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Evidence · Case 06 · Problem of Evil

Passages on God’s sovereignty, the honest counterweight

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Fairness requires naming the other side within scripture itself. Passages such as Romans 9, where Paul compares God to a potter shaping clay for his own purposes, and Ephesians 1, which speaks of believers being chosen before the world was made, place the weight on God’s choosing rather than ours. Stated at their strongest, these texts suggest the decisive choice is God’s.

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Objections & responses

If Romans 9 is right and God hardens whom he wills, the free will defense isn’t incomplete, it’s false. How can both be “fair ways to see it” when they contradict each other on the point at issue?

The tension is real and it is not hidden here. Two things can be said. A Calvinist does not abandon the problem of evil; they answer it differently, by appeal to God’s greater purposes and the reality of secondary causes, and that answer has its own long tradition. And most Christian readings, including many Reformed ones, hold that Romans 9 is about God’s freedom in election and Deuteronomy 30 is about human accountability, and that Scripture affirms both without explaining how they fit. Both are fair ways to see it is not a shrug; it is a report that Christians have held either answer to evil, and that neither has been abandoned.

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