I recently advertised my article on Denmark and their butchery of Downs Syndrome infants on facebook. You may read that article here if you wish. As usual, when I advertise an article, I received some negative feedback from angry evolutionists. One comment, in particular, stood out. This particular evolutionist attempted to use the existence of abortion as proof that there was no God. This argument is essentially a repackaging of the old existence of evil proves there is no God argument and will be the subject of this article.
Before going any further, we need to establish a definition of evil. Some things are automatically evil, such as murder and so on. However, this does not set a definition of evil. It merely points out one thing that is universally considered evil. What it does do is give a clue to the nature of evil. Evil must be tied to a standard of right and wrong. To call murder evil would be impossible unless some standard of morality called murder wrong in the first place. Therefore, evil is the opposite of moral. From the Christian perspective, since God defined the laws of morality, evil is anything that is in opposition to those laws of morality and thus in opposition to God. In effect, this means that God defines whether something is evil or not.
How then did evil come into existence in this world? The Bible makes that quite clear in the first several chapters of Genesis. Man brought it here. Evil already existed when man sinned, but the world itself was still perfect and untouched by sin. The Bible makes it clear that it was after man chose to oppose God’s instruction by eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil that the world was cursed. Genesis 3:17 tells us “And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life;” Thus it was man’s choice to bring evil into the world, not God’s.
God gave man the ability to choose. Genesis 2:16-17 bears that out. “And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.” There is an implicit choice there. Choose not to eat the fruit of the tree, do what God said, and live. Choose to disobey and eat the fruit, and suffer the consequence of death. Not an immediate physical death, though that would come. Rather it was immediate spiritual death and eventual physical death. Romans 5:12 makes this clear. “Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned:” This verse not only confirms that death came because of sin, it also makes clear that the reason we have sin in the first place is because of man’s choice.
This brings us to the salient point. It is man’s sin, that causes the evil in this world. One of the consequences of man’s sin was the earth being put under the curse. The curse included pain, suffering, and death. Just about anything evil in this world fits into one of those categories, including abortion. Man’s choice created the broken sin-cursed world we live in. Atheists frequently decry the world’s evils, saying a God such as the Bible describes could stop those things from happening. They are correct. God could stop every abortion. However, while God is all-powerful, He has granted all men, as in the Garden, the ability to make their own decisions about whether they will follow Him or not. Adam chose not to follow God. Many today make the same choice. Yes God could stop abortion, war, murder, and every other imaginable evil. But to do so would deprive man both of his ability to choose, and the consequences of his choice. God is a God of choice. He let Adam and Eve choose, and He lets men today choose. The consequences of their choices are frequently undesirable, but that is not God’s fault. Man made the choice, he must live with the consequences.
In His Image 