“This World is Far From Perfect”

I just read your article about evidence of God’s existence. I just want to say that this world is quite far from being perfect. A perfect world would be a world free of racism, hypocrisy, and genocide just to name a few. If God had made a perfect world it would have been a world free of these things. And the section about Jesus being the “proof,” well there is no proof of there being a Jesus except the Bible which may be false also.

You are so very right. This world IS quite far from being perfect. However, this isn’t the world that God created. That world was absolutely perfect, with no racism, hypocrisy or genocide. But Adam and Eve chose to go their own way and disobey God, and when they did they plunged the world into awful consequences they could never have foreseen. A world of ugliness and hate and violence, in addition to the evils you mentioned. In fact, as I watched the attacks on the World Trade Center, I thought what a horrible parallel it was to how God must have felt when His beautiful, perfectly-working world was devastated and defaced by sin. We call it “the fall,” and as I watched both towers collapse I thought what an apt description it is of what happened to our world back in the Garden of Eden.

This, however, does not change the fact that our world is perfectly designed to sustain life. What hurtful things happen on the earth, and how the earth was fashioned and placed here with just the right parameters to support life, are apples and oranges. Completely different issues.

Concerning there being no proof of Jesus’ existence, well, I guess you haven’t really seriously examined that, or you would have discovered that there is more evidence for the existence of Jesus than for most other famous people in the ancient world. I’m sorry, I can’t take your criticism any more seriously than the young man who came up to me after a conference and told me he didn’t believe he existed. I can take YOU seriously, and I do, but not your charge. It won’t hold water. There’s a whole discipline called “history” that would prove your charge to be groundless. At the very least, allow me to suggest you read my colleague Michael Gleghorn’s article Ancient Evidence for Jesus from Non-Christian Sources.

Sue Bohlin
Probe Ministries