Today’s New Reason To Believe

This summer I traveled to the state of Virginia to deliver a lecture on “worldview thinking” at a local evangelical church. My wife and son went along and we spent a few days sightseeing in nearby Washington D.C. One of the most stimulating places we visited was the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Being a student of World War II and having a special interest in the Holocaust (the systematic extermination of six million Jews and several million other ethnic minorities and political dissidents by the Nazis), I found this museum to be both intellectually fascinating and spiritually moving.

An entire floor of the museum tells the incomprehensible story of the Holocaust through the use of incredible photographs, authentic artifacts, and moving films. My son Michael and I spent several hours at the museum viewing the unfathomable sights and talking about the cataclysmic crime perpetrated by the Nazis.

During our visit, my son and I were deeply moved to discover that one of the American infantry divisions that my father served in during the war (the 95th Infantry Division) had liberated one of the concentration camps. Michael expressed to me with deep emotion that he was proud that his grandfather had been a part of halting the terrible mass murders.

As we left the museum we talked about the problem of moral evil in the world. I explained to my son that many people thought that a benevolent God would never allow such gratuitous evil. However, I pointed out that in order for evil to exist there had to also exist a standard of goodness that the Nazis had deeply violated (evil is like a parasite that must live on the host of the good). In other words, while thoughtful Christians must wrestle with the “problem of evil,” reflective atheists must wrestle with the “problem of the good.” If God doesn’t exist, then how does one justify the moral goodness that is needed to condemn the Holocaust as being sheer unadulterated evil? It takes an objective moral basis to condemn the acts of the Nazis. But can there be authentic evil in a world without God?

For a Christian response to the problem of evil, see Kenneth Samples’ book Without a Doubt: Answering the 20 Toughest Faith Questions (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2007).