We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.

Free Will: What about “natural” evil? Was Hurricane Sandy a Free Agent?

Free Will: What about “natural” evil? Was Hurricane Sandy a Free Agent?

What about natural evil? How does free will help to make sense of this? Greg reflects on the origins of sickness, natural disaster, animal suffering and so on. Hope you’re enjoying the series so far. There’s more to come!

Related Reading

Why is the World Still So Messed Up?

Through the Incarnation, Jesus made a way for our union with God. In addition, Jesus’ death and resurrection defeated the powers of evil. This should then lead us to ask: Why do we have to continue to fight evil? In fact, if the powers are defeated, a more basic question is: Why is the world still…

Grieving

Henning Mühlinghaus via Compfight Here’s a post by Rachel Held Evans about the shootings in Connecticut today. From the post: So let’s grieve together. And let’s give one another the space to be shocked, to be pissed, to appeal to God, to be angry with God, to find peace in God, to question God, to…

Why Can’t God Stop Evil? The Thomas J. Oord Interview (podcast)

Greg and Thomas talk about Open Theism and how Greg’s views differ from Thomas’s. Theology nerds, get your compass and your flashlight and prepare to go DEEEEEP in the weeds!  Thomas’s book: God Can’t Episode 487 http://traffic.libsyn.com/askgregboyd/Episode_0487.mp3

The Logical Hexagon Made Simple

by: Greg Boyd The Hexagaon in a Nutshell For those of you who don’t have the twenty to thirty minutes it will probably take to read this essay but who nevertheless would like to have some idea of what the Logical Hexagon is all about, here is my two sentence elevator speech: The Logical Hexagon…

Do you believe God is pure actuality?

The basis of the classical view of God as pure actuality (actus purus) is the Aristotelian notion that potentiality is always potential for change and that something changes only because is lacks something else. So, a perfect being who lacks nothing must be devoid of potentiality, which means it must be pure actuality. I think…

How can people who believe the open view trust a God who doesn’t control the future and doesn’t know for sure what will happen?

It’s true that according to the open view of the future things can happen in our lives which God didn’t plan or even foreknow with certainty (though he always foreknew they were possible). In this view, trusting in God provides no assurance that everything that happens to us will reflect his divine purposes, for there…