By, Greg Koukl/str.org founder
 
I am going to spend a little bit of time talking with you about the events this last week. One of the liabilities of course of doing a weekly, that is once per week, is that oftentimes when it gets around to your turn, news is somewhat old. Things that were important that happened early in the week. But in this particular case, the news about Littleton, Colorado and Columbine High School is not old. The facts and the details are now. But the issues are not. In fact, many of the issues pertaining to that tragedy are what might be called universal issues. And it is to those issues I want to speak just a little bit now.
 
I will tell you, though, on a personal note, I was in the gym stretching to get ready for a run close to my office on Tuesday afternoon when I first got wind of the problems. I laid on the floor stretching my hamstring watching the TV monitor and crying to myself, frankly, choked up watching the drama unfold in Colorado. There is really no one in this country who could have watched the events of those terrifying hours and not have their heart and their prayers go out to the residents of that town, the people in that high school, the parents represented by the children in the school, indeed the whole state of Colorado who mourned this tragedy in their midst.
 
I just want you to know my prayers were there for you. And when I say my prayers, for those of you who are listening from Colorado, I'm not talking about just talking about emotional sentiments that I cared. No, I was beseeching a powerful God who is capable of answering prayers, who is fully aware of everything that was happening to respond to prayers and to do something in the midst of this tragedy. I believe those prayers were heard.
 
However, other issues have been raised by this tragedy. L.A. Times, Saturday April 24, 1999, in the Religion Section, the lead piece has the headline, "Age old query: Where was God?" Subtitled, "Southland religious leaders say the answer in times of tragedy such as the Colorado high school shootings is rather, Where are God's people?"
 
This issue comes up all the time. It happened during the Oklahoma bombing. It happened this last week.
 
There is a photograph here of a man who is weeping with a candle in his hand as he attends a memorial. The backdrop is apparently a large posterboard or something on which people wrote their thoughts, feeling, condolences, and prayers. What is amazing to me about this piece on which people wrote letters to the deceased is how many times just in the small section I can see, the word "God" appears, or the word "prayers" appears, or the word "bless" appears. In other words, not everyone is seeing this as a failure of God, but see somehow that God is involved in the process. It also is interesting how readily such things come out in times like this.
 
I am going to drop back just a little bit and try to answer this question that was asked: Where is God? I don't think that is a simplistic question. I don't think the answers are simplistic either, but I do think the answer matters.
 
One answer that came from the Reverend Gary Hall of All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena is an answer that is not going to work. He was quoted in the L.A. Times as having said, "I think God is broken-hearted. I don't think God was in control of these events. I think God will be found in the healing." This is a view of God that is very similar to a rabbi who wrote a very important book about the problem of evil and the existence of God. Basically, his answer is that the problem of evil is bigger than God and that God is not capable to stop evil. He weeps with us at a world out of control.
 
That can't be the Christian's answer because the Bible that Christians follow teach something different about God. Frankly, I don't know that a God like that, a God who is equally victimized with us as He watches history and the evil in history unfold, is a God worthy of praising, praying to, and trusting oneself to. This is a God who basically has our weaknesses, only on a grander scale. It seems to me that the God who the Bible is appealing us to trust in is Someone who is capable at least of dealing with these kinds of issues.
 
Of course, this raises a dilemma, doesn't it? How does anyone who believes in God make sense of this kind of thing? It reminds me of something that William Lane Craig said referring to the great British philosopher Bertrand Russell and his comment about circumstances like this. Russell, who was not a believer of any stripe, wrote a book Why I Am Not a Christian. He said, How am I going to explain God and appeal to God when you are kneeling at the bedside of a dying child? That has a very powerful image and, of course, these kinds of images play powerfully in situations like this.
 
It is very easy to ask the question, where was God? Three words. There's your sound byte. And this rocks Christianity and all theistic religions back on their heels, at least temporarily until one looks at it more closely. Because Dr. Craig's response was this. If God doesn't exist, what is Bertrand Russell going to say in that circumstance to that child? Too bad? Tough luck? That's the way it goes? There is no meaning? There is no life after death? There is no good ending? There is no possibility of redemption? There is nothing but this empty, painful senseless evil? That does not strike me as a helpful alternative.
 
You see, it seems just the opposite. The person who believes in God, though he does have a conflict to confront and I will talk about that in just a moment, has something quite a bit better that he can do in a circumstance like this. Much like the many students who responded by writing on this large posterboard exhibited at this memorial and representing the background of the photograph in the L.A. Times yesterday. They acknowledged that God was still on the throne in some sense and He was capable of doing some things, that it may be the case that we don't understand everything that happens, but it doesn't mean that God can't exist. Because if God doesn't exist in virtue of this tragedy, then this tragedy ceases to be a tragedy.
 
That's one thing that everybody has got to acknowledge, it seems to me. This is tragic. It isn't tragic simply because people died. People die all the time. In fact, other creatures die all the time. It's tragic because of the means of the death. The notion of tragedy doesn't just capture a notion of loss; the notion of tragedy captures a sense of some kind of moral crime that's been committed.
 
