Lee Strobel Quotes

Many have puzzled themselves about the origin of evil. I am content to observe that there is evil, and that there is a way to escape from it, and with this I begin and end.

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 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.

You enter a state of controlled passivity, you relax your grip and accept that even if your declared intention is to justify the ways of God to man, you might end up interesting your readers rather more in Satan.

Evil is always possible. Goodness is a difficulty.

From the days of Cain and Abel, we know all too well there will always be evil. But that evil shouldn't take away our freedoms.

So be it. God created profoundly fallible creatures on this earth, and human history is mostly the story of error and accident.

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.

God had one son on earth without sin, but never one without suffering.

There's too much tendency to attribute to God the evils that man does of his own free will.

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.

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.

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.

Some people turn from God because they cannot understand how a good God can permit evil in the world.

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?

If there was no moral evil upon earth, there would be no physical evil.

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?

The problem of evil, that is to say the reconciling of our failures, even the purely physical ones, with creative goodness and creative power, will always remain one of the most disturbing mysteries of the universe for both our hearts and our minds.

People ask why God allows suffering. You could just as well ask the Minister of Transport why he allows accidents on Britain's roads.

Evil is neither suffering nor sin; it is both at the same time, it is something common to them both. For they are linked together; sin makes us suffer and suffering makes us evil, and this indissoluble complex of suffering and sin is the evil in which we are submerged against our will, and to our horror.

I myself will perhaps cry out with all the rest, looking at the mother embracing her child's tormentor: 'Just art thou, O Lord!' but I do not want to cry out with them. While there's still time, I hasten to defend myself against it, and therefore I absolutely renounce all higher harmony. It is not worth one little tear of even that one tormented child who beat her chest with her little fist and prayed to 'dear God' in a stinking outhouse with her unredeemed tears!

If there are gods, why is the world so full of pain and injustice?' 'Because of men like you.

I ask why your Omnipotent God does not hold a man back when he is about to commit a sin or offence. It is child’s play for God. Why did He not kill war lords? Why did He not remove the fury of war from their minds? In this way God could have saved humanity from great calamity and horror.

But I don't understand God. I don't understand how he could see the way people treat one another, and not chalk up the whole human race as a bad idea.

To justify God's ways to man.