How Can A Loving God Exist at the Same Time There Is So Much Evil and Suffering in the World?
When I was teaching Sunday school, I did a series of classes using Lee Strobel's works. The following is from The Case for Faith. While there may be the stray original item from me, I deserve no credit for what is written in this particular article. It is properly attributed to Lee Strobel in its entirety.
The problem of vindicating an omnipotent and omniscient God in the face of evil is insurmountable. Those who claim to have surmounted it, by recourse to notions of free will and other incoherencies, have merely heaped bad philosophy onto bad ethics.
- Atheistic Philosopher Sam Harris
I imagine none of you are surprised when I say I completely disagree with the quote above. But I have to admit I am not intimately familiar with Harris' philosophy and what it's rooted in. I just know in the general sense that he is an atheist who challenges theism and theists on several fronts.
For him to call free will incoherent leads me to believe his philosophy is grounded in philosophical naturalism, and I freely concede that if physicalism is true, then there is no free will. Of course, there is also no right/wrong, or truth, or even evil for that matter, so there is also nothing for which God would need to be vindicated. So his quote is senseless in the first place.
But it is actually intellectually arrogant when one says that it’s not possible for God to exist in light of all the pain and suffering in the world. Even David Hume, one of history’s most famous skeptics, said it’s just barely possible that God exists. But to say there’s no possibility that a loving God exists who knows far more than we do puts the declarant in the position of having infinite knowledge, which is rather ironic since infinite knowledge (a.k.a. omniscience) is an attribute of God. How can a mere finite human be sure that infinite wisdom would not tolerate certain short-range evils in order for more long-range goods that we couldn’t foresee?
Peter Kreeft provides an example that I believe is helpful here. Most will agree that the difference between man and God is far greater than between a human and a bear. Now suppose a hunter sees a bear stuck in a trap. The hunter tries to win its confidence but to no avail, so he realizes he's going to need to tranquilize it. The bear thinks the hunter is attacking it, trying to kill it. It doesn’t realize it’s being done out of compassion. Then it turns out the hunter has to push it further into the trap to release the spring, so the bear is convinced more than ever he is an enemy out to cause more suffering and pain. The bear reaches the incorrect conclusion because he’s not a human being. Can we be certain this isn’t an analogy between God and us? And that we can’t comprehend it any more than the bear can understand the motivations of the hunter?
Besides, the evidence of evil and suffering can actually be used in favor of God. When someone responds in outrage to certain events, it presupposes there really is a difference between good and evil. The fact someone uses the standard of good to judge evil - that he quite rightly says this or that suffering isn’t what ought to be - means he has a notion of what ought to be.
This notion of what ought to be corresponds to something real, and there is, therefore, a reality called the Supreme Good. That’s really just another name for God. By recognizing evil, one is assuming there is an objective standard on which it is based.
Furthermore, the fact that human beings even came to attribute the universe to a wise and good Creator needs to be accounted for. Why the idea of evil, and thus of goodness and of God as the origin and standard of goodness? How is that over 90% of all the human beings who have ever lived - usually in far more painful circumstances than we - could believe in God? And an absolutely good God at that?
At first glance, there appears to be a problem of logic. Christians believe five things:
1. God exists
2. God is all-good
3. God is all-powerful
4. God is all-wise
5. Evil exists
How can all these things be true at the same time? Many believe they can’t be, and evil certainly exists; thus, God cannot.
God is All-Powerful
It is precisely because He is all-powerful that there are actually some things God cannot do. He can’t create a stone too heavy for Himself to lift; He can’t cause Himself to cease to exist; He can’t make good evil. He can’t make mistakes. Only weak and stupid beings make mistakes. One such mistake would be to try to create a self-contradiction, like 2+2=5 or a round square.
And it’s not logically possible to have free will and no possibility of moral evil.
God didn’t create evil (evil is not a positive creation). Evil is the absence or the spoiling of the good. Evil is a deficit. God created the possibility of evil; people actualized that potentiality.
Even an all-powerful God could not have created a world in which people had genuine freedom and yet no potentiality for sin. But the source of evil is not God’s power but mankind’s freedom. It’s a self-contradiction - a meaningless nothing - to have a world where there’s real choice while at the same time no possibility of choosing evil.