But how does one make sense of moral crime, as opposed to just personal inconvenience or dissatisfaction, personal preference being violated? How does one make sense out of genuine moral crime if God doesn't exist because there is no one to set the standard for what is good and what is bad? If there is no God, it is hard to imagine how there can be such a moral rule as "Thou shalt not murder" and have that rule make any sense morally. It's just hanging there in the universe without anything grounding it, but it is just that moral rule that makes this circumstance in Colorado a genuine tragedy.
 
We already know it is a genuine tragedy. You don't need Greg Koukl to make theological arguments for you to determine it as such. But it's just the fact that we know that it is a moral tragedy that forces us to work backward through that idea a little bit to find out what also must be necessary for it to be a moral tragedy, and that is some kind of God must exist to establish that moral foundation. What one can't do is look at tragedies like this and say, God must not exist because He didn't do anything about it when He ought to have done so.
 
That brings me to another issue. When people say God should have done something my question is, what precisely did you expect God to do about it? What ought God have done in this circumstance? If you were God, what would you do?
 
I suspect the first thing out of your mouth would be, I would have stopped this evil. Of course, if you believe that the way to solve this problem is to have God use His power to stop this evil, there seems to be little justification for saying that He should have let His concern about stopping evil stop with these two boys, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. Yes, we wanted God to stop that evil, but it would really have to be part of a larger picture because it is not just that evil, but would have to be other evil, as well.
 
In fact, if God were to resolve the problem in this way, it would have to be based on a commitment to stop any human being from ever doing any evil. Guess what that includes? It doesn't just include Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. It includes every other human being on the face of this earth that ever has any inclination to do something evil. If God were to be just and deal with evil, He would not just deal with the evil that bothers us either directly or indirectly. His responsibility to deal with evil would also extend to those evil things that we do that hurt other people.
 
The problem isn't just out there. Why doesn't God do something about those out there? If God were to follow that advice, He wouldn't just stop with those out there; He would have to deal with you and I, as well. He'd have to deal with us every single moment almost because the evil that God is concerned about isn't just murder and mayhem. It is a whole lot of other things, too.
 
When the bombing happened in Oklahoma City, I reflected in an article soon after that about how many of those, on the afternoon that the bombing took place, or even take what happened four days ago, how many people do you think in this country were committing adultery on that day?
 
Oh, now you are starting to moralize on me, Koukl.
 
Wait a minute, this is a moral conversation. Aren't we moralizing about Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold?
 
Well, that's different. They hurt people.
 
Do you think adultery doesn't hurt anybody? Think of the families that are destroyed. How many other people were committing adultery at the very same time that this was happening? How many people had in their mind, at least thought of the objection, Why didn't God do something about what was happening at Columbine High School? Why didn't He stop those young men before they got started? But they don't ask, Why didn't God stop me from committing adultery? You know why they don't ask that? Because they enjoyed it.
 
We don't complain when God doesn't stop the evil that we enjoy and brings us pleasure and comfort and advantage. Yet if God were to deal with evil, He would deal with all of it. As one person said, If God were to deal with all of evil tonight at midnight, where would you and I be at 12:01? We are asking for something that would be bitter medicine if God gave it to us. In fact, I suspect that if God did respond to our concerns in that way, it wouldn't be long before we were no longer complaining about the problem of evil because there would not be any, we'd be complaining about the problem of good. Instead we'd complain, I can't believe in a God who would always force me to do what is right.
 
There is another question. What causes this? That is the secular question, the more pervasive question, and the one that is debated more. People aren't as concerned with where was God because they raise that question more than anything else as a criticism of theism and Christianity in particular and then they move on to other things.
 
What caused this? This is what occupies most of the conversation. What caused this kind of thing? The temptation is to look outside of the people involved to find a source for it. So people will ask two kinds of questions. Were they born this way? Were they bad seeds? Is it in their genes? Of course, if it is in their genes then that's not them, they were forced to do it by their genetics.
 
If one can't find a genetic cause or the nature side of the argument, we jump over to the other side. Maybe it's nurture. Maybe their parents weren't good parents. Maybe it was the environment these kids were in. Maybe it was Marilyn Manson and his musical group. Maybe it was the Goth subculture. Maybe it was all the athletes picking on these boys. What was it externally that caused this to happen?
 
The discussion was either about something in the genes or it was something from the environment that forced them to do that. When those are the only two options, and they are almost the only two that are ever discussed, guess what gets lost in the middle? The person.
 
If it is the genes, then they are physically determined to respond. They didn't choose.
 
If it is their environment, the environment caused it to happen and it's not their fault after a fashion.
 
No one is really saying it's not their fault, but part of the point I am making is that this way of approaching the question lands you there. But part of the nature of being a person is the capability of being a self-mover. That's what it means to be an agent. When one has a will to exercise, there needs to be no explanation from any other sphere as to what caused it. The only thing that caused it was a will in motion. Some people just decided.
 
