Walter Lang Quotes

The problem of evil... Why does God permit it? Or, if God is omnipotent, in which case permission and creation are the same, why did God create it?

If there is a God, whence proceed so many evils? If there is no God, whence cometh any good?

I don't doubt that God can bring good out of tragedies, but the Bible is clear that God is not the author of evil!

The Why's of suffering keep us shrouded in a seemingly bottomless void of abstraction where God is reduced to a finite ethical agent, a limited psychological personality, whose purposes measure on the same scale as ours.

It is widely assumed, contrary to fact, that theism necessarily involves the two assumptions which cannot be squared with the existence of so much suffering, and that therefore, per impossibile, they simply have to be squared with the existence of all this suffering, somehow.

Only a completely unintelligible God can be said to be absolutely good and absolutely powerful yet tolerate the world as it is.

If 'everything happens for a reason,' then every act of evil is ultimately God's doing.

I have too much respect for the idea of God to make it responsible for such an absurd world.

Atheism is really nothing but a sorry litany of non-sequiturs, e.g., if God existed, why do we have all the evil and horrors in the world? But this presupposes that God is all-good, an obvious non-sequitur.

Do freshman philosophy classes nowadays debate updated versions of the age-old questions? Like, how could a merciful God allow AIDS, childhood cancers, tsunamis and Dick Cheney?

I was never much bothered about moral questions like, 'How could there be a good God when there's so much evil in the world?'

God Almighty would in no way permit evil in His works were He not so omnipotent and good that even out of evil He could work good.

The problem of vindicating an omnipotent and omniscient God in the face of evil is insurmountable. Those who claim to have surmounted it, by recourse to notions of free will and other incoherencies, have merely heaped bad philosophy onto bad ethics.

Whenever there is a catastrophe, some religious people inevitably ask, 'Why didn't God do something? Where was God when all those people died?'

Why do people hate God?... One, they hate the moral standard. Two, they hate the way he's transforming the world even in the midst of suffering and tragedy.

In my rational mind, I know... that is a very simplistic way of looking at it, but when there is violence of that kind, it challenges my faith. I still can't say that I totally understand why - why that is allowed to happen.

I do not believe that God tortures any person simply for its own sake. I believe that God enables all things to work for the greater good.

If I had to imagine omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent power in the universe that chose to make my mother suffer, I don't know how I would make that make sense in the universe.

God judged it better to bring good out of evil than to suffer no evil to exist.

Evil and good are God's right hand and left.

Almost every time I am in a lectureship on a college campus, young people will say, If there is a God and if he is a loving and merciful God, how do you explain the problems of suffering and death and all the tragedies that happen to people?

The first thing that we need to say is that God is grieving, too. Uh, a lot of people try to make it sound like 'well everything that happens is God's will.' That's nonsense. God allows everything, but God does not choose everything.

We often represent God to ourselves as being able to draw from non-being a world without sorrows, faults, dangers - a world in which there is no damage, no breakage. This is a conceptual fantasy and makes it impossible to solve the problem of evil.

'Preacher' - what it's saying is not just blasphemy and good, fun violence. It's asking, 'Where is God?' If he is there, what's he doing?

For, were it not good that evil things should also exist, the omnipotent God would almost certainly not allow evil to be, since beyond doubt it is just as easy for Him not to allow what He does not will, as for Him to do what He will.