Yep, the UK government successfully disarmed its citizens. Now that same government sentences people to years in prison if they put wrongthink in a Facebook post.

That is unthinkable in America not because our political leaders are more virtuous than the UK’s political leaders. They are certainly not. Leftist pols especially would put a gag in your mouth today if they thought they could get away with it.

So what is the difference? They are not sure they can get away with it, obviously. The UK’s pols do not fear their defenseless subjects. Our pols have a healthy respect for the limits of their power. They push us hard, true, but they understand that they can push us only so far before things get sporty. You can thank the Second Amendment for that.

An aphorism attributed to Louis Veuillot sums up progressive’s approach to politics: “When I am weaker than you, I ask you for freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am stronger than you, I take away your freedom because that is according to my principles.”

Progressives do not value universal principles of justice as such. They value them only when they are useful as a tool in their power game. Take freedom of speech. They are all for it when they are pushing a curriculum for third graders that normalizes sexual deviancy. But they will rush to the barricades if a Christian teacher wants to talk about his faith to those same school children. I am not saying that conservatives always act according to the universal principles they espouse. They obviously do not. But there is a huge difference between failing to adhere to a principle and denying that principle exists in the first place.

Here’s the thing about unprincipled smash mouth power politics. It’s all fun and games until the other side starts to play. What do you get when that happens? You get Donald Trump. Democrats complaining about Trump’s lack of principle is amusing. It’s like a boxer with brass knuckles under his gloves complaining that the other fighter has horseshoes under his.

Progressives have enjoyed a nice long run of unilateral smash mouth. But it was inevitable that eventually Republicans would wake up and realize they were being played for chumps and start playing the smash mouth game too. And now our politics is rapidly devolving into mere tribalism. And as recent events have shown the war between the tribes is escalating into actual violence as leftist activists take it to the next level.

There is a price to be paid for giving up on the concept of universal moral principles. We are starting to pay it.

This brings me to the progressive case against Charlie Kirk, which amounts to stretching out their arm, pointing their finger, and screaming: “Racist!” or “Misogynist!” or “Homophobe!”

Over the last few years, I have watched countless hours of videos of Charlie’s campus debates. In all that time, I never heard a single hateful word come out of his mouth. So, it comes as no surprise to me that every time one of Kirk’s progressive detractors is called on to provide an example of his perfidy, they either run for the tall weeds or splutter insipid “everyone knows it” pablum.

For too long, we have given progressives’ intellectual laziness a pass. They have grown accustomed to spewing slurs (homophobe!) as a substitute for reasoned discourse. The intellectual laziness this has engendered has consequences.

Some years ago, philosopher J. Budziszewski predicted that it was only a matter of time before character assassination would be replaced by real assassination. Sadly, Professor Budziszewski was a prophet.

1. “Do not judge, so that you will not be judged.” Matthew 7:1

2. “Judge with righteous judgment.” John 7:24b

What gives? Are we supposed to judge or not? The answer to this question is obvious, both as a matter of common sense and as a matter of scriptural interpretation.

As a matter of common sense, it is absurd to suggest that Jesus commanded his followers to suspend all moral judgments. If I say “Stalin killed millions; he was abominably evil,’ only an idiot would respond, “Now now, Jesus said not to judge.”

As a matter of scriptural interpretation, in context, the passage from Matthew means that one should not judge hypocritically. It does not mean one should always suspend moral judgment. Indeed, it says exactly the opposite:

For in the way you judge, you will be judged; and by your standard of measure, it will be measured to you. Why do you look at the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ and look, the log is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye!

Matthew 7:2-5

Notice that last part. If you are not being a hypocrite, you are perfectly free to “take the speck out of your brother’s eye.”

With that background, let’s look at the original question again. What do the following passages mean?

1. “Do not judge, so that you will not be judged.” Matthew 7:1

2. “Judge with righteous judgment.” John 7:24b

In context, the first passage means do judge hypocritically. The second passage means “judge with righteous judgment.”

None of this is controversial. That is why Chip Gaines blew it so badly when he responded to criticism of his scandalous sin by condemning those who judged his scandalous sin.

Chip, here is a hint about hermeneutics. When your interpretation of scripture makes Jesus look like he was schizoid or stupid (or both), your interpretation is grievously wrong.

Before I close, I have a question for Jimmy Seibert, senior pastor of Antioch Community Church, where Chip and Joanna have attended:

Pastor, two members of your flock have sinned and caused an international scandal. I Cor. 5 is clearly applicable. Do you have the courage to do what is necessary? Not holding my breath here.

Materialism is the idea that matter moved by mindless forces explains all of reality. This radically secular philosophy dominates the minds of Western cultural elites and is at the root of tribalism in our politics, lawlessness in our courts, chaos in our universities, and the crisis of meaning rampaging among young people. In his thirty-eight years of practicing law, Barry Arrington has seen the toxic impact of materialism firsthand. From representing victims of the Columbine school shooting to litigating challenges to unconstitutional laws before the US Supreme Court, he has seen how materialism destroys lives and hollows out once vibrant cultural institutions. In Unforgetting God, Arrington shines a light on the path out of the soul-numbing materialist wilderness we find ourselves in. He demonstrates that materialism is false, even absurd, and points the way to a loving God who has revealed himself in Jesus Christ, who is our best hope for personal salvation and cultural renewal.

Buy on Amazon

I was in Budapest recently, where I took this photograph. They are not real shoes. They are life-sized bronze statues of shoes. They are meant to keep alive the memory of the people murdered by the fascists. The murderers pushed their victims to the edge of the Danube, forced them to take off their shoes, and shot them so their bodies fell into the river and floated away. There are men’s shoes, women’s shoes, and, God help us, children’s shoes.

These questions have vexed me for a long time. Why does God “answer” one person’s prayer and refuse to “answer” the prayer of the person a quarter mile down the road? I don’t know if I have (or ever will have) an answer to this question that I find emotionally satisfactory. But I think we can get some hints at the answer in Luke 13:1-5:

Now on that very occasion there were some present who reported to Him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mixed with their sacrifices. And Jesus responded and said to them, “Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans just because they have suffered this fate? No, I tell you, but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish. Or do you think that those eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed them were worse offenders than all the other people who live in Jerusalem? No, I tell you, but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.”

When some manmade or natural disaster occurs, we often ask “Why did God let this happen to these people?” One natural response to that question is “They had it coming.” Jesus warns us not to jump to that conclusion. Sometimes, bad things happen to people for no other reason than we live in a fallen creation. Paul writes that whole creation groans and suffers and we groan as well as we await our redemption. Rom. 8:20-23.

Jesus’ point seems to be those who suffer these tragedies are not worse than the rest of us. Rather, we all “have it coming” and therefore we should all repent and be saved. The opposite is true as well. David lamented bitterly the apparent ease and luxury of the wicked.

This is not to say that God does not sometimes save us from disaster. The Bible is full of miracles. Nor is it to say that God does not use disaster to punish. He surely does, as he demonstrated at Sodom. But miracles are, by definition, an exception, not the rule. And Jesus specifically tells us not to assume disaster is always, or even usually, punishment.

Where does this leave us? It leaves us right where we started, walking by faith and not by sight. If there is one thing I have learned about suffering, it is this: Very often you just can’t make any sense of it.

Why should this surprise Christians? After all, this is the very thing the Bible says. The whole point of the book of Job is that God is under no obligation to explain himself to us. We either trust him (and there are many good reasons to do so) or we don’t.

The new occultists of the Satanic Temple do not believe Satanism is at all dark or sinister, but rather a celebration of enlightened humanism, individual liberty, and scientific understanding. The first of their seven fundamental tenets could be lifted from any woke corporate or nonprofit mission statement: “One should strive to act with compassion and empathy toward all creatures in accordance with reason.” And the second could just as easily come from a Black Lives Matter or Antifa manifesto: “The struggle for justice is an ongoing and necessary pursuit that should prevail over laws and institutions.” Unlike its older cousin, the Satanic Temple is an altogether more liberal and rationalist expression of Satanism, in which Satan is nothing more than a literary archetype used to promote a materialist philosophy that espouses egalitarianism, social justice, and the separation of church and state.

Where did the Satanists’ tenets come from? None of them are self-evident on purely materialist terms. Indeed, a variety of social Darwinism would say the tenets are anti-nature, where survival of the fittest and unrelenting competition in the struggle for life are the only “rules.” So, why is it that these Satanists’ ethic is so kum ba yah? Could it be because they live in a Western culture thoroughly infused with a Christian ethic?

It turns out that, at least according to his followers, Satan is a Christian. Who knew? Or, maybe the Satanists, like all so-called humanists, are parasites on the Christian ethic and want to have Christianity without Christ? What happens if the parasites are successful in killing the host? The point of Davidson’s book is that unless, as a culture, we have a drastic course correction, we are about to find out, and it won’t be pretty.

