The Sean McDowell Show - Why Did God Allow the Holocaust?

Episode Date: July 11, 2025

Why would a loving, all-powerful God allow something as horrific as the Holocaust? This is one of the most difficult questions that has caused many to doubt or walk away from faith altogether. Collin Hansen has thought about these questions for years and has written an excellent book on this topic. He’s here today to give his sobering, honest take. READ: Where is God in as World of Suffering? (https://amzn.to/4kfMKUk)WATCH: Answering the Problem of Evil and Suffering (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtdCr3Pxg4w)*Get a MASTERS IN APOLOGETICS or SCIENCE AND RELIGION at BIOLA (https://bit.ly/3LdNqKf)*USE Discount Code [SMDCERTDISC] for 25% off the BIOLA APOLOGETICS CERTIFICATE program (https://bit.ly/3AzfPFM)*See our fully online UNDERGRAD DEGREE in Bible, Theology, and Apologetics: (https://bit.ly/448STKK)FOLLOW ME ON SOCIAL MEDIA: Twitter: https://x.com/Sean_McDowellTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@sean_mcdowell?lang=enInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmcdowell/Website: https://seanmcdowell.org

Why would God allow the Holocaust? Why does God seem silent in the face of the most egregious acts of evil, suffering, and tragedy? And should we even ask such difficult and painful questions? Our guest today, Colin Hanson, has been thinking about these questions for a long time and has written an excellent, short, but thoughtful book called Where is God in a World with So Much Evil? Colin, really honored to have you on. This is the first time we've met. It feels like we should have met a long time ago because this is a question we both care about deeply. I teach a class at Talbot. Why does God allow evil? I've done some writing this. I've done

some shows on this. But I've really hesitated to talk about the Holocaust in particular for reasons we will get into. But before we go there, just tell me kind of your personal story. What motivated you to write a book on suffering and evil? Well, again, thanks for having me as a guest. And it is a good question because not everybody would find this to be a good use of their time or wanting to dive into some of the most painful and difficult moments, not only in our personal lives, but in history. I've been wondering this question myself. I've always been drawn to learning about Christians who went one direction while everybody else was going the other direction people who stood up for their faith people like Dietrich Bonhoeffer

back in World War two and one of the things that distinguished Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Germany even going make the 1930s was his opposition to to anti-semitism his defense and his protection and speaking up for for the Jews And I studied Bonhoeffer all the way going back to college. I graduated in 2003, so it's been a long time. And as life has gone on, and I've read more and experienced more and then ultimately now teach like you do in apologetics, I assign my students a sermon where they have to incorporate what is the hardest objection to Christianity. And I want to give them a model for how I would do that. And so, for me, it's the suffering of innocent children in the Holocaust.

And like you said, we'll dive into a lot of the different reasons of why that is a particular area of focus. But one of the simplest ways to put it is that this has been a major part of why a lot of people have lost their faith, or have objections to Christianity, or are very concerned, and it's, or in other ways, it's a the most concentrated situation in the modern era that raises the timeless questions about the problem of evil. So that's a little bit of the background of how I ended up with this, this short book on a big question. Well, that helps.

And you don't waste any time. You jump right in talking about the Holocaust and you talk, I mean, you don't, you don't straw man this. You talk about the pain, the suffering, the horror of 6 million Jews murdered less than a century ago, children, grandmothers, young, old, pregnant. You lay it out there. It kind of reminded me when William Lane Craig talks about the problem of evil. He has a lengthy quote from the brothers Karamazov

about just the horrible mistreatment of children. I really appreciate that because he's like, I'm not going to straw man this. This is the real objection. Let's go. Is that why you started your book in such a jarring way? Yeah. I mean, I did a trip over to Israel and we went through the Holocaust Remembrance Museum,

Yad Vashem. And of course, it's an emotional experience. If you can get out of that place without being overcome with grief. And it's not so much what you think about with all of the executions and the gas chambers and the concentration camps, which are themselves, of course, so horrible. It's just, it's these pictures of these families. They look so normal. It's these children all dressed up as they're about to head off and to hop on these cattle car trains. And you know how their life is going to end. But when you see them in these pictures, you don't. And so it's just such a visceral emotional

Experience and in reading as well and I just continued to be drawn to reading that I'm sure what you're referencing with with dr. Craig would be from the chapter rebellion Yeah, and brothers Karamazov in the in the in the voice of Ivan Karamazov That scene plays a significant role in my own book here. And when I was studying Russian literature in college That's when I was first introduced So when I was learning about the Holocaust from one of the world's experts I was learning about Dostoevsky from another one of the world's experts and so in my intellectual and moral formation Those two streams were coming together and then you add in there the reflections of the

Of course famous Nobel Prize winning writer and activist Ellie Wiesel and his book night and I was actually just talking with my old Russian literature professor last week and I said Was we Zell was he writing about? Dostoevsky and writing about that section when he was recounting his own experience and what he saw in the concentration camps? Because it's a memoir, but it's a memoir that is oddly similar to the exact same framing of the exact same questions. And that's why you start to see that this is real, it's personal, it's tangible, but it's also universal in

the sense that this is a problem that's been happening for as long as there's been humanity in different ways from Cain killing Abel all the way through. So it's both dramatic in its scope of the Holocaust, but also just directly personal and intangible in situations that we can sadly relate to. When I speak on the problem of evil, and also again in my class at Talbot, one of the things I say to my students is how we assess whether Christianity can make sense of the Holocaust is going to be rooted a lot in our expectations. If somebody says, why does God allow the Holocaust?

And they expect us to lay out all the reasons why God allows evil and suffering of this magnitude, they're going to be profoundly disappointed. We could only know why if God tells us. Of course, in this case, He doesn't explicitly tell us. But I'll say to audiences, I'll say the question is really, how does the Christian response compare to all the other possible responses? And does it offer the most reasonable and existentially satisfying solution in light of the possibilities? That frames it differently. I'm wondering if you frame it the same way,

if you agree with that, or if you would add anything to that. I do. And actually, at the Gospel Coalition Coalition we had just published a very similar essay today by Patrick Schreiner at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, and he approaches things similarly to how we're talking about here. And he frames that basic problem that has been posed to Christians for as long as we can recall, and much further, the question of, well, there is evil, but God is supposed to be in charge. Well, God can't, but God is supposed to be in charge. Well, God can't be good or else He's not in charge. A simple way to put it. And that

seems like, in many ways, an impossible dilemma to deal with. How could you possibly respond to that? Well, I would argue that it is very difficult. We'll get into ways that Christianity does address that specifically in ways that I certainly find to be far more satisfying than alternatives, but that's the key. What is the alternative? And that's what I try to force as an issue in here, because let's just think about the alternatives. The alternatives are that, you know, whoever has the most guns just gets to do what they want. There's no purpose to anything out there, so I guess you better hope that you have power. And if you don't, well, I mean, it's every man, woman, and child for themselves. I mean, or just, I mean, of course, there is the perspective that a lot of people adopt,

which is, and I think this is actually part of the answer to the problem of evil, which is the role that humans themselves play, exercising our fallen nature, sin, and people just do bad things to each other. Now, at least in the Christian interpretation, we have ways for reconciling that, but if you stop with just saying, yeah, people are free to do what they want, I that. But if you stop with just saying, yeah, people are free to do what they want, I find it very hard to believe that that can be more satisfying than the options that Christianity has. So I think when people are getting caught up in that problem of evil, they have thought about how difficult it is for Christians to answer. They have not thought about how difficult, even more difficult, it is

for anybody else to answer. That's really helpful. We'll get into some of those differences and kind of flesh them out a little bit. But I'm wondering, you talk about early in the book, and I thought this was really appropriate, especially right now with how much anti-Semitism is out there, how much we can blame the Jews for the Holocaust. Now, before we go any further, it's, actually I've been reading the Gospel of John almost every day in its entirety if I can and it's literally been life transforming how much I've learned Colin. I was sharing with my wife that it

struck me that in John 5 when Jesus heals the invalid, after 38 years he had this condition, he says, stop singing, don't sing anymore, something worse might happen to you, which I think kind of implies that maybe his condition was brought on by something that he had done. When it comes to the blind man, they're like, well, who sinned? Him or his parents? And he's like, neither, this wasn't brought on by sin. So I think the Christian worldview makes sense that we can sin and bring tragedy on ourselves, but we should not go out of the way

to say every time this happens, it's because somebody sinned. John 9 shows that's distinctly not the case. How do you make sense of that when it comes to the Holocaust and the Jews? Yeah, the book of Job, of course, would answer in a very similar manner. And that's in terms of wanting to make things really clean cut to say that when somebody suffers, it's because of something they've done. And that can be the case, but making it the answer does not add up.

One of the things that stood out to me on that same trip to Israel was something I had never heard before. And that was that the Jews who were living in what is now Israel before the creation of the modern state of Israel, so during the Holocaust in Europe, they were, many of them, very judgmental and I think, more broadly speaking, incomprehending about what had happened in the Holocaust the scale of it the nature of it did not make any sense to them at all and the part that they kept coming back to was how could you have let something like this happen without fighting back and there are many ways to answer that one of them is that they did fight back. First of all, you could look at the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto as an example

of that, and where the Jews get caught not only by the Nazis trying to kill them, but also by the Soviets who are not wanting to help them at the same time. So you have a couple of those dynamics in there. But the basic thought was, actually, there was a lot of shame for the Holocaust survivors in Israel because it was their fault, at least in the view of some of the Jews who were living in Israel. You know, you need to take matters into your own hands. And in fact, a big part of the state of Israel's national identity since then has been, we're not going to let this happen again, and we're going to take matters into our own hands. But I don't think, of course, that

that matches the historical data, and I don't think it solves the theological problem. And I don't think that we can answer the question the way that some Christians have answered it in the past. One could be this is part of the ongoing judgment against the Jews specifically because of what happened with Jesus. Okay, that's one way that people have...and I also just don't personally take the view that this happened in the God's providence to be able to create the modern state of Israel. It's a little bit more associated with some dispensational perspectives. So it's not that the way that I answer the question is the only way that Christians have tried to answer the question.

There have been other attempts to be able to explain it those ways. The reason I'm far more cautious about that is because the great temptation for us, and you see this so clearly in the book of Job, is to use our own experiences, our own fears, our own temptations, our own enemies, to just slap those on whatever we see happening. God is not telling—certainly it's not in His Word, and beyond that you're going to have to talk about an extra biblical revelation, which I think is going to be extremely dangerous for a whole host of reasons, but

especially because when we have that degree of certainty about what's happened in something like this, it's usually because it's built off a presupposition that we have, something that we bring to the table, and we're just sort of saying, well, of course, like, essentially, the facts don't matter because they just need to fit our narrative in there. And unfortunately, I think that a lot of guilt and a lot of bad things have been done by people just trying to fit providential readings into their pre-existing narratives. So that's why I try to avoid that. I'm not saying God couldn't have done it for those reasons. So that's why I try to avoid that. I'm not saying God couldn't have done it for those reasons.

It's just that it's anything but clear that to us from His explanation, that that's why He was doing this. I heard Dennis Prager, who's a Jewish talk show host, interestingly enough, and he's written some of my favorite commentaries on the Old Testament, suggest the reason that you cited earlier that maybe God allowed the Holocaust, didn't cause it, to get Israel a state. It sounds like your hesitation is more theological and just rooted in unless that's explicitly made clear, we ought to be cautious assuming that.

Is that fair? Yeah, that's fair and also just for just to be transparent about it as well I don't have the common dispensational perspective on or that some pre-millennial predispensational or you know pre tribulation all dispensationalists have of the necessity of the modern state of Israel to the necessity of the modern state of Israel to precede the coming of Christ. A lot of people will associate this with the Left Behind series as an example there. I mean, I'm just saying that's not where I'm coming from theologically, and one of the... in terms of my understanding of the church and

whatnot, but generally speaking, the difficulty, I have less of a difficulty with that view than I do with the, this is a judgment for the Jews going way back, because we've seen in Christian history how that interpretation has been used as a precursor to persecute the Jews, as a pretext to be able to punish them, to use violence against them. And that's one reason I'm majorly hesitant to be able to do that. But yes, otherwise, it's entirely possible that that is why God did that. But here's the other problem with that interpretation. We are only looking at a historical horizon that we can see. We do not know what's going to happen in five years, 10 years, 50 years.

What else could happen in that period of time that might make that ridiculous? Let me give you a very extreme and perhaps even scary example of this. Okay, you ready for this? All right. I hope so. What if Iran nukes all of Israel in the next five years? What if Iran nukes all of Israel in the next five years? Would we say then that the reason that God did the Holocaust was to put half of the world's Jews in the same country so they could be easily killed? I don't think we'd say that, right? So at least I wouldn't say that. So my point is, we don't know what's going to happen in the next five years, the next 10 years. So to conclude from our limited vantage point, this is what God was doing. I mean, we're not God.

We do not see what he sees. We've got to be careful in our timelines. I think that's really helpful. It does show the power of our theological assumptions weighing into the way we assess this. And of course, someone could say, well, given my view of God's sovereignty, he wouldn't let that happen. But we're somewhat digressing. I think it's fair enough to say this could be a reason why and hold it with some hesitancy rather than say it dogmatically. Yeah, I agree. Yeah, I want to be clear on this. It could be we just don't have any certainty about it.

That's all. Fair enough. Now you asked a question that I think is exactly the right question early on. In your book, you say, where is evil located? What do you mean by that question? Why is that so important? Yeah, this was an important part of the entire argument for the book. And once again, I'm going to head back to Russian literature. The Russians, historically,

Christian writers from Tolstoy to Dostoevsky to ultimately, then I'm talking about Alexander Solzhenitsyn here from the mid 20th century, mid to late 20th century. Russians have had many opportunities to reflect on the problem of evil. And that continues to this day in very unfortunate and sad ways. But the way that we are often tempted to locate evil is in the group of people who are our enemies. So we locate it outside of ourselves with the people that we don't like, the people who are persecuting us, the people who are trying to kill us. The difficulty there is, well,

manifold. You can justify any number of things in retaliation or in hatred. And as Christians, it's just very clear the command of Jesus Christ is to love our enemies. So that's one problem. Then Solzhenitsyn has the quote that I'm sure a lot of people watching or listening would be familiar with. And that's the line of good and evil does not run between me and you, good guy, bad guy, or good guy, bad guy, either way, but within every human heart. And that's when you go back to the garden. That's when you go back to Adam and Eve, and that's when you go back to Cain and

Abel, and you see that what we're dealing with here is a humanity issue. It's, it's, it's our sin nature. It's the, it's the very, it's the fall of man and woman. That's the origin of all of this. God did not create things to be this way. It's not the way it was supposed to be. But we have inherited that sin from, from Adam. And so the ultimate battle of good and evil is in every human heart. And so Solzhenitsyn would reflect on this. Other people have reflected on this as well. They'd look at something like the, well, it was just the concentration camps or the gulags of the Soviets. Just think about this.

Yes, you could say the communist system is itself evil and should be opposed by the people of God. Completely agree. Just look at the horrible actions there. So completely agree there. But inside every camp, people still had choices. People still were deciding whether to love or to hate, to share or to hoard, to denounce or to support. All these decisions, you still had a tremendous amount of agency. And what Solzhenitsyn is trying to help us to see is that you still have the ability to choose the good, to follow the way of Christ, even when you've been persecuted that way. So the ultimate battle is still in your heart,

even when there can be other battles outside, like I said, between the inmates and the guards, the communist system versus Christianity, or anything like that. But I don't think there's any satisfying answer to the problem of evil until we go back to recognize That all of us at different levels I'm not trying to equivocate here in terms of everybody being on the same level as Hitler or Stalin or something like that But all of us contribute in small medium large and everything in between ways To choose in between good and evil in our everyday lives. So that's why that, that line, that, that evil, of course, Jesus himself talks about this, the evil comes from within us.

Um, that's where it springs from. And that's why it needs to be eradicated by, by him. So one of the things I say to my students, Colin, is that every worldview identifies evil somewhere. So in Marxism, it's external. There's haves and there's have nots. It's brought on by capitalism. Yeah, classes.

New Age says it's a lack of information. Enlightenment. We need enlightenment hence. Secular humanism typically points towards religion. Every worldview identifies the source of evil. Jesus in Mark 7 lays out clearly goes it's out of the heart that comes sloth and anger and division and lust etc. You know that's why we see in John 2 it says Jesus will not entrust himself to them because he knows what is inside the human heart. A colleague of

mine, he's not at Biol anymore, but Clay Jones, who's not reformed interestingly enough, is he wrote an article that if our audience could just literally pause this and go read this article. I don't say this a lot because I want you to watch the videos. Hopefully we're bringing some value to people here, but hit pause and read an article he wrote. It's available online.

And the title is that we don't take human evil seriously enough. And he has probably studied the problem of evil as much as anybody alive. And he studies the 20th century and he says, our assumption is that it's done by a few deranged individuals, maybe Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, but the thousands of camps, the millions of people who went along with this and helped it, or who said nothing, condemns people in the masses and reveals something about human nature. When our lives are fine, we can all be kind. But when the chips are down, human nature comes out.

And one of the things, you know, I remember calling, my dad said to me in high school and I didn't get it. We're watching some TV show, it was the news and there was some, I don't know, murder or something. And I said to my dad, I'm like, gosh, that's so inhuman. And he stopped to me, he looked at me, he goes, son, that is not inhumane. Inhumane means not human. He said, humans do that.

And we all have that capacity in our hearts. I was like, dang, I think I got it up here. And I saw this show, it was on Ted Bundy, interestingly enough. I can't remember which one it was, maybe Netflix or Amazon. And this journalist is describing that he interviews him. And he goes, interviewing Ted Bundy, this horrible serial killer, I was looking for why he would be so deranged.

And he just seemed so normal. And it made me wonder if I have in my heart the same thing he has in his heart. I saw that was like, that's exactly right. So this doesn't explain why God allows the Holocaust, but I don't think we can begin to understand it emotionally and intellectually unless we have an accurate biblical understanding of the depravity of human beings and what we ourselves are capable of. That's really the dividing line to me.

And it sounds like in your book you lay that out as well. Yeah, I agree. And this is another reason why so many people reflect on this question in light of the Second World War. Hannah Arendt took up this same question in writing about Adolf Eichmann, one of the Second World War. Hannah Arendt took up the same question in writing about Adolf Eichmann, one of the one of the leaders among the Nazis in perpetuating the Holocaust and seeing that evil is banal. Evil's not come like looking like a vampire looking like a werewolf but looking like the the man in the gray flannel suit. Now that's part of what's so scary about it.

And then secondly, one other reason people look back on this is because we want to attribute, like you said, we want to attribute evil to inhumanity, or we want to treat it as, this is something that belongs to the past. Well, what do you do with Germany when Germany is the most progressive, enlightened, educated part, corner of Western civilization? What do you do when it's a cradle of biblical scholarship, going all the way back to Martin Luther, of course, where you have very strong Protestant churches, very strong Catholic churches. How do you deal with the problem of evil when it's like that? You have theological problems, you have... So, Christians have to account for this, but progressives and liberals have to account for this because that was a progressive civilization at the time. The right wing has to

deal with it because Nazism was in some ways kind of a right wing movement, but it's also a socialist movement of the left. I mean all these things, it just blows up your categories, and that's why it comes back to the question of would I have been like Bonhoeffer? Or would I have been like everyone else? And the way of wisdom is recognizing that we're all more likely to be like everybody else. Maybe we're not running the gas chamber.

Lord help us. We're probably not the ones that are shooting Jewish mothers in the middle of a field in Ukraine. But could we go along with it and just not say anything so long as we felt like our family would be okay and we would be okay? Well, unfortunately, that is the more normative example in human history. The reason we remember Bonhoeffer among others is because they're the exception. It's because they weren't the rule. A question Clay Jones asks is,

could I have been a guard in Auschwitz? And everybody immediately goes, no, of course not. Well, if everybody says that, and it's the exception of somebody who wasn't, there's some major disconnect going on here between our self-awareness and our own capacity for evil? Well, just consider this. Real quickly, many of the guards in Auschwitz were Jewish.

I mean, I'm talking about the guards on the outside. I'm saying, the people who were doing all the dirty work inside, they were Jewish. Because the question is not, could you have been a guard at Auschwitz? Could you have been a guard at Auschwitz if the alternative was you getting shot in the head? That's the question. Or the question is, could you be a guarded Auschwitz if your family got to live and have food on the outside of the camp walls and you got to see them? Because the alternative is you get to sent to the eastern Front where you're going to get killed within days against the Soviets. That's the real question and that's way harder to answer. Sorry I interrupted you there.

No, no, no. That's what makes it so hard. Thank you. Please do. I think that's exactly the right question. People often say God is silent in the face of evil and suffering, understandably so. But you say, quote, I think God is speaking loudly. He is not silent at all. Tell us about that. Yeah. Well, certainly as a Christian, I would say that God's word directly speaks. We've already been talking about that here. It's very bold. It's very forceful and speaks with such clarity and truthfulness even today. But in this book, I'm trying to not only rely on Christian assumptions

about the inspiration of God's Word or even the Spirit's testimony to the power of God's Word, I'm also trying to help build a bridge to people, specifically the argument that Eli Wiesel is making of where is God? How could God be here? We must have killed him because there's no way he would allow this to happen. Not only that, there's no way, and Eli was Jewish, there's no way he would allow this to happen to his people. Well, we know from scripture that that's the exact question that was asked in Jerusalem with the Babylonian invasion and ultimately with the exile. So we had a lot of resources to draw on there. But even further back than that, let's just look at humanity. And what struck me so much in reading this book, Night,

by Elie Wiesel, that could be considered one of the most effective atheistic arguments of the last 100 years. Now, Ellie was not himself an atheist, but you could see this book being very easily used in that way and it's a very popular book. But I stopped and thought, it makes no sense because the whole reason this book exists is because Ellie's been made in the image of God. And because he's been made in the image of God, he bears the marks of a divine sense, talk about Romans 1 here, of justice, of good and evil. And if there's one thing we know about the animal kingdom, there is no justice. It's eat or be eaten. You have a place in the food chain.

As I just kept thinking about these, the eagles that soar over the world, they don't ask why. It's about the gazelles running across the plains of Africa. They don't ask questions about why the lions would eat them. They're not screaming out in defiance against God, how could you allow this to happen? And then you realize that it's Ellie's testimony itself that is channeling a voice from the Lord saying, no, this is not right. It's not okay. It's not how I made this world to be. Because if there is no God, this goes back to Dostoevsky's point from the Brothers Karamazov. The whole point of that book is that if there is no God, there is no justice.

That's right. Everything and anything goes. The whole point of that book. So the very fact that we rage against God for allowing this to happen is testimony that we are made in His image and that He exists. Because again, if He didn't, there'd be no point in raging. Just grab a gun and do what you can. Now this could be another entire conversation itself. People say, what does the Bible say about suffering, people go, well, turn to the book of Job.

Right. Maybe just tell us one or two of kind of the key takeaways from that book that help us make sense of this larger question tied to the Holocaust. Well this is certainly the case in the book of Job, but it's also the case throughout the Bible. I don't know what your experience is like in reading the Psalms, but it's also the case throughout the Bible. I don't know what your experience is like when in reading the Psalms, but I read through the Psalms so many different times not noticing how much they are about crying out to the Lord about injustices such as friends betraying you and allies betraying you and things like that. And then I lived

a bit a little bit longer. And then I went back and I read the Psalms and thought, wow, these words give voice to my own cries in here. So what you see in the book of Job is an invitation by God to reason with him, to take your complaints to him. Does that mean God's going to agree with you about the complaints? That's very famously a part of the book of Job in there. But there is an amazing dialogical quality to the Scriptures. Yes, this is God speaking to us, but so much of the power in the Scriptures is the way it gives voice to us speaking back to God and asking questions and wondering why this is the case. If you want to find a more clear parallel to

the Holocaust, then you go to the book of Habakkuk. How could God allow this to happen to His people, the destruction of Jerusalem, the exile of His people? And it's very similar to Job in terms of the answer, but the first point is simply the whole Bible is an invitation to take these concerns to the Lord because he can handle them. The second big takeaway though is that you may not and probably will not get a direct one-to-one answer to your questions. God's purposes, and this goes back to my first answer ultimately here, God's purposes will usually evade our understanding on this side of the world, and that speaks to the biggest issues of the Holocaust, but also to our personal sufferings. And this is an

overlooked point of Job. It took me many years before finally a couple friends of mine taught it to me. The friends were not the bad guys we want to make them out to be always because there was a ministry of presence that they extended to their friend Job that we can emulate. It's what happened after that becomes the problem. And they have to locate Job, you must have done something. Why are they so fixated on this? It's so simple and yet so profound and even life changing. Because if Job did something wrong, then they don't have to worry about these things happening to themselves. Wow. Because then they just don't do what Job did, and they'll be okay. Sean, how many of us go around and when we hear of a car crash,

or we hear of anything horrible happening, we think, what did they do? What do they do? What are we doing there? We're trying to reassure ourselves that we're going to be okay. And God says to us through the book of Job, you're going to be okay, because I have you, not because you can prevent what is ultimately inevitable, which is death. not because you can prevent what is ultimately inevitable, which is death. That's profound. One of my favorite writers and friends I've had here, I know you're familiar with Gary Habermas has done incredible work on the resurrection. He wrote a book about the death of his wife, probably 30 years ago, his first wife, Debbie.

And when he's reading through Job, he's like, the heart of the question really is, because God doesn't answer it, can I trust God and why should I trust him? And Gary creates this kind of dialogue where he's going, why God, it hurts so badly. It makes no sense. I've been obedient. And in this dialogue events, God just says, am I sovereign? Did I raise my son from the dead? And it's just this powerful sense of like, you can trust me and I'm good and I'm in control.

I've given you enough evidence to trust me, but you're going to have to believe me. That's the message of Job in many ways, that God is trustworthy because of who God is. Now I love your point and then we'll keep moving about he invites dialogue. You see this with Isaiah, come let us reason together with Abraham, Genesis 18. One of my favorite movies is The Grey with Leon Neeson.

I love this film. It's about a pack of people getting chased down by wolves and just brutally killed one by one, it's rated R. And towards the end, there's this scene where he's the last one alive and he's just with F-bombs crying out to God why he's not responding. And I don't think the movie intended this, and I won't make this case here, but I think it actually suggests that maybe God was guiding things in ways that we can't actually see and he's not silent.

But instead of getting offended at that, I'm like, this in some ways is a biblical response. We see the Psalms, people, David crying out to God. Like that's a human natural response. And of course in the Holocaust, you'd have so many people rightly crying out for that. And the Bible invites that kind of dialogue. Now, I think there's no way we can make sense of evil and suffering as a Christian apart from the person of Jesus.

What do you think he adds? And part of this question is what's the... Adds is almost a silly thing to say the way I frame that, but what's the unique Christian response to evil and suffering? It's a God who suffers. I mean, it's really as simple as that and yet profound. Only a God who suffers in Jesus Christ and His endurance on the cross, but a God who willingly undergoes that suffering. And that suffering is in the plan of God itself the means of redemption,

the shedding of the blood for the remission of sins, not through any work so that no one would boast, but simply by faith. There is nothing like this. And it's one reason why I go back to the resolution of that scene. So so starts with rebellion in Brothers Karamazov, shifts then to the Grand Inquisitor scene. And it's such an apt way of explaining this moral revolution in Western culture where instead of God judging us, we put God, in this case Jesus, we put Jesus on the witness stand, and we accuse Him. We think we are more moral than God, that God has to answer to us. That's modernity. Okay? So Dostoevsky anticipates this in the mid to late 19th century. And this torrent of accusations comes against

Jesus. And how does he respond? He doesn't respond necessarily the way that God does in Job with a flurry, a whirlwind of questions in response, but he responds in this scene simply with a kiss, with the ministry of his presence. And what I thought was so profound is that Dostoevsky is clearly channeling Isaiah 52, 53 here about the suffering servant. He opened not His mouth. He feels no need to defend Himself. He feels no need to account for His actions, and yet he gives us his life before Pilate, before the mockers, before the thief. I mean, in all of these situations, he does not feel the need to justify himself, because his shed blood is the means by which we would be justified. We'd been made right with God. And so seeing that not only in the plan of redemption through Israel's history,

but comparing it to any of the other religious or other alternatives, you have nothing approaching it, nothing similar to it, nothing that comes close to a God who reveals Himself as Father, who sends God, the Son, ministered to by God the Spirit, to willingly suffer, endure all the hardships of basic humanity, all the losses and betrayals and discomforts of humanity, but even to go further than that, to submit himself to the most heinous form of treatment that humans could offer themselves at the time to one of the great, under the supervision of one of the greatest empires to ever live, and the indignity of having it be approved of and facilitated by God's own people, chosen people who have rejected him just as they have rejected the prophets before him again and again and again. I mean, where else do you come even remotely close to something like this?

And in the end, do you get an answer to the problem of evil? Maybe yes and no, but better than that you get a person Better than that you get God himself There's nothing like that. There is no equivalent. You're gonna find in any other religion in any other worldview the main religious symbols really portray this. For example, the statue of say Buddha or say the Shinto gate or say the crescent and the star for Islam or the star of David versus the cross. There's the cross. I mean, that is God suffering.

I told you I've been reading John, Colin. It's been transformative where he is the Messiah, John chapter 4, he's the prophet, he's the holy righteous one. He's clearly God, John 1, John 5, John 10, John 20, clearly is divine. And yet in John 4, before the Samaritan movement, it's like he's tired and he sits down by the well. It's like, wait a minute, who is this guy? He's human and he's divine. And yet the most powerful scene, every time I get it, I pause where Pilate says to Jesus, he's like, you won't speak to me. I mean, as much irony as you can muster. And Jesus had said twice in John 2 and John 10, I lay down my life and

I take it up again. The story of the gospel, it's like... No one takes it from me. He exactly, God takes on human flesh and yet he's disguised and they don't recognize him. And this God who spoke the world into existence lays down his life and suffers in our place. Like I just, that's the power of the gospel. Now, with that said, with the time that we have left, at the end you suggest a few ways that maybe the other alternatives,

and admittedly there's more than this but you say maybe God's just not powerful enough there's been people like Kushner in the past it's like God's trying but maybe it's just not powerful enough to stop evil why don't you buy that I mean the simple answer don't buy it is because that's not who who God has revealed Himself to be. But second, I would love to know what the better news is that God can't do anything about evil. So again, just simply put, the imagery that I used here is, does the baby derive comfort

from knowing that as she cries, there is no mother in the next room? There will never be a mother who comes at all. I mean, you could go the full atheist route and say, you're right, there's no comfort at all. But that's the point. There is no comfort in this world whatsoever. All right.

If you want to believe that, you can believe that. But I certainly don't see any good news in that. I see better news that I don't understand why God allows evil. But he is God, so there must be a reason. And one day, he will be powerful enough to put an end to all of it. So few reasons why I don't buy that. I think that's great for me, God not being powerful enough. I think you could point towards things like the cosmological argument

that maybe doesn't get us to God being all powerful, but mega powerful. If he can speak the world into existence and yeah, what other account do you have for existence? Yeah. And it can bring something into existence from nothing and- Yeah, what other account do you have for existence at all? Yeah. Absolutely. And if God can bring something into existence from nothing and fine tune the laws, I'm pretty sure he can stop the Holocaust.

He can also point towards the- Resurrection. ... the ontological argument. Yeah. Just even apart from scripture that the maximally great being, having all power is maximally great, and then you can go to the scripture. So I think there's just multiple reasons to reject this on top of the ones that you mentioned. You say maybe we just live in a dark, cold universe, whether nothing matters. Yeah, that's what I mean there. And once again,

that's exactly what Dostoevsky is trying to get at. For people who are not familiar with Brothers Karamazov, Ivan Karamosov is this philosopher, a skeptical philosopher, kind of representing the academic approach of progressive intellectuals, and he's musing about all this world of there is no God and nothing matters. And then a guy listens to him and says, yeah, so I should go out and kill people, right? And then does so. And Ivan's like, whoa, wait a minute. That's not what I was. Well, what's the point here? I mean, come on if that's the way it is, then seriously, there is nothing there. There's again, once

again, what is the good news of that? And I basically just make it very simple. That's the Epsiode's point, that's unlivable. You cannot live that way. There is no one who is living that way. Because the only way you could imagine living that way is if somehow you're on the top of this cold, dark universe and can dictate and impose your will on everybody else. Because if you're not, then this is self defeating. And ultimately. I mean, ultimately there's nothing more than your destruction to look forward to in that situation. So once again, maybe that's, maybe that is how the approach you want to take,

but good luck trying to live it. What would you, how would you respond to it? Well, I think you're right. And I want to clarify for those watching, you're not saying those who don't believe in God are just more likely to go out and kill people. This is not the point whatsoever. No, I'm saying that those who don't believe in God are just more likely to go out and kill people. This is not the point whatsoever. Because they don't, because they don't, the philosophy is unlivable. That's right.

Because we're made in the image of God, we don't live out that philosophy, even if we hold that philosophy. So people don't do that. If that's what they believe, to be consistent, that's how they would need to behave. Which is the point that Dostoevsky was trying to contrast between the two figures there. One guy puts it into action, and it is so destructive that, of course, it helps bring conviction that this is not a livable philosophy. Yeah, that's good clarification. Thank you. And of course, almost no one's concerned about a Holocaust advance. We're concerned because this is human beings. Where does human value and dignity come from if not made in the image of God? The protest assumes there's a standard of right and wrong. Now, atheists will, I think, fairly say this is an internal problem for Christians. And on one level it is, but I hear every single atheist I've ever heard say this,

at some point condemn Ukraine or condemn Russia, condemn Israel or condemn Gaza, condemn Trump or condemn somebody else or child molestation, which means it's not just academic and from within their own worldview, they're making these assessments. That's the point Dostoevsky I think has drawn out. Yeah, and they could say that it's evolutionary or it's casustory, like we're just kind of working through case studies to be able to make this work. You can make that argument, but then it's as easily devolved or unraveled as it is wound together, there's nothing holding it.

There's nothing that can compel you to follow through on it. I had an onstage conversation with an atheist recently and he denied that there's ever acts of altruism. We're ever always selfishly motivated. And it hit me that from an evolutionary perspective, you could account for, like you could give some group account for altruism, that if we have the wiring for altruism, it helps the group survive. You could give a case for why there's certain kinds

of like murder for selfish gain. But the problem is, is there's acts of sacrifice that we see in people that truly are motivated by love that go beyond an evolutionary explanation and on the flip side the Holocaust goes far beyond just wiping out the Jews. There's clearly just level evil and debauchery and wickedness here far beyond survival. I don't think an evolutionary perspective, meaning a naturalistic one, can account for either end of the perspective spectrum as I see it.

Well, Sean, let me actually put a finer point on it, historically speaking, from the Holocaust. The Holocaust did not aid in the German war effort. It hampered the German war effort. They were devoting military transport lines to murdering men, old men, and little children who were Jewish. So, from an evolutionary perspective, you'd say, what's the one thing the Germans are trying to do? Preserve themselves. And they've got the Soviets bearing down on them from the East, and they're going to engage in just this incredible, unforeseen orgy of violence and rape against the German people in retaliation for what happened on the Eastern Front. But the Germans are still devoting their resources to killing Jews.

They're not even acting in self-defense. They're acting because of a deep-seated evil conviction about a need to be able to destroy this people. It's not logical. It doesn't fit an evolutionary paradigm there as well. I think if your worldview can't go beyond the material and survival and account for the level of evil at play here, it's not, so to speak, carving up the world at its joints and describing the world as it is.

Now we're bumping up against the time here. Can I ask you just one or two kind of questions to wrap it up? The last one he says, maybe we could all agree just not to be Hitler and live together in peace. I mean, everyone recognizes Hitler's bad. Let's not be Hitler. Can't we just kind of agree and create a society to avoid that in the future? Yeah.

Simple problem. That's what Vladimir Putin is doing right now in Ukraine. Vladimir Putin's justification for that invasion is denazification. The way he justifies the invasion is by saying, we have to go kill the Nazis in a country that is led by a Jewish president. And let me look, it's got to be the most Nazi thing of all time to be a European nation to invade your neighbor. And yet, the way he casts it is that way. In other words, a negative morality, I'm okay, because that guy is worse, does not work at all. There is any amount of evil between us and Hitler on a gradation, where you cannot be Hitler and still be Stalin,

whichever order you want to put those in, or not be Hitler and still be Stalin, whichever order you want to put those in, or not be Hitler and still be Vladimir Putin, or whatever you want to say in there. So the negative morality, I'm okay because I'm not as bad as that guy, does not work at all because it does not lead to good and in fact justifies a whole lot of really bad evil even if it doesn't match the level of the full Holocaust Well, we're all moral if we compare ourselves to Putin and Hitler But if we compare ourselves to Jesus, it's a very very different response That's for sure. That's why he says which of you can convict me of sin again in the gospel of John

Colin in some ways, I feel like we just scratched the surface here. And I feel like we could have a three-hour conversation. I'd love to know from people listening, do you want us to come back and just do a much deeper dive on this or maybe we carve out two or three hours, sit down in person? Not that that would solve it perfectly. Yeah. But there's so much more to be said here. Colin, let me ask you this to wrap up is as I read your book, I got the impression you're saying, look, evil exists and I'm not going to water it down.

There's a lot of different solutions we can try to take. All the other solutions except Christianity are not satisfying. When it's all said and done, we should be very careful and cautious in giving arguments of exactly why God allows the Holocaust when He hasn't specifically told us. Is that fair? And anything else you just want to add here as we wrap up? As a wonderful summary, I appreciate that so much when you're doing these interviews to have somebody who brings so much of his own teaching and knowledge, the equation that I can learn from is a real joy.

I think I just bring it back to we are talking about big theoretical, historical, world world civilizational level questions. But the reason I did this book is because these are the questions that you and I and everybody watching and everybody listening that we all have to ask and do ask and have to answer to be able to live. Because the one problem we cannot defeat on our own through any method is death, and it is the one problem that Jesus has defeated through the resurrection, which is the ultimate hope. That's what I want people to be able to see, and I want them to be able to see it starting from the big civilizational questions to recognize that as I start to wrap my mind around that, what I'm really trying to address is in that moment, just like you're talking about with Gary Habermas,

it must have been amazing for one of the greatest scholars of Christian apologetics and biblical studies in the world to suffer himself and basically ask the question of, now is it real? Now can I put this into action? And to have him say, this resurrection of Jesus Christ that I've defended maybe more effectively than anybody apostolic age, who knows? Um, is it, is, can my faith hang on that being true and saying, yes, that's what I'm encouraging people to be able to do personally through this book, even if they're not necessarily engaged in the same philosophical or literary or historical questions that I try to explore. Well, I love that.

Thanks for giving me the chance to endorse it. I heartily do and I've read a lot of the books on the problem view. When somebody asks me for like a short, quick 40-page book, this one's going to be at the top of my list. Can't believe we have not met before. My goodness, I'm a huge fan of your writing. If there's other ways we can help at the Keller Center for Apologetics, let's talk about it. These days we need to work together.

But I also would ask our viewers if there's other kinds of conversations that would be helpful that you let me know. I saw one, I don't know, maybe four or five years ago. Alex O'Connor, an atheist, had an agnostic, a Catholic and a Protestant on and they talked about the problem of evil differently. Maybe I bring someone who's Jewish on, an atheist, bring Colin back. What kind of conversation would be most helpful to you? Give me some ideas. We want this channel to be helpful intellectually and personally dealing with evil. The book is called Where's God in a World with So Much Evil? and I loved it.

It's available online right now. Before you check away, make sure you hit subscribe. We've got some other conversations coming up on this topic including one on when atheists have near-death experiences. I can't wait for that one. It's going to be fascinating to get your feedback. If you thought about studying apologetics, join us at Talbot School of Theology. I teach a whole class on this and would love to have you in class. Colin, it's been a joy.

Thanks for carving out time. Let's do it again. Thank you. It's been wonderful.