Stephen Meyer

It just means there's no reason to appeal to one.

You see, God could still exist.

So it seems like even Aquinas would agree that the problem of evil is the primary one.

How do you respond to it?

Well, the version of the problem of evil that Neil deGrasse Tyson is putting forward is, I think, probably the strongest argument for atheism, and that is the problem from natural evil.

And it's particularly effective against theists who have portrayed God and his relationship to the world as one that would lead us to expect perfection in the natural world.

The biblical theistic view is not one where we think that nature should be perfect, but rather that nature both

bears the hallmarks of its aboriginal design from God.

You get this idea from Romans 1, that from the things that are made, the unseen qualities of the Creator, His eternal power and divine nature are clearly seen.

But Romans, in the same book, in St.

Paul in chapter eight, says that the creation is groaning for its redemption, that it's been subjected to decay.

And so on a biblical view, we would expect to see two things in nature.

We would expect to see both evidence of aboriginal design and evidence of subsequent decay that in fact would be harmful to human beings, that there's something that's gone wrong in nature since its original creation.

That's the biblical view

of what you might call, that's a biblical theology of nature.

That's what we should expect to see.

And that's actually what we do see.

And so there's a kind of confirmation of the biblical hypothesis there that I think provides epistemic support or evidential support for biblical theism, not for the kind of pure Platonic theism which anticipates that nature would be pristine in all its effects and all its ways.

You get the impression from some of the late 19th century

natural theologians that they had spent all of their time in an Oxford or Cambridge garden, and that they weren't aware that nature was also subject to decay and problematic aspects.