People have started wars in the name of Christianity. The European Wars of Religion fought in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were particularly terrible. That is true. There are two standard responses to this objection. First, the Wars of Religion were at least partially, if not mainly, driven by competition over economic, political, dynastic, and social issues among the warring kings, princes, and emperors, and religion merely served as a convenient banner under which to advance those rulers’ secular ambitions. The second response is to observe that while those wars were indeed terrible, if one wants an example of slaughter on a truly industrial scale, the death toll of the militantly atheist totalitarian regimes in the twentieth century was orders of magnitude worse.[i]

But deflection and whataboutism do not address the core of the objection. There is a long list of good things that Christians have done over the centuries, including the elevation of the status of women, ending infanticide, the abolition of slavery, the civil rights movement, universities, hospitals, humanitarian aid, building the moral and intellectual foundation of liberal democracy – the list goes on. But none of these good things excuses the evil committed in the name of Christianity, and I will not try to defend that evil.

I will, however, ask if you can name one good thing that evil men have not corrupted. You cannot, and the message of Christ is no exception. That message is “love your neighbor.” Who is our neighbor? Perhaps you are familiar with Jesus’s parable of the Good Samaritan. Before I share that story, a bit of background knowledge is helpful. First-century Jews harbored a deep antipathy toward Samaritans. They would literally walk around Samaria rather than risk defiling themselves by coming into contact with Samaritans. The ethnic hatred was so intense that one influential rabbi said that eating Samaritan bread was akin to eating pig flesh.[ii]

Against this cultural backdrop, Jesus told the following story.[iii] While traveling from Jerusalem to Jericho, a man was assaulted by robbers who beat him, took his possessions, and left him for dead by the roadside. Two religious leaders walk by, but when they notice him, they cross to the other side of the road to avoid helping him. Then, a Samaritan arrives at the scene. The Samaritan knows that the man would almost certainly despise him under normal circumstances. However, moved by compassion, he tends to the man's wounds, places him on his donkey, and takes him to an inn to care for him. The next day, he gives the innkeeper money and says, “Look after him, and if it costs more, I’ll pay you when I come back.”

The point of the story isn’t primarily about helping people; it’s about who does the helping. The Samaritan, an outsider and enemy, shows compassion when the religious insiders did not. The story is a radical call to love beyond boundaries, to act with kindness even toward those you are “supposed” to hate. Jesus commands us to love our enemies and to do good to those who hate us.[iv] This does not mean that we are required to have warm feelings of affection for our enemies. You cannot force yourself to feel a certain way, but, like the Samaritan, you can set your feelings aside and will yourself to do good.

Radical self-denying love is at the heart of Jesus’s message, and he exemplified that love on the cross. In the greatest act of love in the history of the world, the sinless one allowed himself to be crucified so that he could bear the penalty for our sins. Christians are called to follow Christ. Most importantly, this means following his example of self-sacrificial love. For 2,000 years, Christians, including this one, have both succeeded and failed in varying degrees to follow that example.

This brings me back to the objection. The charge is that Christians do bad things. I plead guilty. That's why I’m not asking anyone to follow Christians; I’m asking you to follow Christ. Do you object to Christianity because Christians have done bad things? I understand why you would do that. However, if you’re looking for a religion, ideology, or philosophy whose followers have always been pure and blameless, you are bound to be disappointed. None exists. Do not look to Christ’s followers; even the best among them have feet of clay. It is even more true that you should not look to wicked individuals who claim to be Christ’s followers yet act as if they have never heard his message of radical love.

The bad news is that history reveals that many times fallen men have failed to act in accordance with Christ’s message. There is no denying that. The good news is that those failures do not defeat the message. The gospel of Jesus Christ is very simple. God loved the world so much that he gave his son to suffer, die and rise again. He offers forgiveness of sin and everlasting life to whoever believes in him. If the gospel is true, the horrible things Christians (and those who call themselves Christians) have done do not make it untrue. There is good reason to believe that it is true. Indeed, it is – as it has always been – the hope of the world.

[i] Atheists often argue that this is not a valid comparison because the Wars of Religion were fought in the name of Christianity, while the atheist regimes did not go to war in the name of atheism. However, those regimes’ materialist outlook shaped systems that justified the slaughter of millions of innocent victims. Stalin’s purges and Mao’s Cultural Revolution, to cite two of many examples, demonstrate that atheist regimes are far from inherently peaceful. Indeed, all officially atheist regimes have been brutal totalitarian hellholes.

[ii] This statement is traditionally attributed to Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus. It is found in the Mishnah, specifically in Shevi'it 8:10.

[iii] Luke 10:25-37.

[iv] Luke 6:27.

Proteins are large molecules that the nanomachines^[i] inside each cell make from amino acids. The sequence of amino acids in a protein folds up to form a very complex three-dimensional structure. That structure can take on many different shapes. There are 20 standard amino acids, so for any given chain, the number of possible combinations is 20 raised to the power of the number of acids in the chain. For example, a protein consisting of a sequence of 153 amino acids has 20¹⁵³ possible combinations of acids, an astronomically large number. Here is the important thing to keep in mind: Of all those possible combinations, almost all of them are nonfunctional.

Derek Muller at the YouTube channel Veritasium has an excellent video with animations showing how this works.[ii] Of particular relevance to the topic at hand, Muller reports on the enormous complexity of the process. According to calculations by MIT biologist Cyrus Levinthal, even a very short chain folds an astronomical number of ways. Levinthal calculated that if a computer were to check 30,000 configurations of the chain every nanosecond (one billionth of a second), it would take 200 times the age of the universe to find the correct structure for the protein fold.[iii]

Douglas Axe, a professor of molecular biology at Biola University, has done important work on these proteins.[iv] Axe did his work on one of the domains making up an enzyme called beta-lactamase, a sequence that is 153 amino acids long, which is a relatively short sequence. Axe’s goal was to calculate the probability of evolution stumbling upon one of the very few functional amino acid sequences through random chance. His findings were startling. “Of the possible genes encoding protein chains 153 amino acids in length, only about one in a hundred trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion is expected to encode a chain that folds well enough to perform a biological function!”[v] In a vast ocean of combinatorial space consisting of “all sequences of 153 acids” there is a microscopic island called “functional sequences.” Unsurprisingly, Axe made a design inference. It is far more likely that a functional protein fold results from an act of an intelligent agent than from random chance.

[i] Yes, “nanomachines.” I know. Don’t get me started. By the way, “nanomachine” is not my word; that is what materialist scientists call them. See, e.g., Nick Lane and Joana C. Xavier, “To unravel the origin of life, treat findings as pieces of a bigger puzzle,” Nature (Feb. 29, 2024), Vol. 628, 948-951, at 948. The level of willful blindness it requires for materialists not to see the glaring light shining in their faces is truly astounding. There is none so blind as he who will not see. If you want to see a video of these machines at work, go to Veritasium, Your Body's Molecular Machines (Nov. 20, 2017), available at

(accessed January 8, 2025).

[ii] Derek Muller, “What if all the world's biggest problems have the same solution?,” Veritasium (February 10, 2025), available at

(accessed February 12, 2010).

[iii] Id.

[iv] Axe discusses his findings in his book Undeniable: How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life Is Designed.

[v] Axe, Undeniable, 181.

[vi] Dembski and Ewert, The Design Inference, 374.

Materialists often say that invoking God as an explanation is a “science stopper.” The idea is that science continually strives to find natural explanations and that work stops if we just throw up our hands and say, “God must have done it,” every time we encounter a seemingly intractable problem like the origin of life. History shows that this objection is not valid.

Isaac Newton is the best example of this. In his book Opticks, Newton contemplated whether irregularities in planetary orbits might be apt to increase over time until the “System wants a Reformation.”[i] Newton’s rival, Gottfied Leibniz, accused Newton of holding the view that God needs to wind up the watch of the solar system from time to time.[ii] The story has come down through the centuries that Newton did not have a natural explanation for how the planetary orbits would remain stable, and so he invoked a tinkering God to address the problem, and perhaps that is true.[iii] But even if it is true, it was by no means a science stopper. Scientists continued to work the problem, and Laplace and Lagrange eventually demonstrated how planetary orbits remain stable.

Materialist chemist George Whitesides and theist chemist James Tour agree that today, materialist scientists do not have a clue about how life began. From a materialist perspective, the problem appears to be hopelessly intractable. It really is the case that, by far, the best explanation is that God created the first life. Why shouldn’t everyone honestly admit that? If we admit that, must attempts to find a natural explanation come to a screeching halt? Of course not. Perhaps the biological counterparts of Laplace and Lagrange will someday come up with a solution. They obviously have a huge incentive to do so, because if the problem is ever solved, whoever solved it can immediately book their ticket to Stockholm, where a nice shiny prize (and a huge check) will be waiting for them. But until that happens, no one benefits from pretending that a materialist answer is just around the corner.

[i] Specifically, he wrote “. . . blind Fate could never make all the Planets move one and the same way in Orbs concentrick, some inconsiderable Irregularities excepted, which may have risen from the mutual Actions of Comets and Planets upon one another, and which will be apt to increase, till this System wants a Reformation.” Newton, Opticks, 402.

