Publisher's Synopsis
If God is all-loving and all-powerful, why do evil and suffering exist? If a perfectly loving God created man directly, as asserted in Genesis, how does one reconcile this assertion with the overwhelming scientific evidence for man's gradual creation through the cruelly indifferent process of evolution? How does one reconcile the existence of hell with the assertions that God is all-loving and omnipotent?
Why God Allows Evil and Suffering begins with the premise that the principal purpose of man's existence is to experience eternal love with God and one another. It then identifies and examines the prerequisites of love (faith, free will, selflessness, and two others) in order to explain why God's pursuit of eternal love with man necessitated he create the very conditions that allow for the possibility of evil and suffering. With this conceptual framework in place, the book explores the different modes of existence that are experienced by timeless beings, then contrasts these modes of existence against those that are experienced by finite beings who live within linear time. This analysis supplies the insights necessary to interpret Genesis 1-3 in a fundamentally new manner, one that fully reconciles the biblical account of direct creation with the scientific theory of evolution. The analysis of how the prerequisites of love intersect with the differences between finite being and timeless being also provides the insights necessary to answer the theological difficulties raised by the problem of hell. In so doing, Why God Allows Evil and Suffering provides a novel and comprehensive answer to every major facet of the problem of evil and pain, including animal suffering and the suffering of innocents.
