Apologetics Corner

Wouldn’t a good God stop evil and suffering from happening?

This objection has affected most lives at some point, even challenging the faith of a believer in Jesus Christ. We need only read the words of the prophet Habakkuk to see this, when he said, “O LORD, how long shall I cry, and thou wilt not hear! even cry our unto thee of violence, and thou wilt not save!” (Habakkuk 1:2)

Suffering goes beyond intellectual concepts, it affects the heart, wounds the soul, and so this objection must be handled with meekness of touch. We Christians are to respond to such objections with a willingness to hurt with those that are hurting (Romans 12:15). As one preacher recalled, he was having an intellectual debate with an atheist on the existence of God and the truth of the Bible. From nowhere, the atheist asked the minister what happened to people who committed suicide regarding eternity. The minister dismissed the question as a deliberate attempt to distract the debate from the essential matter of the existence of God. The debate soon ended, and the minister felt that he had ‘won’ the debate. A friend of the minister came to him and said, “Do you know why he asked you that question about suicide?” The minister shook his head. The friend then said, “That man’s wife took her own life a few weeks ago.” The minister realised in dismay he may have ‘won’ the intellectual debate, but he had cut adrift a wounded heart whose objections to the existence of God were based on personal loss. So, we are to approach such matters carefully, reflecting the tenderness of Christ Jesus.

Firstly, we must establish what evil is. Everyone who has experienced suffering and evil will correctly dismiss the eastern religious belief that evil is an ‘illusion’. Suffering is very real, just ask any cancer patient, or any grieving parent/child/spouse. Evil then is not some ethereal ‘thing’ either. Evil is best quantified as a “departure from the ways things ought to be, a corruption of good”, as apologist Josh McDowell observes. The logical result of this observation is that good can exist without evil, but evil cannot exist with good; much like a lie cannot exist with a truth that it corrupts. As Frank Turek notes, this is why we refer to evil as a “negation of good things”, such as “We say someone is immoral, unjust, unfair, dishonest, etc.”

It is in someways, ironic then that when people highlight the problem of evil, they are presuming the existence of objective good. If we presume such a thing as objective truth/good, then we are by de facto presuming the existence of God. This is because someone had to delineate at the beginning what is ‘good’ for it to be objective and therefore recognisable to all. Everyone across the world and throughout time, accepts that murder, rape, theft, public nudity, etc are wrong (therefore evil). And so, these evils must have corrupted something that is recognisably ‘good’ by all peoples; that being the sanctity of life, the safety of the individual, the ownership of property, the covering of nakedness, etc. Yet who and at what point in history declared these things to all cultures throughout all generations, as being ‘good’? There is only one capable of such a thing, God.

The existence of evil therefore is actually a proof for the existence of God. As C.S Lewis wrote:

My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing the universe with when I called it unjust?

Yet even if we concede these points, doesn’t the existence of evil go against the nature of an all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good God? As Alvin Plantinga noted in his work God, Freedom and Evil:

A world containing creatures who are significantly free (and freely perform more good than evil actions) is more valuable, all else being equal, than a world containing no free creatures at all. Now God can create free creatures, but He can’t cause or determine them to do only what is right. For if He does so, then they aren’t significantly free at all….To create creatures capable of moral good, therefore, He must create creatures capable of moral evil; and He can’t give these creatures the freedom to perform evil and at the same time prevent them from doing so….The fact that free creatures sometimes go wrong, however, counts neither against God’s omnipotence nor against His goodness; for He could have forestalled the occurrence of moral evil only by removing the possibility of moral good.

Thus, as many other great minds have concluded (C.S Lewis being one of them), God is not the creator of evil, nor is he responsible for when we humans misuse our freedom to choose between good and evil. As Josh McDowell observes, that would be like saying a car manufacturer is responsible when a drunk driver hurts someone in a crash. Yet, God, in His eternal grace and mercy, has provided a way of eternal deliverance from evil and suffering, through the free gift of the Gospel. It is ours, if again, we exercise our freedom of choice to accept the gift. God cannot force salvation on us, as that would violate our freedom of choice, and so we must each choose to accept Him or not.

Christianity, therefore, gives us an explanation as to the existence of evil, and an ultimate rescue from it by the free gift of the Gospel. Atheism, however, offers no such hope and offers no satisfactory answer to the existence of evil and suffering. On the question of evil and suffering, atheist professor Richard Dawkins wrote:

In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at the bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good. Nothing but blind pitiless indifference. DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.

That is the cold, merciless existence of the atheist if they are consistent with their own beliefs. According to atheism, there is no evil, and therefore no suffering. So, when you are suffering, you are to just accept it with a cold indifference. Tell that to the parent whose held their dying child in their arms. Tell that to the child watching their parents mind slowly fade away through Alzheimer’s. The God of the Bible is not indifferent to our sufferings, however. He is not indifferent to evil. He weeps with us (John 11:35) in our sufferings and came in the flesh of man to conquer sin, death and evil. All so that we might have the certain hope, that because He rose from the grave, so too shall all those who believe in Him as the Son of God.