A short while back, I had lunch with a Christian friend of mine I hadn’t seen in a while. Roger owns the largest Microsoft consulting company in our area of the country, is a good businessman, and a solid believer.
We got to talking about work and he surprised me by saying “I really don’t like doing business with other Christians.” When I asked him why, he told me that once the other business finds out he’s a Christian, they take what he called “extensions of grace”. He explained that it could take the form of not paying on time, not delivering work when promised, or asking for fee or labor reductions without cause.
Rather troubling to hear, wouldn’t you say?
When atheists and skeptics try to refute Christianity, most times their primary argument will be one of ‘theodicy’; that is, how can an all-good and all-powerful God exist in world that is unmistakably filled with evil. However, the truth is, the Bible never denies the existence of evil and says that God actually uses it to accomplish His divine purpose. The writer of Proverbs says: “The Lord has made everything for its own purpose, even the wicked for the day of evil" (Proverbs 16:4).
Many Christian theologians and philosophers have put forward very sound defeaters for the problem of theodicy and answer well the arguments put forward by unbelievers like David Hume and J. S. Mill in this area. In my opinion, the problem of evil and God is not the number one arrow in the skeptic’s quiver.
If I were asked to present the best case possible against Christianity, my argument would have nothing to do with the existence of evil per se, but would rather zero in on one very sad observation that I’ve made over a number of years:
The best argument against Christianity is sometimes the life lived out by a professing Christian. Read more
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