In the Christian Story, mind and matter - invisible things and visible things - are both real. The Christian view is not the only way of viewing the world, of course. It has competition.

People are tempted to think (understandably) that if God were really good He'd never allow any evil in the world at all. But I don't think a perfectly good God would never permit any evil, and neither would others, I wager, if they thought about it. Rather, I think that a good God always prevents suffering and evil unless He has a good reason to allow it. That's the crux.

God existed before He made anything else, and He Himself was never made. God is eternal.

Our innate, built-in human value is the reason we have binding duties or obligations towards each other that we don't have towards any other kind of thing. It's also the reason we have unalienable human rights. If man's God-given, special value falls, then unalienable human rights fall, too.

Trouble, hardship, difficulty, pain, suffering, conflict, tragedy, evil - they're all part of the [Christian] Story. Indeed, the problem of evil is the reason there's any Story at all.

Our value is built into us, and nothing and no one can take it away.

Nowadays, people have a habit of relativizing religion, reducing it to "your truth" versus "my truth" versus "their truth," and that's the end of it.