[ii] Leibniz wrote: “Mr. Newton and his followers also have a very strange view concerning the work of God. According to them God needs to wind up his watch from time to time, otherwise it would cease to operate. . . . This machine of God is even so imperfect that he is forced to clean it from time to time by an extraordinary concourse, and even to repair it like a watchmaker . . .” Letter from Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz to Caroline of Brandenburg (November 1715), in The Leibniz-Caroline-Clarke Correspondence, 313.

[iii] I say “perhaps” because in context, it is not at all clear that this was Newton’s considered view. This is demonstrated by the fact the passage quoted above comes from an offhand comment near the end of Opticks, not a book about cosmology or planetary motion.

[W]e must be supremely clear that [the events of Scripture] are also actual events in time and history. And this matters infinitely. We cannot relegate them to the merely mythical, as though they happened “once upon a time” – which is to say that they never actually happened at all. This is one of the ways that our “religious” instinct often deals with the parts we don’t like. It puts “religious” reality in a separate box from the rest of reality, as though our faith has no bearing on the rest of reality when, of course, the exact opposite is true. If our faith exists apart from the rest of reality, then it is meaningless. This is precisely what dead “religion” always does. . . . But real faith in the God of the Bible is exactly the opposite of this. It spreads into the real world in every dimension, because faith in the God of the Bible is faith in the One who called Himself Truth and who created every part of the reality in which we live.[i]

From the beginning, the Christian faith has been self-consciously grounded in historical facts. As Metaxas says, Christianity absolutely depends on actual events in time and history having happened. And as Lewis says, if those events did not happen, Christianity is worthless. The resurrection is the central event upon which it all hangs. Paul put it this way in a letter to the believers in Corinth:

Now if Christ is preached, that He has been raised from the dead, how do some among you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? But if there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised; and if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain, your faith also is in vain. Moreover, we are even found to be false witnesses of God, because we testified against God that He raised Christ, whom He did not raise, if in fact the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, then not even Christ has been raised; and if Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless; you are still in your sins.[ii]

Paul absolutely insisted that the actual resurrection was essential to the faith because “if Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless; you are still in your sins.” This is the scandal of Christianity. The English word “scandal” has its roots in the Greek word skándalon, which means something that causes someone to fall, a stumbling block. The Bible uses the word figuratively of the cross. To many, the idea that righteousness can be obtained only by faith in the crucified and resurrected Jesus instead of scrupulous adherence to religious rules is a stumbling block (literally, a skándalon) that prevents them from believing.[iii] Though the doctrine of the resurrection is a scandal to many, all Christians everywhere have insisted on that doctrine for nearly 2,000 years. It is non-negotiable because it lies at the very core of the faith. The old Christian hymn captures the idea:

My hope is built on nothing less

Than Jesus’ blood and righteousness

I dare not trust the sweetest frame[iv]

But wholly lean on Jesus’ name

On Christ the solid rock I stand

All other ground is sinking sand

All other ground is sinking sand

The cross is a scandal to Jordon Peterson. He cannot bring himself to believe in the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, and instead, he offers an ersatz Christianity stripped of its most basic and essential doctrine. This makes me immensely sad. As Metaxas writes, “The secular narrative needs to be boldly denounced not merely as false, but as a pernicious lie that has harmed billions of human beings throughout history.”[v]

[i] Metaxas, Religionless Christianity, 9.

[ii] I Cor. 15:12-16.

[iii] I Cor, 1:23; Gal. 5:11.

[iv] In this context, the word “frame,” means state of mind, as in “frame of mind.” “So you see, brethren, you and I live for God according to a holy, high spiritual logic and not according to shifting and changing frames of mind or moods.” Tozer, I Call It Heresy!, 48-50.

[v] Metaxas, 137.

Materialists often argue that the universe is big; therefore, God does not exist. If you looked at that sentence and your first thought was that the conclusion clearly does not follow from the premise, you are right. Whoever said God cannot create a big universe? Moreover, for proponents of the multiverse, this objection is not only logically incoherent but also a contradiction. Multiverse theory predicts that grand universes are typical. So, to assert this objection, a multiverse proponent would have to say that God can’t create a big universe, but the multiverse generator, if it exists, has done it many times, maybe even an infinite number of times. It makes no sense.

In fairness, I take it that the materialists’ “big universe” objection is not a strictly logical one. Instead, it is an argument from incredulity, i.e., claiming that a proposition is false simply because someone has difficulty believing it. For instance, imagine you are transported back to 1803, a century before the Wright brothers’ first powered flight, and you find yourself in an auditorium debating someone about the future of technology. With the advantage of being a time traveler, you assert that one day, metal machines hundreds of feet long will carry dozens of passengers tens of thousands of feet in the air and transport them across oceans. Suppose your debate opponent responds, “You’re crazy. Metal can’t even float; that’s why we build ships out of wood. Now you’re saying that a metal machine will someday fly through the air like a bird. Insane.” Your opponent would be arguing from incredulity. They would, of course, be wrong, but they would nevertheless almost certainly be declared the winner of the debate because no one in the audience would believe you either. I never claimed that arguments from personal incredulity aren’t effective. They certainly are. They just aren’t logical, and they can lead us astray.

Those who assert the big universe argument are relying on a dynamic similar to your debate opponent. The argument goes like this. The ancients had no conception of the scale of the universe and the earth’s place in it. It was easy for them to imagine that the universe is kind of small and that the earth is at the center of it. But Copernicus came along and demolished the idea that the earth is special, and in the 1920s, we discovered that there are millions of other galaxies out there,[i] and that knowledge demolished the cozy little universe idea. The cold hard facts are that earth is an insignificant speck in an insignificant galaxy in a vast universe. There is no reason to believe that a God exits who cares about humans wandering around on that tiny speck.

Carl Sagan presented a classic example of the big universe argument while reflecting on an image of earth taken by Voyager I[ii] from billions of miles away:

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives…Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.[iii]

Sagan’s argument boils down to the assertion that he cannot imagine why God would care about creatures who live on a tiny speck in a vast universe. But a critical unanswered question is: “Why should the poverty of Carl Sagan’s imagination concerning God’s motivations matter to us?” Nevertheless, like your debate opponent, while Sagan’s argument is not logical, it is undeniably powerful, and many people refuse to believe that God exists because of arguments like it.

There are many problems with the argument, not the least of which is that Sagan is glaringly wrong when he says there is “no hint” that God exists. There are far more than hints that God exists. There is overwhelming evidence that he exists.

Let’s consider the first premise of the big universe argument – the ancients believed we live in a cozy little universe. The problem with the premise is that it is pure bunkum, as anyone with the faintest grasp of the history of cosmology knows. Ptolemy’s Almagest was, by far, the most influential book on cosmology ever written if one measures influence by time. Ptolemy published the Almagest around 150 AD, and his geocentric model remained the standard model of cosmology for nearly 1,400 years until Copernicus De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium was first printed in 1543.[iv] That was 482 years ago. Copernicus has over 900 years to go before his span of influence matches Ptolemy’s.

While Ptolemy’s geocentric model was ultimately displaced, that doesn’t mean he was wrong about everything. For example, he knew the Earth is a sphere.[v] Another thing he knew is that the scale of the universe is mind-bogglingly vast. He wrote: “Moreover, the earth has, to the senses, the ratio of a point to the distance of the sphere of the so-called fixed stars.”[vi] Thus, according to Ptolemy, the earth has no “perceptible size in relation to the distance of the heavenly bodies.”[vii]

Ptolemy was not the only ancient who knew the universe is vast. The Psalmist was fully aware of his insignificance in relation to the cosmos. Writing circa 1,000 BC, he said:

When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained;

What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him?

For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour.[viii]

It is hard to believe that Sagan was unaware that the ancients knew about the vastness of the universe. After all, in The Demon-Haunted World, he cited Ptolemy’s demonstration that the earth is a sphere,[ix] which occurs only a couple of pages before the text I quoted. C. S. Lewis might have been on to something when he related the following conversation with one of his friends:

Friend: The whole picture of the universe which science has given us makes it such rot to believe that the Power at the back of it all could be interested in us tiny little creatures crawling about on an unimportant planet! It was all so obviously invented by people who believed in a flat earth with the stars only a mile or two away.

Lewis: When did people believe that?

Friend: Why, all those old Christian chaps you’re always telling about did. I mean Boethius and Augustine and Thomas Aquinas and Dante.

Lewis: Sorry, but this is one of the few subjects I do know something about. You see this book, [handing over the Almagest] You know what it is?

Friend: Yes, it’s the standard astronomical handbook used all through the Middle Ages.

Lewis: Well, just read that.

Friend: “The earth, in relation to the distance of the fixed stars, has no appreciable size and must be treated as a mathematical point!” Did they really know that then? But – but none of the histories of science – none of the modern encyclopedias – ever mention the fact.

Lewis: Exactly. I’ll leave you to think out the reason. It almost looks as if someone was anxious to hush it up, doesn’t it? I wonder why.

