‘If there’s a God, why does he allow things like this happen?’ is the common cry of believers and no-believers in times of personal, nation and global upheaval; from illness to natural disaster to man made catastrophe. The question ‘If God is good, why is there suffering?’ is as timeless as it is urgent. In this volume, Chad Meister and James K. Dew, leading thinkers in Christian philosophy and apologetics, take on the problem of suffering from all angles. They seriously engage contemporary critiques levelled against the faith and offer readers new confidence and hope in the God who suffered and died and rose again.
In a series of papers, comments and discussions from such theologians, apologists and their critics as Greg Ganssle, Paul Copan, William Lane Craig, Gary Habermas, William Dembski, and Francis Collins - edited by Chad Meister and James K. Dew Jr, this book looks into the chasm between our expectations of a ‘good’ God, and our experience of the ‘real’ world.
There are essays on most every aspect of the problem of evil, a brief historical review of the dilemma of evil, a discussion on the argument that suffering is good for us, and thoughts on the "hiddeness" of God and why he doesn’t simply reveal himself to everybody. Whether or not the existence of evil fails to disprove God's existence and the role of evil in the theories of Intelligent Design and in evolution, are also explored.