Evil is not a created thing, but is instead the measure of the extent to which a particular thought or act deviates from “the good.” That was the point of a recent. Drawing on the work of Augustine and other early Christian thinkers, I concluded that God allows for evil – for human beings to think and act in a way that is contrary to his perfect will – because that is the only way “free will” could exist. He could make us robots or mere things, but he could not make us “free” without the capacit..

One of the most common challenges to the Christian worldview is the problem of evil. In its common syllogistic form, the challenge can be reduced to this:

God created all things
Evil is a thing
Therefore God created evil.
This challenge is not new. In the 4th century, St. Augustine tackled it, as did St. Thomas Aquinas centuries later. What we call evil, they explained, is in fact a deprivation of the good and is therefore not really a “thing” at all. Like the hole in a donut, it describes what..

Interim president Michel Temer gets evangelical support from Congress but faces a country split by faith and politics.

Brazil has a new president, albeit temporarily. After sitting president Dilma Rousseff was accused of doctoring public finances to hide the country’s growing deficit, politicians—including the evangelical contingent—voted last week to begin her impeachment trial.

Brazil suffers its worst economy in recent history, with high rates of unemployment and inflation making the countr..

Many skeptics maintain unquestioned faith that science will solve the world’s problems. Seeing the evidence of chaos throughout the world, often the product of religiously-inspired violence, they conclude that religion is somehow the problem. Authors like Christopher Hitchens capitalize on such assumptions, writing best-selling books that explain how “God is not great” or how religion has “poisoned” everything. By contrast, science has provided “progress,” the sense that things are definitely ge..

In a recent post, I addressed the issue of whether Christ’s death constituted a sacrifice. For many skeptics, Christ’s death, resurrection and atonement for our sins constitute a major stumbling block. In response to that post, one challenger commented that he could not understand

“why the death of Jesus was that big a deal. He had 6 hours of agony. A terrible way to go, but how many people have similar experiences? And the atheist supposedly bound for hell will experience this kind of agony co..

Most atheists feel confident that they have “reason” on their side. As a result, many are surprised when a Christian apologist takes an evidentialist, or reason-based, approach to matters of “faith.” Not long ago, the issue arose in a conversation I was having with a skeptic. I had been laying out the basic philosophical arguments for the existence of a supreme, uncaused being.

Accepting the logic of these arguments, she shifted her challenge, saying: “You want me to use reason to get me to agr..

The blood-curdling scream signaled that she had not yet given up. Hours of pushing, and the baby had still not descended. The OB was weighing her options, while dad wiped mom’s forehead and encouraged her on. She screamed again, pushing and puffing and praying that this agony might soon draw to a close. The pain was so… intense, so utterly mind-numbing that she wondered, for the thousandth time, why she had wanted to have another child…

This is a scene that plays out day after day in hospitals ..

For many people, an obstacle to faith in Jesus is the seemingly gory nature of the core tenets of Christian history. Jesus suffered a horribly violent end, yet Christians revere the cross that was the instrument of that torturous death. And they celebrate His victory over death by partaking of His “body” – honoring His last injunction to “take and eat” and “take and drink” of His body and blood.

One challenger asked why Christians venerate the cross. If a friend were gunned down, he asked, woul..