ADAM, JESUS, AND NATURAL EVIL: AN ARGUMENT FOR RELATIVE ATHEISM
The problem of evil is perhaps the most pressing problem for believers in an omnipotent and all-loving God. It was one of my own reasons for leaving Christianity (number 6 on my list ). There are many versions of it, and there are also lots of responses to those versions. But in my view, there is a version of the argument that I have not heard anyone put forward as of yet and which I think has some cogent force against certain schools of Christian thought. Allow me to explain. Christianity holds that God created the world as "very good" (Genesis 1:31). This is often taken to mean that the world was in as perfect a state as God could have made it. In addition, it is often taken to mean that what we would call natural evil was not a part of God's original creation. There was no suffering or pain, and the suffering in the world came in later as a consequence of sin. Adam (I'll use this name as a collective term for Adam and Eve) sinned and brought death into the world ...