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Atheists (or Anti-theists) often argue that there cannot be a God because horrible thing happens to people.  They represent Christians as believing that “thinks go better with Jesus” in that every calamity is merely a stumbling block for something better around the corner.  What do you do with senseless murders?  What do you do with the holocaust?  What do you do with tsunami?  They look at these things as proof that God is not involved at all.

The truth is, historically, Christians don’t believe that “all things work together for good” means “everything is going to work out OK for everybody”.  While that may be heard or thought in the me-centered American version of Christianity, no thinking person would believe that the early church believe this in a time when martyrdom and senseless persecution was a way of life.  No one could argue that this was Paul’s meaning considering the senseless abuse he received.

“All things work together for good” takes into account Paul’s apocalyptic view – that when Christ returns and judges evil, things will be set right and the particulars that make up life will be brought into the proper perspective.  It was an encouragement in time of persecution, not a trite cheer-me-up for life’s problems.  While it may be shallowly applied to a new job, it has its fuller meaning in eternity.

A senseless rape, far from disproving God, is actually a strong argument for Christianity.  It affirms that the Christian doctrine of man’s depravity is an apt explanation of the world around us.

What anti-theists have a hard time explaining is why we even look at pain and suffering in moral terms.  If there is no God and life is a collision of unaided events and people living for their own enjoyment with no external moral direction, then wouldn’t pain, suffering, cruelty and destruction be not only natural but therefore expected and acceptable?  It is a spark of the Divine, not mechanistic nature, that causes us to think of pain in moral terms, be enraged at rape, and move to do something about it.