Why?

Thus they became fatuous in their argumentations, and plunged their silly minds still further into the dark. Behind a facade of "wisdom" they became just fools, fools who would exchange the glory of the eternal God for an imitation image of a mortal man, or of creatures that run or fly or crawl. They gave up God: and therefore God gave them up - (Romans 1:21-24 Phillips translation)

With the atrocity that happened at Virginia Tech at the hands of Cho Seung-Hui, many are asking, "why?" For those who believe in a sovereign God, this and a thousand other acts of human evil can be a test of that faith.

But the fact is that it is only from a place of faith in a sovereign God that the question has any meaning. To ask the question is to first borrow a whole set of presuppositions and system of values that come to us only through the God-revealed truth of Scripture.

In a Darwinian, godless universe, human beings, the human mind, and all our social constructs are the product of evolution for the expedience of survival. "Good" and "Bad" don't really exist objectively, they are merely illusions of social convention, the result of myth that worked themselves out from the dreams of slowly progressing social orders (bands, tribes, cities, nations, civilizations, religions, etc.) In this Darwinian worldview, "good" and "bad" should be replaced by "successful" and "unsuccessful," for those are the only real criteria for existence. The question "why?" in any sort of moral sense, has no meaning. This was merely another unsuccessful variant of evolutionary social process. Feel whatever rage, sorrow, or pity you like, but realize that those feelings are nothing but the interactions of chemicals and electrical impulses in your brain. Free will itself, becomes an illusion from this perspective. What humans subjectively think of as "choices" they make, are in reality nothing more than the effects of external causes, a type of Newtonian physics of action and reaction on a social level, or the mechanistic workings of biological drives and imperatives.

If you are stirred with compassion for the loved ones of those killed, outraged at this act of evil, and grieved to ask how a loving God could allow it, know that in the asking, you are, at least tacitly, assenting to God's law, "you shall not murder" as an objective moral truth.