No, says Pastor Jonathan Bennett, and the reasoning is tighter than it first sounds. To call anything evil, you need a fixed standard of good to measure it against. If truth is whatever each person decides for themselves, that standard disappears, and the word evil loses the only thing that ever gave it meaning. The problem of evil, the classic objection against God's existence, quietly assumes the one thing a purely relative view of truth cannot supply: a real, fixed difference between right and wrong that holds for everyone, not just for the person doing the judging.
Why Does Everybody Eventually Ask This, Even Without the Philosophy?
The problem of evil is the oldest objection to God there is, older than any of the technical philosophical language built up around it over the centuries. If God is good, loving, and all powerful, why is there so much pain in the world he supposedly controls? Most people never phrase it that precisely. They feel it the moment something goes wrong in their own life and the question surfaces almost on instinct. Lisa Fields points out that hip hop has been asking exactly this question for years, set to a beat, long before most listeners would have called it theology. Jay Z does it on the song Lost One, written in the aftermath of his nephew's death in a car accident. 'We might not describe it the problem of evil, but when something goes wrong in our lives, the problem of evil is at the forefront of our mind. God, why? Why did you allow this?' Fields says. The question does not require a philosophy degree to ask. It only requires a loss significant enough to make you ask it out loud.
Okay, But Can't You Just Call Something Evil Without Needing God First?
This is the move a lot of people try to make, and it feels intuitive right up until you press on it. Of course you can call something evil without first working out a formal metaphysical justification, the same way you can speak a sentence without first studying grammar. The deeper question is not whether you can say the word. It is whether the word means anything stable once you ask what it is actually measuring against. Fields names the trap directly: 'If my truth contradicts your truth, how do we even define truth?' If a school shooter sincerely believes his actions are justified by his own internal sense of right and wrong, and a purely relative view of truth has no resource beyond personal conviction to appeal to, then on what actual basis do you tell him he is wrong rather than simply different from you. Most people's gut says he is wrong, full stop, no qualifier attached. But a fully relative view of truth, followed all the way to its logical end, cannot supply the fixed standard that gut reaction is quietly leaning on.
Don't People of Every Worldview Use the Word Evil the Same Way?
They use the same word, but Pastor Jonathan Bennett argues they cannot all actually hold onto its full meaning consistently, and he lays out three broad ways people try to handle the relationship between God and evil. Atheism affirms evil is real but denies God exists at all. Pantheism, the view that everything is divine, in some sense God himself, dissolves the category of evil instead, since if everything is already God, nothing can ultimately stand against God or violate his nature. Christian theism is the one view, on Bennett's account, that holds onto both at full strength simultaneously: evil is genuinely real, God is genuinely real and genuinely good, and the tension between those two claims is worth wrestling with honestly rather than resolved by quietly discarding one side of it. 'Atheism affirms evil and denies God, only theism and true theism affirms both God and evil,' Bennett says, stating the contrast as cleanly as it can be stated.
Pantheism's move is the less obvious one and worth sitting with for a moment. If everything that exists is, at bottom, an expression or extension of the divine, then a so called evil act is just as much an expression of the divine as a good one, which means the distinction between them collapses into preference rather than moral fact. Few pantheists actually live as though that distinction has collapsed; most still react to genuine atrocities with real moral horror. Bennett's point is that this reaction reveals something the system itself cannot fully account for.
If a Moral Law Is Real, Where Does It Actually Come From?
Once you grant that a real, fixed right and wrong exists, holding for everyone regardless of personal opinion, the next question follows almost automatically: where did that standard come from. A law, in any other context humans encounter, implies a lawgiver. Traffic laws come from legislatures. House rules come from parents. A moral law that binds every person everywhere, the kind the problem of evil itself quietly assumes when it calls suffering evil rather than merely unpleasant, points back toward a source above any individual human opinion or any single culture's preferences. That is the move the Jude 3 conversation makes explicitly: the existence of a moral standard that holds across cultures and centuries points back to the One who set it in place. 'Intrinsically, we all know that there has to be right or wrong,' Bennett says, naming something closer to a shared human intuition than a conclusion reached only after careful argument.
Taken seriously rather than dodged, the problem of evil does not actually push a careful thinker away from God. It quietly assumes the kind of real, fixed moral standard that only makes sense if something like God exists to ground it, which means the very objection skeptics raise against belief turns out to require one of belief's central claims just to get off the ground.
How Does This Connect to Other Answers in This Same Conversation?
Bennett's moral argument is not standing alone in the Jude 3 Project's broader treatment of evil. It functions as the groundwork underneath the other theodicies in the same series. The free will defense, which argues God gave people real freedom to choose, and that evil is the cost of that freedom, only has force if evil is a real category to begin with, not just a personal preference dressed up in stronger language. Process theology, which tries to clear God of blame by adjusting what he knew and when, is likewise only a meaningful move if there is something real called evil that needs clearing in the first place. Strip away the fixed standard Bennett's argument defends, and every other theodicy in the conversation loses the very thing it was trying to explain. In that sense, the moral argument is not simply one apologetic case among several equally weighted options. It is closer to the foundation the other arguments are quietly standing on, whether or not they say so explicitly.
What This Argument Does Not Claim
This case is precise about its limits, and it is worth stating those limits plainly so the argument is not mistaken for more than it offers. It does not claim atheists cannot live moral, even admirable, lives, plenty obviously do. It does not claim every atheist or relativist is being dishonest or insincere when they call something evil. What it claims is narrower: that the word evil, used with its full ordinary weight, logically requires a fixed standard of good that a fully relativized view of truth cannot supply without quietly borrowing from a framework, like theism, that it officially rejects. The moral horror people feel at real atrocities is not in question here. What is in question is whether their stated worldview can actually justify that horror as more than personal taste, scaled up.
Quick Answers
What is the problem of evil? It is the question of how a good, all powerful God can exist alongside the real evil and suffering present in the world.
Why does defining evil matter to this argument? Because you cannot meaningfully say something is evil unless a real standard of good exists to measure it against. No standard, no coherent concept of evil.
Does relative truth solve the problem of evil? No. If truth is simply whatever each person decides, the word evil loses its stable meaning, and the objection against God collapses under its own weight before it ever reaches God.
How does this function as an argument for God's existence? A moral law that holds for everyone, not just for one person or one culture, points to a moral lawgiver. The reality of evil assumes a real, objective good, which points back toward God as its source.
Did the biblical writers already think this way? Scripture says God's moral law is written on every human heart, which is why people who explicitly reject God still recognize, often immediately and without instruction, that certain things are truly wrong.
Listen to the Full Conversation
This piece draws on the opening episodes of the Jude 3 Project series on the problem of evil in hip hop: the reflection on Jay Z's Lost One, and the follow up conversation on defining evil itself. Find them on the Jude 3 Project podcast feed, hosted by Lisa Fields with Pastor Jonathan Bennett.
Pastor Jonathan Bennett serves at Cornerstone Baptist Church in Richmond, Virginia, and holds a Master of Arts in Theological Studies. He was an early contributor to the Jude 3 Project.
