When skeptics and cynics claim that an all-powerful, all-good God would never allow bad things to happen to good people, they are assuming we live in a world where it makes sense to speak of “bad things” and “good people”… a world in which there is such a thing as good and bad, and that humans can know the difference between good and bad.

But what are “bad things” in a world without God, in which death, violence, and natural disasters are just natural parts of an evolutionary process? What are “good people” if human behavior is really no different than animal instinct, within a world in which “survival of the fittest” ultimately determines the future of all living things, and humans have no freedom to act against it?

In other words, a universe without God is not a morally intelligible one.

When we recognize something as “bad,” we are suggesting that whatever happened is not the way it is supposed to be. But if there is no Creator, no design or purpose to the world, then there is no way things ought to be, only how they are. And there is no moral standard to which humans are accountable.

But we do sense the world is a moral place and we have an ability to know when something is bad. If there is no God, that sense is meaningless.