is the atheist more valid than the Christian? If this is a world without objective values and all life arose from blind evolutionary chance, then why would we assume the atheists musings against God are any more coherent than the inflections of a barking dog? Without God is our reference point. There is no good or bad, only stuff. The most we could note is that things happen. Meaningful judgment beyond that is not possible. It takes humility and maturity to really accept this, but the evil in the world simply shows how desperately we need a Savior and Lord. Some people are honest and wise enough to accept this by the age of five or six. Others live eight or nine decades, never yielding to it. Because God is the ground of truth, goodness and beauty, we are able to discern and make sense of the world. Be glad for this the next time you hear a skeptic railing against God because of pain and evil in the world. Because a pervasively righteous God does exist, each human possesses and may cultivate a moral conscience and aesthetic sensibilities. Our love and truth preferable over narcissism and wokeness would forcibly keeping the southern border open be morally just at the expense of the welfare of American citizens. Is the music of Brian Wilson or the Beatles objectively better than Drake, The Weeknd or Taylor Swift? Because God exists, we can actually know. And yes, that last example was a joke, so chill out. If you like what you heard, share this episode with others who you think might also like it. Maybe the person you share it with will want to join this weirdo congregation too. To join this weirdo family yourself, on Facebook, listen to previous messages, even find out how to join me in my daily Bible studies, visit WeirdDarkThis.com slash church. That's WeirdDarkThis.com slash church. You can find the sources I used for this week's message in the show notes. I'm Darren Marlar, thanks for joining me, Weirdos, and until next time, Jesus loves you and so do I. God bless.