Lewis: At any rate, we can now state the problem accurately. People usually think the problem is how to reconcile what we now know about the size of the universe with our traditional ideas of religion. That turns out not to be the problem at all. The real problem is this. The enormous size of the universe and the insignificance of the earth were known for centuries, and no one ever dreamed that they had any bearing on the religious question. Then, less than a hundred years ago, they are suddenly trotted out as an argument against Christianity. And the people who trot them out carefully hush up the fact that they were known long ago. Don’t you think that all you atheists are strangely unsuspicious people?[x]

The first premise of the “big universe” argument cannot hold up under scrutiny. What about the second premise, the idea that Copernicus demonstrated that the earth is not the center of the universe (sometimes called the “Copernican principle” or the “mediocrity principle”)? It turns out that this idea has not held up well either.

First, the ancients did not think of the earth as occupying an honored place at the “center” of the universe. Rather, it is more accurate to say that the earth’s “sublunar” position is the nasty bottom of the universe.[xi] More importantly, in their groundbreaking book, The Privileged Planet, Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Richards convincingly demonstrate the earth is special after all. Gonzalez and Richards discuss all of the parameters that must be simultaneously balanced for a planet to exist that supports life that is capable of observing the universe. The parameters for such a planet include:[xii]

· It orbits an early G dwarf star that is at least a few billion years old

· It orbits a star in the in the galactic habitable zone

· It orbits a star near the corotation circle and with a low eccentricity galactic orbit

· It orbits a star outside spiral arms

· It orbits a star with at least one terrestrial planet in the circumstellar habitable zone

· It is one of the terrestrial planets in the circumstellar habitable zone

· It orbits a star with no more than a few giant planets comparable in mass to Jupiter in large, circular orbits

· It has a low eccentricity orbit and is outside the region where giant planets would destabilize its orbit

· It is near enough to the inner edge of the circumstellar habitable zone to allow high oxygen and low carbon dioxide concentrations in atmosphere

· It is in the right mass range

· It has a proper concentration of sulfur in its core

· It has a large moon and the right planetary rotation period to avoid chaotic variations in its obliquity

· It has the right amount of water in crust

· It has steady plate tectonic cycling

· It is a planet where life appeared

· It had a critically low number of large impacts

· It was exposed to a critically low number of transient radiation events

· It is a planet where complex life appeared

· It is a planet where technological life appeared

· It is a planet where technological civilization has not destroyed itself

Gonzales and Richards assign a (almost certainly too high) chance of ten percent for each of the factors. Multiplying the combined probability of only the first 13 factors by the number of stars in the Milky Way, Gonzales and Richards calculate that the total expected number of habitable planets in the Milky Way is 0.01. In other words, it turns out that it is highly unlikely that even one planet in the Milky Way is habitable, much less hosts a technological civilization that can observe the universe. The Earth beat the odds and is a privileged planet after all, and that giant crashing noise you hear is the second premise of the “big universe” premise falling down like the first.

What about the possibility of other life forms in the universe? Even if the probability of life is much lower than we thought, what if it is discovered? C. S. Lewis also contemplated this issue. This is is his response:

Christianity says what God has done for Man; it doesn’t say (because it doesn’t know) what He has or has not done in other parts of the universe. [You] might recall the parable of the one lost sheep. If Earth has been specially sought by God (which we don’t know) that may not imply that it is the most important thing in the universe, but only that it has strayed. Finally, challenge the whole tendency to identify size and importance. Is an elephant more important than a man, or a man’s leg than his brain?[xiii]

Lewis’s final point is particularly significant. An implicit assumption of the “big universe” argument is that in a vast universe, the physical insignificance of Earth implies its metaphysical insignificance as well. But why should that be? Size and importance have no logical connection.[xiv] A diamond is many times smaller than a ten-ton boulder, yet it is also many times more valuable. It seems to me that until materialists can demonstrate (rather than merely assert) that the size of the earth is necessarily linked to its value to God, they should be more modest in making their claims.

[i] It is easy to lose sight of the fact that Edwin Hubble proved the existence of galaxies other than the Milky Way only a little over 100 years ago in 1923.

[ii] The pale blue dot image is reproduced at Gonzalez and Richards, The Privileged Planet, 238.

[iii] Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 12-13.

[iv] For the sake of simplicity, I assume that Copernicus immediately displaced Ptolemy. That is not the case.

[v] Ptolemy, Almagest, Book I, Chapter 4 (page 40 of text of translation).

[vi] Ptolemy, Almagest, Book I, Chapter 6 (page 43 of text of translation).

[vii] Ibid.

[viii] Psalm 8:3-5.

[ix] Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World, 305.

[x] Lewis, “Religion and Science,” in God in the Dock, 74-75.

[xi] Gonzalez and Richards, The Privileged Planet, 226. The immutable celestial regions beyond the orbit of the moon were considered far superior to the sublunar region. Id.

[xii] These bullets are drawn from Appendix A to The Privileged Planet.

[xiii] Lewis, “Christian Apologetics,” in God in the Dock, 100.

[xiv] Guillermo Gonzalez, “Do We Live on a Privileged Planet?” in Dembski, Luskin, and Holden, ed., The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith, 239.

Heroic atheists dragged the world out of the Dark Ages and kickstarted the scientific revolution, all while fighting obscurantist clerics who were busy burning Galileo at the stake and insisting that the earth is flat. Right? No. Almost everything you have been told about the “war” between Christianity and science is false.[i]

How many times have you heard that Columbus had to overcome the opposition of benighted flat-earther churchmen to gain funding for his voyage from the Spanish Crown? The story is pure nonsense. The ancients knew the earth was a sphere, and Eratosthenes even made a remarkably accurate estimate of its circumference as early as 230 BC.[ii] That knowledge was never lost, and the late atheist paleontologist Stephen J. Gould tells the real story in his essay “Columbus and the Flat Earth: An Example of the Fallacy of Warfare Between Science and Religion.”

Greek knowledge of the sphericity never faded, and all major medieval religious scholars accepted the earth’s roundness as an established fact of cosmology. Ferdinand and Isabella did refer Columbus’s plans to a royal commission headed by Hernando de Talavera, Isabell’s confessor and, following the defeat of the Moors, Archbishop of Granda. This commission, composed of both clerical and lay advisors, did meet at Salamanca among other places. They did pose some sharp intellectual objections to Columbus, but no one questioned the earth’s roundness. As a major critique, they argued that Columbus could not reach the Indies in his own allotted time, because the earth’s circumference was too great. Moreover, his critics were entirely right. Columbus had “cooked” his figures to favor a much smaller earth, and an attainable Indies. Needless to say, he did not and could not reach Asia. Americans are still called Indians as a legacy of his error.[iii]

Columbus seriously underestimated the length of the westward route to the Indies. If he and his crew had not accidentally discovered the Americas, they would have starved to death long before reaching their intended destination. Columbus was wrong, and the clerics were right. Yet, for generations, American students were taught the flat-earth myth as unimpeachable truth.

How did this happen? The source of the myth is a work of fiction funneled through an academic who was angry at Christian opposition to Darwin. In 1828, Washington Irving published The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, a work of historical fiction based on Columbus’s voyages. In his fictionalized account of the Council of Salamanca, Irving had the clerics attempting to rebut Columbus’s accurate geographic calculations with specious citations to the Bible and the church fathers.[iv] As Gould explained, that did not happen. Enter chemist-historian John William Draper. In 1860, Draper traveled to Oxford to speak about Darwinism at a meeting of the British Association. Bishop Samuel Wilberforce and Thomas Huxley also attended the meeting, and after Draper’s talk, they had a legendary exchange in which Wilberforce attacked, and Huxley defended Darwin. The confrontation between Wilberforce and Huxley engendered in Draper the view that religion and science are at war,[v] and in 1875, he published a book entitled History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science. In his book, Draper decided to smear Christianity with the flat earth myth. His source? Irving’s fictionalized account of Salamanca, which he lifted almost word for word from Irving’s book.[vi]

A few years later, Andrew Dickson White, the first president of Cornell University, published A History of the Warfare of Science With Theology. White, also a fervent defender of Darwin,[vii] further perpetuated the flat earth myth. He wrote:

Many a bold navigator, who was quite ready to brave pirates and tempests, trembled at the thought of tumbling with his ship into one of the openings into hell which a widespread belief placed in the Atlantic at some unknown distance from Europe. This terror among sailors was one of the main obstacles in the great voyage of Columbus.[viii]

The Draper-White “warfare thesis” continues to be influential to this day, which is unfortunate because not only were they wrong about Columbus specifically, but they were also wrong about the supposed “war” between science and religion generally. Indeed, they were more than merely wrong; as we shall see, their warfare thesis is preposterous. Far from being at odds with Christianity, modern science was largely built on a Christian foundation, and many of the greatest scientists from the beginning of the scientific revolution until the present time have been Christians, who obviously saw no conflict between their science and their faith.

