Often, people reject the idea of God because they cannot understand how a Being that is omniscient and
omnipotent could allow so much suffering in the world. In the Bad Religion song "God's Love," Greg
sings:
Honest Christian thinkers recognize that the problem of evil poses a serious challenge to the idea of an
all-powerful, all-loving God. The physicist and theologian John Polkinghorne writes that
when most people scan the world for signs of God it is not to its scientific orderliness that they look.
Rather it is such matters as the incidence of debilitating and destructive disease that concern them.
The randomly imposed burdens of unmerited suffering seem to many to call in question assertions
that the world is in the care of a loving God.How does Polkinghorne respond to this? He continues:
At the deepest level I believe that the only possible answer is to be found in the darkness and
dereliction of the cross, where Christianity asserts that in that lonely figure hanging there we see God
himself opening his arms to embrace the bitterness of the strange world he has made.RESEARCH QUESTIONS