Stephen Meyer

But that's something you would expect if you took the biblical view of nature seriously.

Suppose you were in an elevator with Neil deGrasse Tyson, and he says, if God is all good and all powerful, we shouldn't expect evil.

We do have evil, therefore God does not exist.

Elevator ride, what's your one, two-liner response?

If we're talking about the evil that human beings have perpetrated against other human beings, what used to be called man's inhumanity to man, the classical free will defense, I think, is exactly apt, that God chose to make human beings with agency, with free will,

because he viewed that as better than making us as puppets or automatons.

He wanted us to be freely able to choose to love him, to love each other, and to follow his ways, which he had laid out as being the best things that would comport best with the way he designed us to live and to flourish.

But he wanted to give us the freedom

To choose ourselves.

And he understood that that freedom came with the risk that we might choose to rebel against him or to do harm to each other.

And so we live in a world where that has occurred.

What about natural evil?

How would you respond to that real quick?

Well, the idea, the natural evil question is a bit harder because we don't get the whole backstory in the biblical text, but there is a clear implication that there is a backstory.

That not only is there the evil that we have perpetrated against each other, but our choice to rebel against God and the choice of angelic beings that preceded us has in some way affected nature adversely.

And so what we're told to expect in nature, if you look at Romans 1 and Romans 8, we're told to expect to see evidence of God's eternal power and divine nature, his wisdom, that's Romans 1, from the things that are made.

We should see in the things that are made evidence of an aboriginal design, but we should also expect to see evidence of subsequent decay.

And we see that, I see that at the genomic level with mutations and viri and bacteria that are harmful to human beings.

So there is, I think what we see in nature matches that general expectation that we should glean from the biblical text, that we should see both

Evidence of original design, but subsequent decay.