Let’s consider an example of such a scientist. Professor Henry F. Schaefer is the Graham Perdue Professor of Chemistry at the University of Georgia, where he is also the director of its Center for Computational Chemistry. He has written over 1,600 scientific papers and is one of the most highly cited chemists in the world. Professor Schaefer’s major awards include the American Chemical Society Award in Pure Chemistry (1979, “for the development of computational quantum chemistry into a reliable quantitative field of chemistry and for prolific exemplary calculations of broad chemical interest”); the American Chemical Society Leo Hendrik Baekeland Award (1983, “for his contributions to computational quantum chemistry and for outstanding applications of this technique to a wide range of chemical problems”); the Schrödinger Medal (1990); the Centenary Medal of the Royal Society of Chemistry (London, 1992, as “the first theoretical chemist successfully to challenge the accepted conclusions of a distinguished experimental group for a polyatomic molecule, namely methylene”); the American Chemical Society Award in Theoretical Chemistry (2003, “for his development of novel and powerful computational methods of electronic structure theory, and their innovative use to solve a host of important chemical problems”). In 2003, he also received the annual American Chemical Society Ira Remsen Award. The Remsen Award citation reads, “For work that resulted in more than one hundred distinct, critical theoretical predictions that were subsequently confirmed by experiment and for work that provided a watershed in the field of quantum chemistry, not by reproducing experiment, but using state-of-the-art theory to make new chemical discoveries and, when necessary, to challenge experiment.” Professor Schaefer has been nominated for a Nobel Prize five times.

Impressed? I know I am. Dr. Schaefer is one of the foremost scientists in the world. He is also a committed Christian. In his essay “How Have Christians Helped to Advance Science?”[ix] Schaefer notes that the scientific revolution occurred in Christian Europe and nowhere else.[x] One reason for this is the Christian belief that God created an intelligible universe. Schaefer quotes Dr. Keith Ward:

Thus appeal to the general intelligibility of nature, its structuring in accordance with mathematical principles which the human mind can understand, suggests the existence of a creative mind, a mind of vast wisdom and power. Science is not likely to get started if one thinks that the universe is just a chaos of arbitrary events, or if one thinks there are many competing gods, or perhaps a god who is not concerned with elegance or rational structure. If one believes those things, one will not expect to find general rational laws, and so one will probably not look for them. It is perhaps no accident that modern science really began with the clear realization that the Christian God was a rational creator, not an arbitrary personal agent…[xi]

Schaefer then discusses many of the Christians who created and sustained the scientific revolution over the centuries.[xii] These include Francis Bacon, the discoverer of the scientific method. Bacon believed there were two “books,” the book of nature and the book of God’s work, and the books were equally important. Johannes Kepler, who discovered the laws of planetary motion, was a devout Lutheran who wrote that his purpose was to think God’s thoughts after him. Blaise Pascal, who made discoveries in both mathematics and physics, also contributed to theology in his Pensées. Robert Boyle was the first true chemist, and he also wrote a book entitled The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of Creation.

Sir Isaac Newton deserves special mention, as many consider him to be the greatest scientist who ever lived. Newton wrote more words on theology than on physics. Michael Faraday discovered benzene and electromagnetic induction, invented the generator, and was a pioneer in the theory in electromagnetism. On his deathbed, Faraday praised Jesus and quoted the Bible. James Clerk Maxwell’s equations – which form the foundation of classical electromagnetism, classical optics, and electric and magnetic circuit theory – are one of the great achievements of the human intellect. On June 23, 1864, Maxwell wrote:

Think what God has determined to do to all those who submit themselves to his righteousness and are willing to receive his gift [the gift of eternal life in Jesus Christ]. They are to be conformed to the image of His Son, and when that is fulfilled, and God sees they are conformed to the image of Christ, there can be no more condemnation.[xiii]

Dozens more of the most famous scientists in history who were also Christians could be named, including Nicolaus Copernicus, a canon of the Catholic Church who proposed heliocentric cosmology. In modern times, a Catholic priest, Georges Lemaître, discovered the Big Bang. Schaefer goes on to name many twenty-first-century scientists who are Christians, including Dr. James Tour, whose work on the origin of life issue we discussed above,[xiv] and Nobel Prize winner William Phillips, who sings in a gospel choir, teaches Sunday school, and leads Bible studies.[xv] Scientists who profess faith are the rule, not the exception. Schaefer cites a poll of 3,300 members of the scientific professional society Sigma Xi. Half of the scientists who were polled regularly participate in religious activities.[xvi]

All of that’s fine you might say, but what about all the guys the church burned at the stake because of their scientific views? There were none. That’s right. Despite what you may have heard, there were exactly zero scientists burned at the stake because the church disagreed with their scientific views.[xvii]

What about Galileo? Galileo’s main mistake was picking a fight with the Pope, openly ridiculing him, and making him look like an enemy of science. At a time when the Pope wielded great temporal power, that was unwise. Nevertheless, I will not deny that the Catholic Church treated Galileo shabbily when it placed him under house arrest and banned his books. But even if that is true, it does not come remotely close to proving the warfare thesis. The warfare thesis must be evaluated in light of the totality of the evidence, not an isolated incident involving a single man hundreds of years ago. The totality of evidence includes the fact that natural philosophy (later called “science”) was fostered in the universities, a Christian invention. The first university in the world opened in Bologna in 1088, and dozens more had opened by 1450. The totality of evidence includes the fact that Christianity provided the metaphysical foundation for science, as discussed above. The totality of evidence includes the fact that from medieval times through the present day, scientists, including arguably the greatest scientists of all time, were Christians. I could go on, but you get the point. Conflict thesis advocates have Galileo. Non-conflict advocates have practically the rest of history up to this present moment. The overwhelming evidence is that there is no war between science and Christianity. Christians have been doing great science – including much of the most important science of all time – for hundreds of years.[xviii]

[i] For an encyclopedic resource exploring this issue in great detail, see William A. Dembski, Casey Luskin, and Joseph M. Holden, ed., The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith: Exploring the Ultimate Questions About Life and the Cosmos. Harvest House Publishers, 2021.

[ii] Jacques Dutka, “Eratosthenes’ Measurement of the Earth Reconsidered,” Archive for History of Exact Sciences, Vol. 46, No. 1 (1993), 55.

[iii] Gould, Rock of Ages,114.

[iv] Irving, The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, 62.

[v] Russell, Inventing the Flat Earth, 37.

[vi] Draper, History of the Conflict, 160.

[vii] Russell, Inventing the Flat Earth, 42. White was more of a scholar than Draper and attempted to defend the flat earth myth more systematically. Russell utterly destroys White’s arguments. See id. at 44-47.

[viii] White, A History of the Warfare, 1:97.

[ix] In Dembski, Luskin, and Holden, ed., The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith, 507-534.

[x] Id. at 512.

[xi] Id. at 511.

[xii] The following discussion is based on id. at 512-518.

[xiii] Id. at 515, quoting Maxwell, as quoted in Matthew Stanley, “By design: James Clerk Maxwell and the evangelical unification of science,” The British Journal for the History of Science 45 (March 2012), 57-73.

[xiv] Id. at 519-23.

[xv] Id. at 523.

[xvi] Id. at 6543, citing Richard Seltzer, “Poll draws portrait of U.S. scientists’ views,” Chemical & Engineering News 66 (November 7, 1988), 6.

[xvii] Materialists sometimes say Giordano Bruno and/or Michael Servetus were burned at the stake because of their scientific views. This is not correct. It is true that they were burned at the stake, and that is inexcusable. But they were declared heretics because of their theological views, not their scientific views. David Haines discusses these cases at great length in David Haines, “Does Science Conflict with Biblical Faith?” in Dembski, Luskin, and Holden, ed., The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith, 68-69.

[xviii] Do you know where there is a true war between a belief system and science? When materialists insist that science conform to the precepts of materialism. In the early cold war Soviet Union, several areas of physics were suppressed for ideological reasons. Piergiorgio Pescali describes this suppression as follows:

Objective scientific laws had to toe the party line. This included disciplining the Big Bang, quantum mechanics, and Einstein’s theory of relativity. On June 24, 1947, Andrei Zhdanov extended his policy to astronomy and cosmology, claiming that these fields should be cleansed from bourgeois lies and illusions. Quantum theory was rejected as it does not describe the matter as a unique and real structure, apparently negating materialism. In the essays Against idealism in modern physics, released in 1948, the theory of relativity was labelled as “idealistic” and “Einsteinianism” denounced. The relativistic theory of a closed, expanding universe was defined a “cancerous tumour that corrodes modern astronomical theory and is the main ideological enemy of materialist science”.

The most controversial and discussed theory was the Big Bang’s, still rejected at the time by many scientists, including Western ones. However, if the Western scientific community was still skeptical because of the lack of clear evidence, in the Soviet Union the opposition was purely ideological. According to Stalinian cosmology, the universe was infinite (no space limit, no matter limit) and eternal (never began, never will end). Matter was only a material manifestation of motion and energy (no wave-particle duality contemplated). Galactic redshifts, discovered by Vesto Slipher in 1912, did not indicate that the space is expanding and all the theories had to fit in materialism and dialectical philosophy. The Big Bang was deemed to resemble the Bible’s Genesis and branded as a pseudo-scientific, idealistic theory.

Piergiorgio Pescali, “Stalin, the big bang and quantum physics,” Osservatorio Balcani e Caucaso Transeuropa (Feb. 2, 2017). Mao’s China experienced similar repression of quantum theory because it conflicted with materialism. See Quantum Study Simplified in Pei-Ching University – Another Victory for the Mao Tse-Tung Ideology (Sept.14, 1960), available at https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA379963.pdf (accessed January 29, 2025).

Materialists often argue that if God exists, he would not permit evil to exist, and since we know evil exists, we can conclude that God does not. Good arguments depend on the unambiguous use of language, and the argument from evil is no exception. It requires a clear definition of the word “evil,” and materialists face a difficult challenge from the start because they deny the existence of evil. Dawkins, for example, writes that “The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.”^[1] If Dawkins is correct and there is no evil, it would seem to be impossible to argue that the existence of evil disproves the existence of God.

But that is not the case because when Dawkins says there is no good and no evil, he means there is no objective transcendent morality. In other words, he is saying that in a universe governed by blind physical forces, stuff just happens for no reason, and it is neither good nor evil in the sense of “conforming to an objective transcendent moral code.” However, Dawkins himself uses the word “evil” all the time to describe certain things or people. He believes that discrimination and religion and Hitler and Stalin are evil, to cite just a few examples.[2] There is no contradiction here because when Dawkins uses the word “evil,” he means a “sense” of right and wrong derived from our Darwinian past.[3]

Materialists agree that we feel strong urges to do certain things (which we call good) and not do other things (which we call evil). For the materialist, those urges are reducible to the electrochemical processes of our physical brains, and our brains, like all of our other organs, are the product of evolutionary processes. We have an appendix because, at some point in our evolutionary history, it gave our ancestors an advantage in the Darwinian struggle for relative reproductive success, and we have strong feelings of revulsion about the Holocaust for the same reason. Thus, we arrive at the materialist definition of evil: “That which blind physical evolutionary forces have programmed me not to prefer.”

Now that we have the definitional issue out of the way, we can go on to the argument, which is straightforward and amounts to the following syllogism:

Major Premise: If God exists, he would prevent “evil” – i.e., that which blind physical evolutionary forces have programmed me not to prefer – from happening.

Minor Premise: Things often happen that blind physical evolutionary forces have programmed me not to prefer.

Conclusion: God does not exist.

Thus, we see that if “evil” means what materialists say it means, the argument from evil is absurd. A subjective sense of revulsion caused by evolutionary forces cannot be the basis for asserting God does not exist. To avoid this problem, the materialist must smuggle into the argument an objective meaning of “evil.” But then the argument hits another insurmountable problem. Objective evil can exist only if it is possible to transgress an objective transcendent moral code.[4] But an objective transcendent moral code exists only if God exists. Thus, it makes no sense to argue that God does not exist because things happen that transgress a code that only he could create. The argument eats itself. Objective evil is possible only if God exists. Therefore, the existence of objective evil, far from disproving the existence of God, actually confirms it.

There is no logical contradiction between God’s existence and the fact that he permits evil to exist, for it could be the case that an all-powerful, all-knowing and omnibenevolent God has good reasons for allowing evil to exist and persist.[5] This is not a controversial conclusion among philosophers. Both theist and atheist philosophers widely agree that Alvin Plantinga’s Free Will Defense[6] demolished the logical problem from evil. Professor Chad Meister writes:

Most people writing at the popular level aren’t aware that professional philosophers of religion, theists and atheists alike have agreed in recent years that this version of the problem of evil [i.e., that the existence of evil logically precludes the existence of God] has been decisively rebutted and is therefore unsuccessful. That kind of consensus doesn’t come very often in philosophy![7]

Well-known atheist philosopher Paul Draper agrees. He writes, “Logical arguments from evil are a dying (dead?) breed.”[8]

While the logical argument from evil is dead or dying, the “evidentiary” version of the argument from evil is another matter. This argument asserts that the existence of evil^[9] and suffering makes it highly improbable that God exists. This appears to be the version of the argument Neil deGrasse Tyson uses to reject the existence of God.^[10] William Lane Craig has provided a detailed and persuasive response to the evidentiary problem, which he summarizes as follows:

As finite persons, we are limited in time, space, intelligence, and insight. But the transcendent and sovereign God sees the end from the beginning and providentially orders history so that his purposes are ultimately achieved through human free decisions. In order to achieve his ends, God may have to put up with certain evils along the way. Evils which appear pointless to us within our limited framework may be seen to have been justly permitted within God’s wider framework.[11]

Dr. Craig then argues that when all of the evidence (not just the existence of evil) is considered as a whole, the existence of God is the most reasonable conclusion.[12]

Dr. Craig’s argument is consistent with the Biblical story of Job. Job was, we are told, a very righteous man. Yet God allowed almost unbearable pain to fall on him. In the midst of his anguish, Job insisted on his innocence and demanded that God explain why he had required him to endure such torment. He shouted, “Let the Almighty answer me!”[13] But God declined to give an account of Himself to Job. Instead, he reminded Job of his unimaginably awesome power and wisdom as demonstrated in creation, and he reminded Job of his own comparatively limited intelligence and perspective.[14] God expected Job to trust Him even when he could not understand Him. Christians are not called to a blind, unthinking belief in God in the absence of evidence. There is plenty of evidence that God exists and that he is good, and, as he did with Job, God invites us to consider that evidence and trust him.

The Christian faith is a reasoned and reasonable one grounded in a sober assessment of several lines of evidence. However, apodictic certainty is unattainable. Some degree of doubt will always be possible, and God requires us to trust Him[15] in the face of that doubt. Sometimes that can be hard, especially when we are suffering or we see the ones we love suffer. Fyodor Dostoevsky, for example, was a Christian, but his faith was sorely tested by doubts that arose when he contemplated innocent suffering, especially the suffering of children.

Dostoevsky explored these themes in The Brothers Karamazov, widely regarded as one of the greatest novels of all time. The novel is written mainly from the perspective of a young Russian Orthodox novice[16] named Alyosha Karamazov. Dostoevsky contrasted Alyosha’s beliefs with those of his brother, an atheist intellectual named Ivan. In the chapter entitled “Rebellion,” Ivan offers, in the words of Professor Gary Saul Morson, “the strongest case against God ever made.”[17] Ivan recounts several gut-wrenching stories of children who endured almost unimaginable suffering at the hands of sadistic torturers. (These accounts are all the more horrifying because Dostoevsky based them on actual newspaper reports.) Ivan rejects God because even if God somehow eventually harmonizes all of creation so that we can see how it all makes sense in the end, the price – innocent suffering – is too high. Ivan declares:

I don’t want harmony, for love of mankind I don’t want it. I want to remain with unrequited suffering. I’d rather remain with my unrequited suffering and my unquenched indignation, even if I am wrong. Besides, they have put too high a price on harmony; we can’t afford to pay so much for admission. And therefore I hasten to return my ticket.[18]

Ivan is angry with God for allowing children to suffer, and his anger drives him to reject God unequivocally. His rage is so incandescently hot that he says he rejects God “even if I am wrong.” In other words, he acknowledges that he could be mistaken and God might have morally justifiable reasons for permitting innocent suffering. It does not matter. Ivan will have nothing to do with a God that allows innocent suffering.

The most important thing to understand about Ivan’s declaration is that it is not an argument that God does not exist. It is a visceral emotional rejection of God. This is not uncommon among atheists. For example, one commentator said that New Atheist Christopher Hitchens’ atheism could be summed up with a single sentence: “There is no God and I hate Him.”[19] Ivan has not offered an intellectual argument for his atheism, so it does no good to offer counterarguments. As Dr. Craig has said, those who reject God for emotional reasons do not need a philosopher; they need a counselor.

What would a Christian counselor say to Ivan? First, I don’t think a counselor would dismiss Ivan’s anguish and doubts out of hand. At a certain level, anger at God can be understandable (even if it is ultimately unjustified), and even the most faithful sometimes harbor doubts about God’s goodness in the face of great pain and suffering. Dostoevsky himself was candid about his struggles with doubt. Near the end of this life, he wrote, “It is not as a child that I believe and confess Jesus Christ. My hosanna is born of a furnace of doubt.”[20] It is hardly surprising that the man who put in Ivan’s mouth “the strongest case against God ever made” was tormented by doubt.

