The Argument of Good and Evil
(Apologetics - Week 7- Student’s Guide)
(Romans 2:12-16) One of the first arguments that people use against the idea of a God, particularly the good God of the Bible, is the existence of evil in the world. Often the argument goes something like this: "If there really was a God, he would never allow people to commit such evil deeds to each other." If this were to be tested, we would have to first establish a few things. First, we would have to know the nature of God. For instance, if God were evil, this statement would not be true. Second, we have to know that evil things are being done. This seems easy at first, but only because we are making a big assumption.
How do you define what the word evil?______
The very fact that we know in our hearts what is right and what is wrong tells us something. The Bible says that God's law is written on people's hearts. Even in people who have never heard the gospel, God has written his law on their hearts and they know right from wrong...they know good from evil. Though people can learn to ignore that part of their mind/heart, the Bible makes it clear that at some point, people who disobey God's law know it is wrong because his law is written on their hearts.
The prevailing theory in psychology is that people are born with a ______ and it gets written on by parents and society as they grow up, but new research is showing otherwise. Like every other area of science, the more we learn, the more the Bible is proven. The research was carried out by a team led by Paul Bloom, professor of psychology at the Infant Cognition Center at Yale University in Connecticut. What is showed was that babies as young as six months old understood the difference between helpful and unhelpful behavior. The results contradict the theories of Sigmund Freud and others, who thought human beings start out as “amoral animals”, or a moral blank state. Bloom said there is mounting scientific evidence that this may not be true and that “some sense of good and evil seems to be bred in the bone.”
Anywhere you go, laws are different, but there a great similarities in laws all over. What are laws that seem to "transcend culture?" ______.
So, let's go over all the main points of what we have established so far and see if you can see a picture forming. The following are points we proved in previous weeks. What do these things show?
The universe has a beginning. ______.
The Cambrian explosion was in a top down pattern where changes happed big at first and got smaller over time. ______.
The earth is not nearly as old as we have been led to believe it is. ______.
Many living things require many pieces at once to work and if any of them were missing, they wouldn't work. ______.
Because of the odds against it, it is crazy to assume things came to be the way they are by accident. ______.
Lastly, today we showed that people are built with an innate knowledge of good and evil. ______.
Not only is there a God who caused the universe in the beginning, but he is a good God who loves us so much he planned out, designed and made us, and finely tuned everything to make it possible for us to live.
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