Much of what passes for objections to the Christian faith can be summarized under what is known as the “problem of evil.” When it comes right down to it, this might be at the core of most objections to the existence of God: How can God and evil co-exist? How could a good and powerful God allow so much suffering? These are real, heart-felt questions that Christians should take seriously and seek to answer. 

The argument can be put in terms similar to this:

1. If God is all good, he would destroy evil

2. If God is all powerful, he could destroy evil

3. But evil is not destroyed

4. Therefore, there is no such God.

The problem of evil is really two-fold. First, it is a PHILOSOPHICAL problem: How do we reconcile the existence of an omnibenevolent, omnipotent God with the existence of evil? Second, the problem of evil is an EXISTENTIAL problem. Most of us have personally dealt with some really tough situations in life, situations in which there seems to be no irredeemable quality to the evil that we encountered.  When a person is going through intense suffering, they are usually not looking for a philosophical treatise but are more in need of pastoral care. Again, this is the difference between the intellectual and emotional responses to evil. The focus here will be on the intellectual or philosophical response to the problem, an exercise that can be conducted even in abstraction from real life evils suffered in the real world.

Religious diversity is an obvious fact of American life and its healthy presence is a valuable indicator that our society truly values freedom. Americans have not departed in any appreciable manner from the pluralism celebrated by the influential philosopher William James a century ago. We are often wont, in fact, to boast that ours is one of the most, if not the most religiously-diverse nation in the world. And the empirical evidence seems to support this claim. (www.pluralism.org)

Religious pluralism, however, is more than just a cluster of largely indisputable sociological facts. It is, in fact, the position of some philosophers that pluralism is the necessary outcome of an unbridgeable epistemological divide between mankind and “the Ultimate.” This can be called a priori pluralism (before the fact) in contrast to the a posteriori (after the fact) pluralism that is the ongoing research subject of Harvard University’s Pluralism Project.

As a philosophy of religious epistemology (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/religious-pluralism/), pluralism is frequently illustrated by the parable of the blind men and the elephant. In the familiar tale, an elephant is examined by a number of blind men, each of whom feels a different part of the elephant and consequently draws different conclusions about the nature of the elephant, which of course, none except the story-teller actually knows as an elephant. The blind men, says the proverb, represent the epistemic status of the world’s religions: all have a part of the truth; none has the truth. The British philosopher John Hick, himself an influential pluralist, thus concluded: “If, then, we distinguish between the Real/ Ultimate/ Divine in itself [the elephant itself] and that Reality as humanly perceived [the parts of the elephant], recognizing that there is a range of modes of human cognition [the blind men], we can at once see how there is a plurality of religious traditions constituting different, but apparently more or less equally salvific, human responses to the Ultimate. These are the great world faiths.”

This “rainbow of religious expression” sounds great and liberal and broad-minded and all that stuff that is supposed to make non-pluralists feel like the knuckle-draggers they really are. But is religious pluralism as such actually a tenable philosophy? Even before I consult a religious text that might inform me otherwise, is it reasonable for me to embrace the idea that all religions are ultimately reconcilable with one another and all can be said to represent a small part of an even greater, ultimately unknowable truth? 

The Cambridge Dictionary of philosophy defines a worldview as “an overall perspective on life that sums up what we know about the world, how we evaluate it emotionally, and how we respond to it volitionally” (Audi, 236). Another quotable source puts it: “A worldview is a philosophical system that attempts to explain how the facts of reality relate and fit together….a worldview shapes or colors the way we think and furnishes the interpretive condition for understanding and explaining the facts of our experience” (Geisler and Bocchino, 55).

The basic questions addressed by any worldview concern the nature and/or existence of God or gods, the nature and origin of the universe, the origin, nature, and destiny of mankind, the source of and solution to evil, and the basis and nature of ethics and morality. Based upon these criteria, it is safe to say, nuances aside, that there are three major and opposing worldviews colliding in the world today: theism, pantheism, and atheism. Put simply, theism says that God brought the universe into existence some finite time in the past, that man is the special creation of God who is morally accountable to his Creator, that moral evil is the result of the corrupt use of freewill, and that ethics are ultimately rooted in the nature of God. Pantheism teaches that God is impersonal and metaphysically indistinct from the universe, that man’s true self is God, that evil is an illusion caused by the errors of the mind, and that ethics are relative inasmuch as they transcend the illusion of good and evil. Atheism asserts that there is no God or gods at all and that the universe is all that is, that man is a product of evolution, ultimately reducible to matter, that evil is caused by human ignorance (especially religion), and that ethics are grounded in humanity alone.

Though this is of course a thumb nail sketch, I think it fairly treats the major worldviews in at least rough outline. Recently, however, the supposition was brought to my attention that atheism allegedly is not a worldview. This attempt to deny the “worldviewness” of atheism, I believe is fueled by what I call the atheist via negativa. That is, despite all appearances to the contrary, some atheists claim that they are not making any metaphysical assertions and therefore need not provide any proof of their beliefs.