Was it fair for God to flood the world in the days of Noah?

So when sceptics want an example of times that God was cruel and unfair and went way overboard with dishing out punishments, what better example is there than the time he drowned every living thing on the planet with the exception of one family and a selection of animals?
Doubly offensive to them is that Christians often use this one as a favourite children's story.

So the basic set up that everyone knows is that Noah and his family were the only people following God, and the rest of the world had got nasty and were doing their own thing. So God wanted to start over and just keep the good stuff.
This is actually a great foreshadowing to the end times, and is even referred to by New Testament writers as a comparison. Just like how in the Flood, water washed away the wickedness and made things good and new again, in the end times the same thing will be accomplished with holy fire (2 Peter 3:6-7). '1 Peter 3:29-30' tells us that baptism is a symbol which corresponds to Noah's Flood, which again is making the point that it is all about becoming reconciled with God, and being made new.

But the point sceptics try to make is that this mass drowning was an extremely harsh judgement.
Let's look at the connection Noah's Flood has to the end times. In the final judgement, those who do not choose God will be destroyed. So, Noah's Flood, being a precursor to that, shows us these people as examples of that. They turned away from God and were destroyed so that the good and faithful could live in a better world without them.
As detailed in my article on God's plan, God's goal is to create a perfect world. There is no room in a perfect world for sinners.

Quick Answers to Problems of Evil and Suffering

I'm responding to these assuming you're not familiar with some of the things I'm saying, so apologies if it seems patronising. I'm also going to try and be brief, so there might be some skimmed details.

If God is good, why is there Hell? Infinite punishment for a finite crime.

I imagine you have a particular something in mind when you say 'Hell'. The movies tend to use the medieval imagery of fire and brimstone with goat legged devils with pitchforks tormenting sinners day and night.
That's just not what the Bible teaches.
I personally am an annihilationist, which means I believe that when the time comes, God will bring the saved to the new Heaven and Earth, and the unsaved will cease to exist - much like how atheists think they will end up anyway.
But I think the most common belief among Christians is that Hell is a prison locked from the inside. God gives everyone a choice of whether or not to be with him and follow him. It's not a case of follow and love me or be punished, it's follow me or do what you want without me.
But the outcome of that is by your own free choice, you will have to live somewhere that God has closed off to himself. And that place will naturally be really awful, seeing as God is the source of goodness. He doesn't want you to go there, but if you choose to go there, he won't stop you.

If God is good, why does he let people die and suffer? And all these disasters happen?

Why does God allow evil?

Here's a thing. The Problem of Evil is a terrible terrible argument philosophically. It's terrible. Rubbish. Just awful. It's an emotional knee jerk reaction to stuff people don't like. It hasn't got any actual weight as an intellectual problem. 

But people are hung up on it. And we shouldn't be surprised about that. People in general do favour their emotions over rationality.

It's human nature to put our feelings first, even when reason points in a different direction. When you do philosophy, you have to get in the practice of switching off emotion for a while, otherwise you can cloud your judgement. It's not always easy, and in tricky subjects like the worldwide suffering of humanity, it can seem cold and heartless. But them's the breaks.

Quite often, the Problem of Evil won't even be presented as any kind of logical philosophical argument or syllogism. It'll usually just be the question "Why does God let bad things happen?"
You don't have to have studied philosophy for long to know that a question is not the same as an argument!
A question is looking for an answer. You don't know how to explain something, so you ask someone else if they can. An argument is an attempt to make an explanation that you already have stick.

So given that there's this big question casting a large dark shadow of doubt over people, we should wonder if there's an answer.

And this is a thing that plagued me before I began my journey into Christianity. There were so many questions like this that were in common knowledge, yet nobody seemed to even have the beginning of an answer. We'd say "If God exists, why do bad things happen to good people?" and then shrug our shoulders and move on thinking "I guess we'll never know".

There was a time where I thought it was perfectly reasonable when I heard people saying stuff like "I think it's likely that there was a man in history called Jesus who was a good teacher, but I don't know for sure."

But then I discovered these things called 'reading' and 'research' and 'critical thinking'. It was amazing the results that I got. Answers are out there. Just go have a look.

So, after that lengthy sidetrack, let's get on with the question of the day. "If God exists, why does he let bad things happen to good people?"

A Rough Guide To God's Plan

I would never suggest that I know the mind of God, and I'm wary that there could be mistakes in what I'm putting here, but I find that when discussing various issues, as a Christian I'm coming from a certain understanding that someone else might not have. I might be taking for granted some thing or another that they haven't even thought about. So while I think I'm talking about something obvious, the other person might not have a clue how I can square what I'm saying with anything. Like, I might be talking about the way Jesus suffered for us, while their image of God is the benevolent comfort blanket who makes sure everyone is happy all of the time. The two things don't make sense.

Things like the 'Problem of Evil' and 'Divine Hiddenness' are massive issues for sceptics, but for Christians, they are nothing. They are expected! Somehow, even though these things are necessary in Christianity, some people think they are reasons that Christianity isn't true. It's clearly a lack of understanding about who God is, what we wants, and his ultimate plan.

So, here I want to attempt an outline of what God is trying to do according to Christianity.
It will be an attempt, and I don't for one second pretend to know every detail. The old phrase "God works in mysterious ways" is not helpful to anyone, but he has revealed to us what we need to know on a need-to-know basis. We don't have all of the information but that should be enough.

Anyway Lesson 1: God is not a comfort blanket who answers every prayer with the goal of making everyone on Earth as happy as possible.

Auschwitz and God

I'm so far removed from this. My parents generation were born well after the wars were over. I'm in the UK. I'm a Christian. So it's hard to really get to grips with an understanding of what happened at Auschwitz. The best I can do is watch the movies, the documentaries, hear the testimonies. Even then I doubt I can fully grasp the horror of the death camps. I wonder if even those who were there to suffer in them had a full picture of the terrible place they were in.

I've been a little flippant dealing with the Problem of Evil. My only defence there is that generally I treat it as a logical problem. A philosophical argument that gets a thorough debunking. What I (and I'm sure I'm not the only one) often forget is that the strength of the Problem of Evil and Suffering is not in its philosophy, but in its emotional weight.

When you see, or worse, suffer hurt, sadness, loneliness, let alone the horror of being reduced to whatever subhuman category the Nazis treated people as, it's very understandably difficult to keep a level, logical, philosophical head about it all. It's no surprise whatsoever that a person who has gone through a bad time is going to struggle with looking at their situation with the passionless outlook of Mr Spock.

Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life? - Matthew 6:27

It's so easy to ask "Where was God when I needed him?", "Where was my guardian angel?".
It's so easy to think that the answer to the question is that he was never there to start with. And it's very understandable to not be comforted at all the by the answer "God has a sufficient reason to allow this".

Moral Argument From Evil

To the philosophical Christian it's as obvious as a bright red smacked arse wobbling two feet from your face that the Problem of Evil is a non-starter. However, some atheists won't let it go. They try to rework it so that it makes sense and can avoid the hurdles that it falls at (if you think it even gets out the gate).

Here's one complicated attempt that I found recently. It's set up a little differently that I'm used to, but it's not a big deal. It's 'The Moral Argument from Evil' from Dean Stretton:

1. A1. The most rational theists know (i.e., have a justified, true belief) that God exists.
2. A2a. For any possible world W, if God exists in W, then every instance of evil in W is objectively justified.
3. A2b. If God exists, then there is objective justification for any actual instance of evil, including those evils for which there is a human onlooker
4. A2. If God exists, then there is objective justification for every actual instance of evil, justification that will occur even if no onlooker intervenes to stop or prevent that evil.
5. A3. Some members of the class of most rational theists (as I have defined that class) are theists who know A2.
6. A4. Some of the most rational theists (namely, those who know A2) know that there is objective justification for any actual instance of evil, justification that will occur even if no onlooker intervenes to stop or prevent that evil.
7. A5. If human person P knows that there is objective justification for evil E, and that this justification will occur even if P does not intervene to stop or prevent E, then P is morally justified in allowing E to occur.
8. A6. Some of the most rational theists (namely, those who know A2) are morally justified in allowing any actual evil to occur.
9. A7. If the most rational theists know that God exists, then some of those theists (namely, those who know A2) are morally justified in allowing any evil to occur.
10. A8. Even the most rational theists (including those who know A2) are not morally justified in allowing just any evil to occur.
11. A9. Even the most rational theists do not know that God exists.
12. A10. If the most rational theists do not know that God exists, then no theist knows that God exists.
13. A11. No theist knows that God exists.
14. A12. For any given theist, that theist’s belief that God exists is either false or unjustified.
15. A13. If God exists, then some theists are justified in believing that God exists.
16. A14. If God exists, then no theist has a false belief that God exists.
17. A15. If God exists, then some theists know (i.e., have a justified, true belief) that God exists.
18. A16. It is not the case that some theists know (i.e., have a justified and true belief) that God exists.
19. A17. God does not exist.

Look how long winded it is. These are the lengths that have to be gone to to try and salvage the wreckage of The Problem of Evil. Oh boy.
Let's check it out.

If Bad Things Happen To Good People Then God Does Not Exist

You might have heard something like this being said by non-believers. Something like it, I haven't actually heard it put the way it is in the title, but it amounts to about the same.

I'll sketch out the basics here as to why 'the problem of evil' is one of the worst objections to believing in God. (Aside from it having been covered to death by loads of philosophers all through the ages, starting with debate in the Book of Job).

The classic Problem of Evil goes a little like this:
P1) If an all-loving, all powerful being exists, it would destroy evil.
P2) Evil exists.
C) Therefore an all-loving, all powerful being doesn't exist.

Archbishop of Canterbury Embarrasses The Faith

I saw this article in The Times this week and just had to comment. I don't usually read The Times, it just happened to be lying around in a waiting room and I needed something to browse.

So anyway, I was pretty surprised to find this. What a way to make Christians look dumb!

Not the stuff about doubts. That's fine, that's normal. Everyone has moments of doubt. But that's not limited to Christians. People have doubts about everything. There's no issue there.

The thing I found a little shocking is the part that says "Christians are unable to explain why suffering exists in the world".

It might just be me, but I don't think a Christian leader, particularly an Archbishop, should say that. There should be a test when you're being signed up and one of the questions should be 'Why does God permit evil and suffering?'
If you don't have a reasonable answer, you should fail the test.