Blomburg, Craig. Can We Still Believe in God? Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2020.
"Ethicists rightly point out that if a person rejects the existence of an all-powerful, all-loving being, they still have no satisfactory explanation for evil in the universe." (2)
No citation for this is given. Which ethicists point this out? I can't think of any. I'm sure Christian philosophers claim this. The use of the term 'ethicists' is suspicious, because it makes it sound like this is a common belief among even secular philosophers who specialize in ethics. But without a citation, I have no reason to believe this, and I suspect that all, or nearly all, secular philosophers who specialize in ethics would disagree with this on multiple levels.
Even worse, even if it were the case that ethicists claim this, they wouldn't be rightly pointing anything out. They would be confused and mistaken.
Even worse still, I can think of at least one secular philosopher that specializes in ethics, Russ Shafer-Landau, who would argue that it's divine command theory, the common metaethical view of Christians, that fails to give a satisfactory explanation of evil in the universe. (See The Fundamentals of Ethics, Fifth Edition, Chapter 5.)
At 8:15 she says:
"My view turns out might have more in common with an atheistic Kantianism than with a certain form of Orthodox Judaism."
At 12 minutes, she says "It could be wrong to rape and torture even if God didn't exist."
(At around 15 minutes she speaks about how divine command theory is a view taken seriously by theistic ethicists, but Catholic theists will gravitate more toward natural law theory.)
She even suggests that sophisticated naturalistic systems of objective morality could show God's concern for our actions.
She says:
"I think that there's a lot to be said for how the reason that God has given us to come up with very good explanations for morality. . . . It's actually more evidence that God is good and gracious that God provides us with the sorts of cognitive faculties that can come up with naturalistic arguments for real, objective morality, because objective moral obligations are so important for us to believe in . . . that it's better, for all of us, if more people believe in it. And if belief in certain varieties in theism is waning, all the better that these arguments are available. . . . I think [naturalistic explanations for morality are] impressive stuff and important . . . it's nice to have a sort of backup theory, that your moral beliefs are not so precarious . . . even if God didn't exist, I think I still shouldn't kill innocent people and it doesn't depend on what I care about or what I'm committed to . . ."
Additionally, Christian philosopher Dustin Crummett has criticized William Lane Craig's moral argument, and instead argues on behalf of theism from moral knowledge.
Even worse still, it's unclear what a "satisfactory explanation for evil" means. Does this mean an explanation of where evil comes from? Or what makes something evil? Or how we can know that there is evil? And are we speaking about axiological evils, or moral evils, or both? It doesn't matter; naturalism has excellent explanations of all of this, even better explanations than Christianity, because the naturalist doesn't have to worry about challenges to divine command theory, to natural law theory, and to Christianity in general.
Here's where the author might help us, a few sentences later:
"But where do the concept of evil and the idea that it is something to be alleviated come from in the first place? If neither revealed religion nor natural theology (ultimate truths that can be inferred from what exists) points to a transcendent God who concerns himself with the affairs of humanity, from where do the ideas of good and evil originate?" (2)
The answer is our experiences: Badness and goodness are phenomenal concepts, as I have explained elsewhere. See: https://benstowell.blogspot.com/2026/02/response-to-lance-bush-on-certainty-of.html
Badness is worth eliminating for its own sake. Though some badness gives rise to greater goodness; that badness is a good deal. Discipline is painful, but that pain is worth the benefits of discipline.
It's not exactly an honest thing to say that God is concerned with the affairs of humanity. I don't see that at all. But even worse, I don't see how it's relevant that there be a transcendent God when it comes to the origins of the ideas of axiological and moral goodness and badness. Even if God existed, it would still be the case that axiological goodness and badness are phenomenal categories that we have direct access to, and that moral goodness and badness can be explained in light of axiological goodness and badness. Adding God doesn't do anything, except make the world far more mysterious given the problem of evil.
This is page two of the book. Given mistakes this egregious right out of the gate, is it worth reading more?