Real love - our love of God and of one another - must involve a choice. We’ve seen the disastrous results of compelled love (stalking and such). A world with free will necessarily includes the freedom to choose evil over good, with suffering being the result.
God is All-Knowing
He knows not only present good and evil, but future good and evil. It is at least intellectually possible that a loving God could deliberately tolerate horrible things like starvation because He sees that in the long run more people will be better and happier than if he miraculously intervened. Hard to accept, right? But God has already demonstrated how the very worst thing to happen in the history of the world actually resulted in the very best thing that has ever happened in the history of the world, deicide - the death of God himself on the cross.
Here God gives us peek behind the curtain; elsewhere He simply says, “Trust me.” Maybe too when we bleed and suffer, as Christ did, it is God’s way of defeating the devil. The greatest Christians in history seem to say their sufferings brought them the closest they’ve been to God - so this is the best thing to happen, not the worst.
God is All-Good
We don’t bail our children out all the time. We don’t do their homework for them. We don’t put a bubble around them and protect them from every hurt. Kreeft relays an incident with his daughter when she was quite young. Without her knowing, he watched her trying to thread a needle. He watched as she attempted several times, and pricked herself many times, causing herself pain. Now he could have made his presence known and done it for her, but he didn't. Then, when she finally got the thread through the needle, she was so excited that she forgot about the pain. He made his presence known at that time and celebrated with her.
So it’s at least possible that God is wise enough to foresee that we need some pain for reasons we may not understand but which He sees as necessary to some eventual good. Dentists, athletic trainers, teachers, parents - they all know that to be good is not to be kind. God allows suffering and deprives us of the lesser good of pleasure in order to help us toward the greater good of moral and spiritual education.
There is a refining quality of suffering. Moral character gets formed through hardship. Scripture tells us that even Jesus learned obedience through suffering (Heb. 5:8). Suppose we had no suffering - we’d become impossibly spoiled little brats.
Do we see that anywhere around us in the world today?
Yes, but people get away with hurting others all the time. That's actually not true; they don't get away with it. Justice delayed is not justice denied. On the Christian worldview, evil will decisively be dealt with once and for all. We mustn't attempt to impose our timetable on God.
But doesn’t the sheer amount of suffering in the world bother you? That’s like saying it’s reasonable to believe in God if six Jews died and not seven, or sixty thousand but not sixty thousand and one, or 5,999,999 but not six million. It’s true that in some instances quantity becomes quality, like the temperature required for water to boil, but at what point does suffering disprove the existence of God? No such point can be shown.
Besides, pain and suffering often leads nations and individuals to repentance. C.S. Lewis once said, “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” Pain and suffering are frequently the means by which we become motivated to finally surrender to God and seek the cure of Christ.
All suffering contains at least the opportunity for good, but because we are morally free creatures, not everyone actualizes that potential. Not all of us learn and benefit from suffering.
Let us never forget that God himself entered into the world and took all the pain of the past, present and future upon Himself. It is the Incarnation that is the answer when we cry out. God could have sat back and said, “Well, it’s your fault…” But He didn’t. How could you not love this being who went the extra mile, who practiced more than He preached, who entered into our world, who suffered our pains, who offers Himself to us in the midst of our sorrows? What more could He do? The answer to “How could God bear all that suffering?” is HE DID!
God’s answer to the problem of suffering is that He came right down into it. He doesn’t get off the hook - He put himself on the hook, so to speak, on the cross.
It’s significant that most objections to the existence of God from the problem of suffering come from outside observers who are quite comfortable, whereas those who actually suffer are, as often as not, made into stronger believers by their suffering.
Scottish theologian James S. Stewart said, “It is the spectators, the people who are outside, looking at the tragedy, from whose ranks the skeptics come; it is not those who are actually in the arena and who know suffering from the inside. Indeed, the fact is that it is the world’s greatest sufferers who have produced the most shining examples of unconquerable faith.”
Because it is such an important issue, I began this website with posts regarding evil and suffering. Those posts answer more specific questions in greater detail. I highly encourage you to check them out.
To make it a bit easier, here are some links to the more common questions/objections: