BONUS Q&A with SEAN MCDOWELL: Why Does God Let Bad Things Happen? | Kirk Cameron on TBN

Sean McDowell joins Kirk Cameron in this exclusive interview to discuss the heavy-hitting apologetics questions that people are most curious about. Why does God allow evil to exist and how many of the 183 questions asked of Jesus did He actually answer? Dig into this insightful discussion here on Takeaways with Kirk Cameron on TBN!

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All questions you can ask about God, why that one?
I think most people are asking that question not for intellectual reasons, but they’ve seen evil, they’ve been hurt, and they’re wondering why God doesn’t seemingly fix it.
Hey. Thanks for joining us for a special digital exclusive with author, speaker, professor, and apologist Sean McDowell.
Sean, you’ve been apologizing for a long time now.
And, uh, you know, I I love the word apo apologist and and, uh, apologetics.
It really is not talking about apologizing for our faith and what we believe.
It really is is giving giving an answer and and a defense and helping people understand why we believe what we believe.
And I really, really appreciate all the work that you have done and are continuing to do.
We had someone call up at Biola University where I teach and say, why do you have classes on teaching students to say sorry for being a Christian?
And she didn’t understand that apologetics comes from the Greek apologia, given a reason for the hope within.
So let’s do it.
Well, Sean, there are certainly questions that, um, tie our brains up in a knot because, uh, God is is infinite.
He is eternal. Uh, his his ways are higher than the ways of man, and and we begin to understand the mind of God when we have the spirit of Christ dwelling within us.
But, uh, there’s still so much that is a mystery, and and, uh, I’ve got a few topics that I’d love to just, uh, throw out there on the table with you and just get some of your thoughts.
Um, the subject of free will.
How can free will, uh, exist if God is omniscient and he already knows everything that’s gonna happen?
So there’s the biblical question of, like, Armenianism versus Calvinism, and then there’s, like, the logical question you’re asking that says, wait a minute.
If god knows what I’m going to do, then it’s already determined that I will do that and not something else.
Therefore, how do I have free will?
And in some ways, I think the nature of this question has it backwards.
So we aren’t determined to do something because God knows what we will do.
Rather, God knows what we will do because of his omniscience and his awareness of what we will freely choose.
So if I were to choose differently, God’s knowledge would reflect that fact of what I will do.
So God’s knowledge, he knows everything past. He knows everything present, and he knows everything in the future.
Now this is this is not a perfect analogy, but it’s the closest human one I can come up with.
If I go home after this recording and I say to my kids, hey. We’re having lunch today.
It’s either pizza or broccoli.
I know about 99.9% that my kids are not gonna pick the broccoli.
They’re gonna pick the pizza. Now my knowledge of this doesn’t force them to do so.
I just have an awareness of what they will freely choose.
Now, of course, the difference is mine is just a really good educated guess. God isn’t guessing.
But it makes the point that we can know what somebody is going to do, and our knowledge doesn’t determine it.
Our knowledge reflects it.
Boy, that that that’s so cool. That that’s so good.
And and I would just add add there that when when I sort of do a study on this, uh, phrase of free will, I I find that God’s will is free.
God freely chooses what he wants to choose and that he does things according to the purpose of his own will and his own counsel.
But I also understand that that that because of sin and the prison that we’ve been locked into via Adam and the Garden of Eden, um, my my will is actually deeply, um, uh, crippled and in bondage, and I need the son to set me free so that I can actually, uh, be free indeed.
And and and so, again, we’re swimming really in the deep end theologically when we talk about how the sovereignty of God and the free will or the free choices or the, uh, the real choices of people can coexist.
And I heard one pastor say recently, he said these are not opposing truths that need to be reconciled.
These are twin truths that need to be recognized.
And maybe that’s a flowery way of saying something, but Spurgeon would say, these appear to be parallel lines that will never intersect God’s sovereignty and the will of man, but they do come together, uh, in the same place where they were forged in the beginning, uh, in in in the mind of God, in the heart of God, uh, in eternity.
Uh, the problem of evil and the existence of suffering can easily stop many Christians in their tracks.
How would you respond to the question, how can an all powerful, loving God coexist with the existence of evil?
Practically, Kirk, what I would say to that person is I would say of all questions you can ask about God, why that one?
And my reasoning being that I think most people are asking that question not for intellectual reasons, but they’ve seen evil, they’ve been hurt, and they’re wondering why God doesn’t seemingly fix it.
So, practically, that’s how I would respond.
Now logically, the way you framed it is how can God coexist with evil and suffering?
And the answer to this is to come up with some morally sufficient reason why God, amidst his goodness and power, can coexist with evil.
Well, if you just take power, if God is going to make free beings who have the choice to follow God, which implies a choice to not follow God.
God has to give us the free will, so to speak, to act and to choose.
So it’s Alvin Plantinga who said, if god made us and determined that we do everything that is good, we don’t have free will.
If we have free will, God is not determining all of our steps.
So if God is going to make beings that can have their free will to love him and to love others.
He’s gonna have to make us the kinds of beans that can choose good and choose evil, which means we can coexist as we do with God.
Now when it comes to God’s goodness, the question is, how can God be good with a coexistence of good and evil?
And this is where CS Lewis said, you know, something in effect of God whispers in our pleasure, and he shouts in our pain.
Pain is God’s megaphone to a deaf world. So be it might be because God is good.
He allows evil and suffering as a way that can wake us up from our slumber, kind of like you described earlier and realize my life is headed in a bad direction.
I need to turn towards God and think about things that are eternal.
If that’s the case, you can have an all powerful, all good God, and it can coexist with evil because the nature of what it means to be human and because God wants us to turn towards him for eternity.
Now that doesn’t answer everything and, in fact, probably raises more questions, but that is the beginning of a response that you asked.
And, Sean, uh, we have a mutual friend, Ray Comfort, who who reminded me that if God actually did what I was suggesting he might do, being all powerful and all good, just eliminating evil, you and I would go up in a puff of smoke right now.
And so I thank God that he has ordained in his plan that evil can exist in his world and in his economy because this gives me time to repent and turn to him.
Uh, I I I don’t want God to eliminate every evil being he sees because that would include me.
And and now I’m I’m on a different road because of his patience and his long suffering.
Uh, last question. Uh, many progressives I I don’t know why they’re called progressives.
I I would I’d like to rename them, um, more accurately regressives, uh, say that the Bible is not the inerrant word of God.
How do you respond to that? Well, first thing I’m gonna
do is I’m gonna ask questions.
I’m gonna say, why do you believe the Bible’s Bible’s not the inspired or the inerrant word of God?
They’re making the claim. I think they need to defend it.
And then I’m just gonna ask them, how does this square with the way Jesus seemed to use the scriptures as authoritative and as inerrant.
I mean, Jesus talked about I think of, for example, in Matthew 19, he’s asked about marriage.
What does he do? He points back to God’s creation at the beginning, and he cites both Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 as if it’s authoritative, as if it’s normative, and still applies.
That’s just one example. So I’m gonna ask them where they get this idea from.
And then because progressives tend to point more towards Jesus than, for example, Paul or the Old Testament, I’m just gonna say, how do you square that view with the view that Jesus seemed to have that the scriptures are without error, and they don’t have mistakes, and they’re authoritative.
Tell me how you line those up.
That that that that’s so good to ask questions, and I found it fascinating in the last conversation that we had.
Uh, Can you just go over those statistics again?
Jesus was asked many questions, uh, but he actually answered with questions, uh, and Paul did something similar.
Would you would you share that with everyone again?
So in the 4 gospels and Acts, we have 341 questions that Jesus asked.
In Paul’s letters, we have 262 questions that Paul asks.
Jesus was asked about a 183 questions, and he directly answered 7.
What this tells me is that the God who made our brains and communicates with us knows how to communicate well.
So if he engages us with questions, we’d be wise in our teaching, in our relationships, in our evangelism to also ask people questions.
Sean, this is great. Thanks so much for joining us, and thank you all for watching.
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