The Problem of Evil and Suffering
I once preached a funeral in which the daughter of the deceased woman came up to me and asked, “How can God take my mother away from me?” What she was essentially saying is that a good and loving God would not allow me to go through this horrible pain in my life.
Here is how the formal argument unfolds:
1. The nature of God (if He exists) is inconsistent with the existence of evil and suffering.
- He is omnipotent (and has the ability to prevent evil)
- He is omniscient (and knows when evil and suffering will occur and how to stop it)
- He is omnibenevolent (means all loving – He would want to prevent evil and suffering)
2. But there is evil in the world
3. Therefore, God does not exist
How do Christians deal with the problem of evil and suffering? If the argument above is correct, then God does not exist! What do we say to answer this objection to Christianity? There are several responses we could give.
The Open Theism Response. Some have answered the problem of evil by saying that God is not omnipotent nor is He omniscient. They say that God doesn’t have all power and He does not know all things. In fact, they say when bad things happen God is just as surprised as we are. He was just as shocked as the rest of us when the terrorists attacked on September 11, 2001. Evil and suffering is not His fault! If He could stop it, He would stop it! Poor powerless God!
Now sure, the Open Theism response does solve the problem of evil and suffering. But at what price!? If Open Theism is true, then the Bible is wrong. According to the Bible, God knows all things past, present, and future. He is able to create peace and cause calamity. He is never surprised or shocked by anything that happens. So for the biblical Christian, open theism does not work.
Isaiah 45:7 7 I form light and create darkness, I make well-being and create calamity, I am the LORD, who does all these things.
The Freewill Defense. Another and much better way to solve the problem of evil and suffering is called the Freewill defense. This response says that God certainly has the power and the knowledge to prevent evil, but that He has a very good reason not to prevent it. He wants to maintain human freedom. That is, He wants people to make real choices and to live with the consequences of those choices.
God did not create robots. He created people, who are called to obedience. He created people who decide whether they will love God or hate God. But this freedom cannot be real freedom if there is no evil. Think about it, if there was no such thing as evil or suffering, then people could not choose to disobey God. But if they cannot choose to disobey God, then they are not free. Freedom demands both good and evil.
The Freewill Defense gets the job done better than the Open Theism defense. But is it sufficient? I think we have an even better answer to the problem of evil and suffering.
The Greater Goods Defense. This response to the problem of evil and suffering agrees with the Freewill defense that human freedom requires both good and evil in order to have real freedom. But this defense adds that there are many very good things that God loves dearly that could not exist without evil.
One of these things is mercy. God is merciful and God loves mercy. That means He grants relief to those who are suffering in misery. God is glorified in His mercy. But there can be no mercy without suffering. Mercy comes to those who are suffering and suffering is caused by sin and evil. So in order for God to be exalted as a God of mercy, sin and evil must be present.
What about forgiveness? God tells us that He is a forgiving God. But He can’t show us that, unless He actually forgives us of something. But how can He forgive us unless we do something wrong? There can be no forgiveness without disobedience.
We could also add the notion of trust. If there were no situations in life that were desperate, people would be much less likely to trust God. But God values trust and commands people to trust Him. “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil for you are with me” (Psalm 23). That verse could not have been written without a “valley of the shadow of death.”
So there are greater goods that God wants, but that cannot exist without evil and suffering. Thus God allows evil and suffering as a necessary part of bringing these greater things into existence.
This does not mean that we know exactly why certain horrible things happen. We should not make the mistake of claiming we know exactly why God would allow Hurricane Katrina to destroy New Orleans for example. We do not and cannot see all that God sees. But what we do know is that God is bringing good things from bad things (Romans 8:28; Genesis 50:20). He has the ability and the desire to make all things new and set all things right. If you understand this, then you see there is no real problem of evil at all.
Of course some people would agree with this but raise an objection: “Sure, God might allow some evil for a greater good, but there is TOO MUCH evil and suffering in the world to be a good God.”
That is, the level and intensity of evil is much too high for a good God to exist. After all, consider the Holocaust or the number of people who died in the Indian Ocean Tsunami. Could God actually be bringing good out of things that horrible?
But this objection depends on the “noseeum” principle – I can’t see how God might bring good from this, therefore He can’t be bringing good from this. But what if we can’t see all that God is doing? What if we do not have the type of eyes to perceive His kind of big-picture work?
I can see in my fridge pretty well. And if I see that there is no milk, I can be pretty sure that there is no milk. But I do not have the eyes to see the craters on the moon. I can’t say, “I don’t see craters so they must not be there!” Just because I can’t see them doesn’t mean they are not there.
Just because we may not be able to comprehend and understand the ways in which God brings good out of things does not mean that He isn’t bringing good from them.
When Joseph was sitting in prison after Potiphar’s wife had framed him, he had no way of knowing that God was about to raise him to the height of Egyptian political power. He had to walk through the dungeon first.
When people say that there is too much evil and suffering in the world for a good God to exist, they betray a misunderstanding of who God is and what kinds of things He does. His mission is to honor and glorify Himself above all and He even allows evil and suffering (and sometimes lots of it) to bring that mission to completion.