R.C. Sproul

A theodicy is a rational attempt to justify God or to exonerate God for the presence of evil in the world.

It's like the philosophers say, I am going to be God's defense attorney.

Everybody's mad at God because this world is ruined.

It's marred.

It's blemished.

His principal creation, man, is the most corrupt of all.

Now, what's wrong with a God who has botched the job so severely?

We're going to try to defend God and shift the blame from God to some other place where it belongs.

And blindness came to this theory.

It said there are three kinds of evil in the world.

There's moral evil, which we understand.

We call it sin.

There is physical evil.

which we understand physical evil would be disease or a calamity that befalls us because of the wind or the fire and the storm, what we call an act of God.

Earthquake swallows us up.

That's physical evil.

And then thirdly, Leibniz spoke of what he called metaphysical evil, metaphysical evil.

Metaphysical evil meaning that to be finite is less great than being infinite, and to be finite is to be metaphysically imperfect.

Only that which is infinite would be metaphysically perfect.

So anything that is created is by its very nature finite.