As Alvin Plantinga writes, while both the logical and the evidentiary argument from evil have been defeated, “this is cold and abstract comfort when faced with the shocking concreteness of a particularly appalling exemplification of evil.”[21] This does not mean that the counselor has nothing to say to Ivan. Again, Job is our example for getting to the other side of the doubt that understandably springs from suffering. In the depths of his misery, pain, and confusion, when he desperately searched for God and could not find him, Job clung to his faith that God was there and that in, the end, he would bring him through.[22]

A Christian counselor would also tell Ivan that he is being unfair to God. In his intellectual hubris, Ivan thinks of God solely in abstract intellectual terms, as if he were a cosmic trolley operator standing above the fray pulling levers[23] as he calmly computes an optimal overall outcome. But that is not who God is. Instead, in the person of Jesus Christ, God entered into his creation and shared in its sufferings in order to redeem it to himself. God does not stand at the lever directing trolleys. He placed himself on the track and allowed the trolley to hit him so that he could save us all. Plantinga writes:

As the Christian sees things, God does not stand idly by, coolly observing the suffering of his creatures. He enters into and shares our suffering. He endures the anguish of seeing his son, the second person of the Trinity, consigned to the bitterly cruel and shameful death of the cross. . . . Christ was prepared to endure the agonies of hell itself; and God, the Lord of the universe, was prepared to endure the suffering consequent upon his son’s humiliation and death. He was prepared to accept this suffering in order to overcome sin, and death, and the evils that afflict our world, and to confer on us a life more glorious than we can imagine. So we don’t know why God permits evil; we do know, however, that he was prepared to suffer on our behalf, to accept suffering of which we can form no conception.[24]

Where does all of this leave us? On the one hand, there are compelling reasons to believe that God exists, that He loves us, and that he sent his son, Jesus Christ, to suffer, die, and rise again to save us. On the other hand, God does not force himself on anyone. We must approach him in faith, a reasoned and reasonable faith to be sure, but faith nevertheless. God does not give us absolute certainty. There will always be room for doubt.

[1] Dawkins, River Out of Eden, 134 (emphasis added).

[2] The God Delusion at 18, 23, 309.

[3] Id. at 245.

[4] Professor Meister writes:

If rape, racism, torture, murder, government-sanctioned genocide and so forth are objectively evil, what makes them so? What makes them truly evil, rather than simply activities we dislike? What made the atrocities of the Nazis evil, even though Hitler and his thugs maintained otherwise? One cannot consistently affirm both that there are no objective moral values, on the one hand, and that rape, torture and the like are objectively morally evil on the other.

Chad Meister, “God, Evil and Morality,” in God Is Great, God Is Good, 109.

[5] Id. at 108.

[6] See Plantinga, God, Freedom, and Evil, 54-55.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Draper, The Evidential Argument from Evil, 176-77. The full quotation is:

Logical arguments from evil are a dying (dead?) breed. One reason for this is the following: Since even an omnipotent being’s power would have logical limitations, such a being could produce goods that logically entail the existence (or possibility) of E[vil] only by allowing E[vil] (or its possibility). So, for all we know, even an omnipotent and omniscient being might be forced to allow E[vil] for the sake of obtaining some important good. Our knowledge of goods and evils and the logical relations they bear to each other is much too limited to prove that this could not be the case.

[9] This version of the argument from evil, like the logical argument from evil we have already considered, seems to suffer an insurmountable problem from the outset: On materialism, the word “evil” has no objective meaning.

[10] See Martha Teichner interview of Neil deGrasse Tyson, “Neil deGrasse Tyson on God,” CBS Sunday Morning, (April 30, 2017), available at

(accessed January 15, 2025).

[11] William Lane Craig, “The Problem of Evil,” Reasonable Faith Website, available at https://www.reasonablefaith.org/writings/popular-writings/existence-nature-of-god/the-problem-of-evil

[12] Id.

[13] Job 31:35.

[14] See Job chapters 38-41.

[15] “And without faith it is impossible to please Him, for he who comes to God must believe that he is and that he is a rewarder of those who seek Him.” Hebrews 11:6.

[16] In this context, “novice” means someone who is preparing to become a monk.

[17] Gary Saul Morson, “The Greatest Christian Novel,” First Things (May 2021).

[18] Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, 393.

[19] Frank Turek, “Why are Atheists Angry at God?,” CrossExamined.org, (Jan. 13, 2011), available at https://crossexamined.org/why-are-atheists-angry-at-god/ (accessed January 18, 2025). There is clinical support for the proposition that atheism is often based in anger at God or an image of God that the atheist holds. Julie J. Exline, Crystal L. Park, Joshua M. Smyth, Michael P. Carey, “Anger toward God: Social-cognitive predictors, prevalence, and links with adjustment to bereavement and cancer,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol 100(1), Jan 2011, 129-148.

[20] Fyodor Dostoyevsky, written in his last notebook [1880–1881], as quoted in Martin, Kierkegaard, the Melancholy Dane, 86.

[21] Alvin Plantinga, “Self-Profile,” in Tomberlin and van Inwagen, Alvin Plantinga, 35-36.

[22] Job 19:25-27; 23:8-10.

[23] I refer to the well-known “trolley problem,” attributed to Philippa Foot. The trolley problem presents a scenario involving a runaway trolley hurtling down a track toward several people. A bystander has the option to intervene by pulling a lever to redirect the trolley. However, by pulling the lever, the bystander will cause the death of another individual. The problem has several variations that explore the ethical implications of pulling the lever in different situations.

[24] Alvin Plantinga at 36.

I just spent an hour and a half watching O’Connor moderate a discussion between Peterson and Richard Dawkins here. Again, Peterson is extremely good at diagnosing our present spiritual crisis. And he points out that the solution is to adopt the sublime ethical system developed within the Judeo-Christian tradition.

In response, Dawkins asks a profound question: “Are you saying that Jesus really did die for our sins? I mean do you believe that? Do you believe that as a fact, that Jesus died for our sins?” As he usually does, Peterson dissembles. Dawkins continues by conceding that even if Christianity has some instrumental value, “that doesn’t in any way increase my trust in the validity of Christian propositions like the resurrection, the virgin birth, the miracles and Jesus is the son of God.” For example, “Christianity may have some kind of historical facilitating effect that led to the Renaissance, that led to the scientific revolution. And that would be a very interesting historical analysis. But it doesn’t bear upon the truth the propositions of the Christian religion.” Then Dawkins dismisses Peterson’s project. He says that if Christianity’s truth claims are not actually true it is useless. He says he is not impressed by Peterson’s attempt to instrumentalize Christianity.

I agree. Christianity is good because it is true. It is not good because it is useful. C.S. Lewis once wrote: “Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance, the only thing it cannot be is moderately important.” In response to Peterson, I would modify this to say: “Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance, the only thing it cannot be is merely useful.”

Originalism Is Doing Just Fine, Thank You

Gregory J. Sullivan says the Supreme Court’s originalist majority has betrayed the originalist project in their Second Amendment cases, which, he says, are a cover for the “exercise of raw judicial power.” (“A Fly in Originalism’s Ointment”). It is no coincidence that Sullivan quoted the most famous line from Justice White’s dissent in Roe v. Wade. He believes that in this area of law, the current Court’s originalists are just as lawless as the Roe majority was, an argument he developed at length in “The Problem with the Supreme Court’s Conservatives.” In that article, Sullivan accused Justice Scalia of setting the Court on a course for “result-driven judicial imperialism” in his seminal Second Amendment opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller. Yes, that Justice Scalia, the chief architect of originalism and perhaps its greatest practitioner. If your reaction to Sullivan’s accusation is “that’s ridiculous,” you are on the right track.

William Blackstone, the preeminent authority on English law for the Founding generation, wrote in his Commentaries that the right to bear arms is grounded in the “the natural right of resistance and self-preservation.” In Heller, Scalia marshaled overwhelming historical evidence that the founders understood that the Second Amendment codified this pre-existing individual right. Scalia rejected the “collective right” theory that had been popularized by progressive judges and academics in an effort to render the right practically meaningless.

Heller then established an originalist test for evaluating laws burdening a citizen’s right to keep and bear arms. Under this test, such laws are valid only if they are consistent with the “text and history” of the Second Amendment. Dick Heller wanted to keep a handgun in his home for self-defense but was prohibited from doing so by a D.C. ordinance banning the possession of handguns. The Court held that for its ordinance to be valid, D.C. was required to demonstrate that it was consistent with the nation’s history and tradition of firearm regulation, such as the tradition of banning “dangerous and unusual” weapons. But handguns are far from unusual. They are the most popular weapon chosen by Americans for self-defense in the home, and therefore the Court held D.C.’s complete prohibition on their use under any circumstances is unconstitutional.

Predictably, Heller touched off a firestorm of criticism. Even a small minority of conservatives disagreed. Perhaps none was more trenchant than Fourth Circuit Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, a Reagan appointee whom George W. Bush once interviewed for the high court. (Perhaps Ed Whelan can provide insight into that episode). Sullivan gets his comparison of Heller to Roe from a law-review article Wilkinson wrote in 2009. With all due respect to Judge Wilkinson, that comparison is just silly.

Roe announced a right to abortion that is completely unmoored from the text, history, and structure of the Constitution. Even abortion rights supporters understand this. As pro-abortion rights Professor John Hart Ely famously quipped, Roe “is not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be.” In contrast, the operative clause of the Second Amendment expressly states that “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” The dissenting progressives in Heller argued that because of the amendment’s prefatory clause, the operative clause does not really mean what it appears to unambiguously say. Whatever the merits of that argument, it is nonsensical for Wilkinson to argue that Heller is of a piece with Roe, which made up the “right” to abortion out of absolutely nothing at all.