I was very refreshed to see a piece on the Friday Op/Ed page in the L.A. Times written by John Hewitt. It was a perspective on the violence entitled "Seeking to make sense where there is none." Let me just read a couple of paragraphs:
 
"More ominously this tragedy may have an explanation that we are not prepared to accept. Science has taught us to look for peculiar social or psychological circumstances that cause people to do what they otherwise would not do. The mind does not rest easy with the idea that seemingly ordinary people who are a bit odd, but generally keep to themselves, may quietly be forming awful plans. We would rather think of bad acts as the unfortunate consequences of discoverable and remedial social and personal conditions, yet it is precisely the account we do not wish to believe that may best capture what happened in Littleton.
 
"The two dead members of the Trenchcoat Mafia, together with their fellows, may simply have chosen evil. In circumstances where others choose to play football or to crave membership in the National Honor Society. Most of us in spite of abuse or low self-esteem or exposure to violence choose personal projects and social paths that lead us to conventional lives. Others, even absent conditions, thought to predispose them toward doing evil choose to do evil."
 
I don't know anything about John Hewitt, but that is the Christian answer, ladies and gentlemen. That is the Biblical answer. People ask me, How does the Bible and Christianity explain this kind of thing? It doesn't explain it. It predicts it. This is the kind of thing you would expect to see if Christianity were true.
 
If it were true that human beings were made in the image of God, but that something has gone wrong and it's man's fault that it has gone wrong, not God's, and that influences him so that he is capable of doing terribly wicked things.
 
It also explains the Jekyl and Hyde kind of profile of these young men because, on the one hand, people report very nice things about these young men. They seemed to be nice fellows. They worked hard and, even though they got involved in a little larceny, they did their bit with the juvenile deal and they got a clean bill of health. People thought they were moving toward success. Then there is the dark side that comes out from other testimony.
 
We see the dark side and the light side from the same individuals. Frances Schaeffer called it the dignity of man and the cruelty of man. It fits perfectly with the Biblical world view.
 
So the question isn't what causes this. If you are a Christian, you know what causes this. Human beings have it in themselves. It is called sin. This is why Rousseau was wrong. We don't avoid this kind of thing by getting back to nature. Nature is the problem in the broad sense. William Golding was right. Lord of the Flies, remember that one? 17th century English philosopher Thomas Hobbs, was right, too. Life in an unregulated state of nature was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. That's what life is like in the natural, and this is why any arguments of a moral nature that appealed to the natural self for their justification are doomed to failure.
 
Well, my homosexuality is natural, therefore it is right. Appealing to nature is the wrong way to go, ladies and gentlemen, because nature is the problem. When you let your nature go, when you do just what comes naturally, more often than not, the result is wickedness, not goodness.
 
This is why the solution is quite simple, as well. We ought not be surprised by this. In fact, Dennis Prager talked about this during the week. He says, I'm not shocked. I'm surprised there isn't more of this. Why? Because we are more concerned with health standards in school than we are with moral standards. The answer is civilization.
 
We know what causes it. It is in everybody. Civilization is morality expressed through law, people living by moral conventions. Conventions like society, government, the family, and the church help stabilize those evil impulses so that people live civilized lives. In other words, they are taught to keep in check that wild, natural, immoral animal inside. That's what morality in civilization is.
 
If we remove those restraints, people do what comes naturally. You attack government as an appropriate controlling force and emphasize almost autonomous individual liberty, you lose the constraint government provides.
 
You attack the family that provides those kinds of constraints, and you lose the constraint the family provides.
 
You expel the church from the public square, and you lost the constraint the church provides.
 
If you undermine the institutions that provide the moral foundations for civilization, then you are going to lose the impact that institution has to keep evil from propagating in culture: the government, the family, the church.
 
By the way, guess who instituted each one of those things? The God that everyone is complaining about. God has instituted things to help control the amount of evil there is in the world. There will be a time when He will deal with it entirely, but for the time being that is not the plan, and I think He has some good reasons to do so. But He's given some things that diminish the impact of evil that can protect us, things that are meant to control that wild, wicked, immoral compulsion inside every human being. To the degree that we ignore those things that God has given us, it's to that degree that the wild, wicked thing will not be controlled and you will see these kinds of things.
 
I'm not just trying to offer a simplistic answer like, Well, it's values. Or if you believed like me, there wouldn't be these problems. No, even if you believed like me, there still would be these problems because part of it is that I believe and the Bible teaches that the problem is deep inside of man and there are only three solutions to it.
 
The first is forgiveness for evil men who do evil things. The second thing is the new birth, so that those evil men who have received forgiveness can begin to be transformed from the inside and cease being evil in their conduct. The third thing is the resurrection when once and for all this evil thing will be put down and put to death and will be no more. That is some time in the future.
 
In the meantime, we live in the balance and we have a responsibility to make the best use of those things God has given us to deal with evil. If we ignore these things, we will see more of this.
 
If our civic attitude is more freedom, less judgment, less morality, less interference from the state, less interference from the family, less interference from the church. If we are working hard at silencing those very voices that give us protection in society we ought not be surprised when they cease to protect. This is not rocket science. It is to the degree that we encourage those institutions properly, that evil is controlled.
 
The answer is God's answer. Government properly functioning; the family properly exalted and functioning; the church properly being allowed to function in culture instead of being made fun of and marginalized. That's when you are going to see some difference. In those countries where those things function well and properly, then you have much greater stability because of them.