Summary
Alvin Plantinga faces up to the question: why does God permit such terrible things to happen in the world?
There are these horrifying things that go on in the world – Auschwitz and the like, and all of the ills that beset humanity. All the cruelness and so on, wickedness that’s gone on in God’s world. And I don’t have any answer to the question, well, why does God permit that? Just, Job asked these same kind of questions and he didn’t have an answer and I don’t have an answer.
But the fact that God was willing, for our sakes – people who had turned their backs on him and gone away from him and fallen into sin and don’t pay attention to him, sometimes actually actively campaign against him – the fact that God would be willing to undergo the suffering involved in sending his own Son into the world and then seeing him vilified and cursed and spat upon and crucified … the fact that he was willing to do that to enable us to achieve salvation, be in the right relationship with God again, that sort of overshadows all the other. I don’t know why God permits it, but if he’s willing to do this, he’s got to be on our side.
