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Making Sense Of Your World: A Biblical Worldview

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The issue of evil in the world raises questions with which everyone wrestles. Pain and suffering come into everyone’s life to some degree or another. Trying to find meaning and purpose in the midst of suffering, whether our own or someone else’s, is difficult regardless of what worldview one holds. How individuals and societies deal with this issue will have important implications for those individuals as well as to the whole of society.
The presence of evil in the world became horrifyingly apparent again on December 14, 2012 in Newtown, Connecticut. Shortly after 9:30 a.m. a lone gunman entered Sandy Hook Elementary School and brutally murdered six adults and 20 students, ages six and seven, then took his own life. There was no apparent reason …show more content…

The physical world is all that exists. In their book, Making Sense of Your World: A Biblical Worldview, Phillips, Brown, and Stonestreet (2008), state that atheists believe the world is “governed by purely natural causes and processes, without any supernatural intervention or oversight” (p. 151). To the atheist, when something bad happens, it is merely bad luck. The problem atheists are confronted with is defining what qualifies as “good” in order to distinguish what is “evil.” With no objective standard for what is good, there is no objective standard for evil. Good and evil become subjective opinion. What is good for one person may not be for another. In Germany, the Brown Shirts held the belief that ethnic cleansing was a “good” thing, thus justifying the extermination of those the Reich deemed inferior. But can mere belief or group-think constitute what is good or evil, or is there an objective, transcendent definition that stands independent of the individual? The atheist must reply negatively to the transcendent definition, as the implication would be that there is a transcendent power or authority which issues this definition.
Atheists will acknowledge, and rightly so, that what happened at Sandy Hook Elementary School was a horrible tragedy, but most will stop short of calling it evil. Instead, the focus is on gun control and psychological health. A statement made …show more content…

They may even come to the conclusion that if there is a God, he cannot be good.
In contrast to Atheism and Agnosticism, Pantheism does not acknowledge the physical world as reality, but accepts only the spiritual world as real. According to Phillips et al. (2008), there are two approaches that Pantheism can take to resolve the issue of evil in the world. The first is to “suggest that any evil that occurs in the natural world [is] illusory. [The] second… explanation for evil and suffering is karma” (pp. 152-153).
Since Pantheism sees the physical world as an illusion, evil is illusionary as well. We are all connected to the universe, or to the One. We are not physical beings, but spiritual beings who need to detach from the physical world (from selfish living) in order to attain enlightenment. Failure to do so will result in the soul’s reincarnation until its journey is complete. Since evil is illusionary, a Pantheists would probably respond to the tragedy that took place at Sandy Hook Elementary School by detaching from the victims and letting them go. After all, to hang on to them would be clinging to the physical. The victims’ souls are on a spiritual journey back to the One, as is everyone. According to Philips et al. (2008), for the Pantheist, detachment from the illusion of the physical world and looking within to become one with ultimate reality is the

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