Phil Cook

I was relaxing at a coffee shop recently when up walked Jimmy Knechtel. He grabbed a chair and, frowning, thumped a few things on the table: wallet, keys, vape. “These pants! I just discovered a hole in my pocket. Lost my eyedrops and my pocketknife.”

“How was your 2025, Jimmy? I asked.

“I read that last column of yours about how you said Christianity explains the big questions of life better than other worldviews,” he said as he broke off a large piece of my chocolate muffin. “I’m not buying it.”

“Why not?” I asked, retrieving my muffin and guarding my latte.

“I shouldn’t buy any more muffins. Need to lose some weight. You know, resolutions and all.”

“Oh, I thought you’re not buying Christianity.”

“That too,” he said. “Why would God allow this hole? I liked that knife!”

“When things are going well, we don’t need God. But when things are difficult, we blame God.”

“Oh, you just don’t want to see it. Look back on 2025. Too many terrible things going on. How can a good God allow so much evil? Or any evil for that matter. Shootings, non-stop wars, abuse… If you think about it, I guess it’s simply better to be an atheist.”

“I wouldn’t go there. The atheist has a much bigger problem with evil than the Christian does.”

“What? What do you mean?”

“Is murder evil?” I asked him. “How about racism? Ethnic cleansing?”

“Yes. Of course.”

“Why? Why are these wrong?”

“Because… well,” he thought for a moment, “because we as a society determined them to be unhelpful for human flourishing.”

“Ah, that’s a good answer,” I said, “but what about other societies? Or even our own society a few generations ago. Darwin’s influence opened a host of racist ideas that led directly to human zoos in New York City and to atheistic regimes that killed a hundred million people around the world. Nazis tried to make a master race under the promise of human flourishing, cleansing the gene pool of undesirables.”

“That was all wrong, we know. See, that’s not the way things should be.”

“Why? If there is no God, and we are all just moist robots trying to pass along our genes, then what makes anything wrong? There can’t be something called evil unless there is first something good. The shadow proves the sunshine. For the atheist who believes we are here by random chance, there is no ‘the way things should be.'”

As I walked over to purchase another muffin, he said, “It’s all relative. What’s wrong for you is not necessarily wrong for me.” Jimmy then got up to leave, coffee in hand. He stopped suddenly, looking around. “Hey, where’s my wallet?”

I sat back down with the new muffin that I had purchased with Jimmy’s wallet.

“I’m sure you won’t mind,” I said.

“You can’t take my wallet! That’s wrong!”

“Why? What’s wrong for you isn’t necessarily wrong for me.” He scowled, and I handed him the wallet along with the new muffin before he walked out.

Of course, this applies to areas much weightier than muffins. As the great philosopher Willam Lane Craig said, “On the atheistic view, there’s nothing really wrong with your raping someone. Thus, without God there is no absolute right and wrong which imposes itself on our conscience.

“Thus, paradoxically, evil actually serves to establish the existence of God. For if objective values cannot exist without God and objective values do exist–as is evident from the reality of evil–then it follows inescapably that God exists. Thus, although evil in one sense calls into question God’s existence, in a more fundamental sense it demonstrates God’s existence, since evil could not exist without God.”

C.S. Lewis, who for years held tight to his atheism, said, “My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line.”

Andrew Klavan, the award-winning crime novelist and screenwriter–whose movies you’ve probably seen–became a Christian later in life and was surprised to find that “understanding that there is a moral order and understanding it more deeply through the Bible and worship, my outlook on life became much darker (but) at the same time, weirdly enough, I became a much more joyful person. The price you pay for evil is meaninglessness and separation from God. At the same time that my view of the world has become quite dark, my inner world has become quite joyful.”

That’s the power of a Christian worldview. We can see evil clearly (in the world, and yes, in ourselves), but we know a hope and a Love. And a remedy.