For the philosophers and the serious thinkers of different religions the difficulty of integrating the reality of evil in a God-driven world cannot be underestimated. For a God who can do everything and knows everything there is possible to know, why should there exist evils of every kind – famine, AIDS, dropped atomic bombs, rape and genocide? This seems fairly a not-so-easy knot to untie especially to believers who meet this problem face-to-face as they encounter death, injustice and grave illnesses for real. Whatever means we employ to face this problem largely determines the quality of faith that we will eventually develop.
For the weak or the intellectually lazy, the easiest way to cope up is to deny the reality of God so that evil becomes a mere human construction. Evil is not caused by God since there is no God who causes it. What appear evils to us are simply those things which we find unpleasant or destructive to our well-being. One of the distasteful consequences of this doctrine is that it denies the reality of sin. If this is true, there is no objective immorality since the standard of ethics is not based on an unchanging element (God) but on the decisions of the culture and environment where one is situated. Morality becomes relative and arbitrary.
As the twentieth century dawned, the world has witnessed a “resurrection of theism”, as philosopher William Craig aptly puts it. After the Death-of-God theologies which sprang during the 17th Century, a batch of intellectually acute and brilliant thinkers on the side of theism appears. After years of long wait, they have finally showed up to bring the “God is dead” slogan into shambles and to demonstrate their own original and stimulating insights in the arena that is Philosophy of Religion. Armed with the ...