Before we leave philosophy, I would like to answer an argument that has been used to disprove the existence of God, at least the existence of the Christian God. That argument concerns the problem of evil.

The teleological argument says that the world is like a large and expensive house. Such houses do not spring up on their own. An architect designs a plan for it and then the master builder constructs it according to that plan. The orderliness of the structure shows that an intelligent being created it. The world, too, shows signs of orderliness, which means that an intelligent being, an architect/builder, must have designed it and built it. This architect/builder we would call God.

Some have taken this argument to what seems like the next logical step. The evil in this world—the earthquakes, hurricanes, avalanches, storms, famines, poverty, wars, accidents, death itself, anything that hurts and/or kills people—must be proof that this intelligent being is also incompetent at best or evil at worst. The house is falling apart all around us, which means that this intelligent architect/builder whom we would call God has accidentally—or deliberately—built a shoddy house. Christianity says that God is all-powerful and all-loving, but the presence of evil in this world is proof that he cannot be both: if he were, he would simply stop the evil. He either wants to stop the evil because he loves us but he is unable to do so, or he is able to stop the evil but he simply does not wish to do so. Either way, this architect/builder is not the God of Christianity.

Or perhaps—just perhaps—both the orderliness and the evil in this world are the results of chance. No one created either the orderliness or the evil. We have no need to create a God to explain the existence of the world. The world is the way it is simply because that is the way it is.

All of this would be true except for one very important fact:…