Shortly after Heller, the Court held in McDonald v. City of Chicago that the Second Amendment applies to the states. Unfortunately, in the years that followed, the lower federal courts declined to apply Heller’s originalist text and history test. Instead, they jettisoned that test in favor of a judge empowering balancing test. On one side of the judicial scale, they placed the government’s assertion that its gun-control law is good policy. On the other side they placed the citizen’s interest in exercising their Second Amendment rights. To no one’s surprise, judges almost always decided that the government’s interest outweighed the citizen’s. The Ninth Circuit was a particularly egregious offender. In his dissent in a 2021 Second Amendment case, conservative Ninth Circuit Judge Lawrence VanDyke totted up the score in that circuit. By his count, in the years after Heller the government had a perfect 50–0 undefeated record in Second Amendment cases.

Of course, when the government always wins when it is challenged for infringing on a right, as a practical matter that right does not exist. And that was more or less the state of the law until 2022 when the Court announced its decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn. v. Bruen. Contrary to Sullivan’s claim, Bruen did not establish a new rule of law. Instead, the Court surveyed the total hash the lower courts had made of Second Amendment law after Heller and stated that it would no longer allow the lower courts to interest balance away one of Americans’ fundamental rights. Bruen abrogated all of the interest balancing cases en masse and reiterated Heller’s originalist text and history test. The Court then applied that test to strike down a New York law that allowed government officials to arbitrarily deny permits to law abiding citizens for any reason or no reason at all.

Last June, the Court decided U.S. v. Rahimi, its first post-Bruen Second Amendment case. Sullivan tries to give the impression that the originalist majority splintered in several different directions in Rahimi as they struggled to apply the Heller and Bruen methodology. That is simply false. All of the originalists save Justice Thomas were in total agreement. It is true that Justices Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett filed concurring opinions. So what? All three of them stated in those concurrences that they were in complete agreement with Justice Roberts’ majority opinion. They wrote separately only to emphasize various points of law they thought were important. Yes, Justice Thomas did not agree with his five originalist colleagues. Again, so what? As Justice Kavanaugh pointed out, reasonable minds can sometimes disagree about how originalism applies in a particular case but “we at least agree that is the only proper question a court may ask.”

In the lower courts the progressive rebellion against Heller (and now Bruen) continues apace. If anyone hoped that after being chastised by the Court in Bruen the circuit courts dominated by progressives would fall in line and finally begin applying the Heller test in good faith, they were in for disappointment. Post-Bruen, the government still has a near spotless 16–1 record fending off challenges to arms bans. The Ninth Circuit is, again, the worst offender. Its decision staying an injunction in Duncan v. Bonta is typical, and Judge Bumatay’s dissent in that case (which I have cleaned up for readability) reflects the frustration of originalist judges:

If the protection of the people’s fundamental rights wasn’t such a serious matter, our court’s attitude toward the Second Amendment would be laughably absurd . . . [In Bruen], the Supreme Court had enough of lower courts’ disregard for the Second Amendment. It decisively commanded that we must no longer interest-balance a fundamental right and that we must look to the Second Amendment’s text, history, and tradition to assess modern firearm regulations . . . Despite this clear direction, our court once again swats down another Second Amendment challenge . . . The Constitution and Californians deserve better.

Sullivan points to Judge Wilkinson’s recent opinion in Bianchi v. Brown as evidence that conservatives have a problem with Heller too. Nonsense. There are 15 active judges in the Fourth Circuit. Nine were appointed by Democrat presidents and six were appointed by Republicans. In Bianchi, Wilkinson joined the nine progressives to form a 10–5 majority. A single defection is hardly evidence of widespread conservative discontent. Bianchi had nothing to do with conservative dissatisfaction with the originalist test developed in Heller. It had everything to do with willful judges (including one who usually leans conservative) refusing to apply those originalist principles in good faith.

Bianchi is the Fourth Circuit’s second post-Heller failure. Remember all of those interest balancing circuit court decisions that were abrogated by Bruen? One of them was the Fourth Circuit’s decision in Kolbe v. Hogan. Bianchi was a post-Bruen challenge to the same gun control statute Wilkinson voted to uphold in Kolbe. In true you’re-not-the-boss-of-me fashion, Wilkinson responded to the Supreme Court’s abrogation of Kolbe by holding that Kolbe was right all along and reaffirming it. I am not making this up. Read the decision for yourself.

Sullivan implies that the Heller test is such a muddle that even judges like Wilkinson purporting to apply it struggle to do so. Not true. Spouting the Heller test and applying it in good faith are not the same thing. Justice O’Connor once noted that when they want to “[judges] know how to mouth the correct legal rules with ironic solemnity while avoiding those rules’ logical consequences.” Bianchi illustrates the truth of this observation. The thrust of Wilkinson’s opinion is that semi-automatic rifles that are disfavored by progressive judges (especially the AR-15, the most popular rifle in America) are not within the scope of the Second Amendment’s plain text. You read that correctly. According to Wilkinson, certain firearms do not count as “Arms,” as that word is used in the Second Amendment. To be sure, Wilkinson tacked on a perfunctory historical analysis, but after holding that disfavored arms do not even fall within the plain meaning of the word “arms,” one can be certain where that went.

Wilkinson’s opinion in Bianchi is not a good faith attempt to apply Heller. It is, frankly, a tendentious embarrassment, as any reasonably intelligent eighth grader would be able to discern. If you want to know the true state of Second Amendment law and how it should have been applied, you would do well to read Judge Richardson’s masterful dissent in that case.  

Have the Supreme Court’s Second Amendment cases exposed a flaw at the heart of the originalist project as Sullivan says? No. The originalist project is doing just fine, thank you. That is especially true when one considers the alternative – unelected, unaccountable, life-tenured, judges acting in “black-robed supremacy” (Scalia’s words) as they impose their policy preferences on the rest of us under the guise of interpreting the Constitution. The Court’s Second Amendment cases have not exposed a flaw in originalism. They have exposed a flaw in willful lower court judges who refuse to apply binding Supreme Court precedent with which they disagree. Of course, “exposed” is not quite the right word, because anyone paying attention knows we have had that problem for a long time.

Barry Arrington is Chief Legal Counsel for the National Association for Gun Rights.

So, we had a discussion on the way to the gym. Discipline is one of the keys to success in life, and the essence of discipline is the ability to force yourself to do things you don’t want to do. I told him I am preaching to myself as much as to him. As it happens, I nearly stayed in bed today myself. The alarm went off and a fierce argument erupted in my head. Get up! No, I worked hard this week; I need rest. Get up! No. The first time is the hardest; failure always gets progressively easier.

That last one usually convinces me, and I rolled out of bed. I am glad I did and I am glad for the coincidence (Providence?) that caused me to struggle so hard the same day Son No. 2 advanced his “clean the couch” argument. It presented a golden opportunity to talk to him about my own struggles. I hope he took it to heart.

Maybe not. After he learned he could get away with anything by melting hearts in the aftermath of his carnage, things got rough for a while. For example, he would smack my wife and then immediately lay his head against her for his free pass. He had learned Romans 5:20 ("where sin abounded, grace did much more abound"). But the grace of Romans 5:20 can be pernicious in isolation because it can lead to a doctrine of cheap grace.

So one day when it happened again, I (metaphorically) preached the very next verse (Romans 6:1) to him. I said, "I love you and will always forgive you, but shall we continue in sin that grace may abound? God forbid. How shall we who are dead to sin live any longer therein?" I'm pretty sure he did not understand at the time.

In that respect he is like a lot of adults I have talked to over the years. I remember one case in particular where a friend actually told me that he could do anything he wanted because God's grace was sufficient to cover his sins. That man went on to experience many heartaches, including divorce and the alienation of his children. Yes, God's grace is sufficient to cover all of our sins. But sin nevertheless has temporal consequences, including broken relationships. Cheap grace hurts.

I can learn from my own preaching. Have I used "grace covers all sin" as a cheap get-out-of-jail-free card? If I have, I must repent. Grace is not cheap. It came at an enormous cost -- God himself becoming flesh and bleeding and dying on Calvary. As Paul said to the Corinthians, "I am bought with a price." A very costly price. Christ has paid the penalty for my sin; may it never be that I treat his staggering act of redemptive grace as a cheap talisman. Instead, may I always remember the enormous price he paid for me and never treat his grace lightly.

Nonsense. That twinge of conscience we feel when we do wrong is not a bad thing. Just the opposite is true. Guilt can be a precious gift from God that serves His purposes in our lives. It warns us away from moral danger. It prompts us to better behavior.

If you succumb to your besetting sin for the millionth time and it hurts, good. God is still dealing with you. As my pastor preached one Father’s Day, “it is never too late to become a better man.” Don’t give up. Pick yourself up determined to do better.

Far from “getting over our guilt,” we should worry if we do wrong and feel no guilt. That may mean our conscience has been seared, and we are no longer sensitive to God’s leading. That is a place we never want to be.

Christ paid the price for our sin at Calvary, and God has removed that sin from us “as far as the east is from the west.” We can embrace God’ forgiveness, and there is no need to wallow in despair over past sins. We have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. If that is what you mean by “God does not want you to feel guilty,” OK.

But God does not want us to go through life oblivious to our sinfulness. He wants us to know when we have done wrong, and he uses guilt as the messenger. The remedy for that kind of guilt is not to ignore it or wish it away but to pray to the Spirit for grace to overcome and do better next time.