What about the problem of evil?

Question 60006.

The problem of evil is the objection I take most seriously, and the one I am slowest to answer quickly. It is the argument that if God is entirely good and entirely powerful, then the suffering in this world should not exist, and since it plainly does, one of those attributes has to go.

I want to work through it properly, because it deserves that. But I also want to say at the outset that this question usually arrives in a hospital corridor rather than a lecture theatre, and an argument that is technically sound and pastorally useless has failed.

Stating the problem of evil fairly

The classic form goes back to Epicurus and was sharpened by David Hume. If God is willing to prevent evil but not able, He is not almighty. If He is able but not willing, He is not good. If He is both able and willing, then where does evil come from.

Modern philosophers usually distinguish two versions. The logical form claims that God and evil cannot both exist, which is a very strong claim and one most philosophers now regard as unsuccessful, since it requires proving that God could have no possible reason for permitting any evil at all.

The evidential form is more modest and more powerful. It grants that God and some evil might coexist, but argues that the sheer quantity and apparent pointlessness of suffering counts as evidence against Him. That version of the problem of evil is the one I actually meet, usually without the vocabulary.

What Scripture does not do

The Bible never treats suffering as an abstraction to be tidied away. It contains an entire book on the subject in which the sufferer is given no explanation, and it contains prayers of complaint that would make most congregations uncomfortable if read aloud.

How long, O Lord, appears repeatedly in the Psalms. Habakkuk asks why God tolerates wrong and receives an answer that is harder than the question. Jeremiah accuses God of deceiving him. None of this is edited out.

That should shape how we handle the problem of evil. Scripture does not rebuke the question. It gives the question a vocabulary and puts it in our worship, which is a remarkable thing for a religious text to do.

Where evil came from

Christianity does not teach that evil is an eternal principle standing alongside God. Evil is not a thing at all in the way that a tree is a thing. It is a corruption of something good, in the way that rot is a corruption of fruit.

The origin is rebellion. A created being with genuine freedom turned against God, and then human beings did the same in Eden. God did not create evil. He created creatures capable of loving Him, which necessarily means creatures capable of refusing.

That is the first move in any Christian answer to the problem of evil, and it matters that it is an answer about history rather than metaphysics. Something went wrong that was not supposed to happen, and the world we live in is a ruin rather than a blueprint.

Moral evil and genuine freedom

The bulk of human suffering is caused by human beings. War, cruelty, neglect, greed, betrayal. If you removed only what people deliberately do to one another, the problem of evil would shrink to a fraction of its size.

Could God have made creatures who always freely chose good? The question sounds reasonable until you notice the words always and freely doing contradictory work. A love that cannot be withheld is not love, and a loyalty that cannot be broken is a mechanism.

So God made a world with real choices in it, which is to say a world where the choices matter. I develop that argument further in whether God could have created a world without evil.

Natural evil and a broken creation

Earthquakes, cancer and famine are harder, because no human will is obviously behind them. The biblical answer connects them to the fall as well, not by assigning blame to individual sufferers but by describing a creation that was subjected to futility.

Paul says the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now, Romans 8:22. The image is important. Groaning suggests wrongness, and childbirth suggests that the wrongness is going somewhere.

So the world is neither as God made it nor as He will remake it. That framing does not remove the pain of a diagnosis, but it does stop me having to defend the present arrangement as though it were God’s finished work.

The freedom of God to permit

Here I want to be precise, because the language people use often does more harm than good. There is a difference between God causing evil and God permitting it, and Scripture consistently maintains that distinction. God cannot be tempted with evil and He tempts no one, says James.

At the same time God is not a spectator. Joseph tells his brothers that they meant evil against him but God meant it for good, Genesis 50:20, and the sentence holds both realities without collapsing either. Their guilt is real and God’s purpose runs through it.

I have written more on that distinction in whether God controls or permits evil. Getting it right matters, because a God who authors evil is not a God anyone can trust in the dark.

The hiddenness of reasons

A common move in discussions of the problem of evil is to demand that God justify Himself, and the demand assumes that if we cannot see a reason, there is none. That inference is weaker than it looks.

Job is the case study. Chapters one and two let the reader see something Job never learns, and God’s eventual answer contains no explanation at all. Instead there are questions about wild goats and rain on land where no man lives, and Job is satisfied without being informed.

That is not evasion. It is a claim that the creature is not positioned to audit the Creator, and that trust can rest on the character of a person rather than on possession of the file. Most of us live that way with people we love already.

What suffering can do

Scripture does claim purposes for suffering, and I want to name them carefully rather than deploy them as a lecture. Suffering can produce endurance and character, it can expose false confidences, it can make us useful to others in the same trouble, and it can be discipline in the hands of a Father.

Paul says we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, Romans 5:3. He also had a thorn that was not removed, and he was told grace would be sufficient rather than that the reason would be supplied.

None of this should ever be said quickly to somebody in the middle of it. Job’s friends were at their best during the seven days they said nothing, and I have done more good in bereaved houses with a cup of tea than with a doctrine of suffering.

Why atheism does not solve it

The problem of evil is often presented as a difficulty for believers alone, and it is worth noticing what happens to the objection if God is removed. You still have the suffering. What you lose is the standard by which you called it wrong.

If the universe is matter in motion with no purpose behind it, then a child dying of malaria is not evil, it is simply what happens. Cruelty becomes a behaviour that failed to confer advantage. The outrage we all feel becomes a chemical artefact rather than an insight into reality.

C. S. Lewis made the point about his own atheism, that his argument against God was that the universe seemed cruel and unjust, and that he had got the idea of just and unjust from somewhere. The problem of evil is real precisely because goodness is real, and that is difficult to account for without God.

The answer at the centre

Christianity’s distinctive contribution to the problem of evil is not an argument. It is an event. God did not stay above the suffering issuing statements about it. He entered it.

Jesus was betrayed by a friend, tried unjustly, tortured by an occupying power and executed in public. He wept at a graveside knowing He was about to end that particular grief, which tells you something about how God regards death even when He is in the process of defeating it.

And on the cross He cries out asking why He has been forsaken, Matthew 27:46. Whatever else the problem of evil involves, it does not involve a God who is unfamiliar with it from the inside.

Evil taken seriously enough to be judged

There is a further piece that our culture finds uncomfortable, which is judgement. A God who never finally dealt with evil would not be good. Every atrocity that has ever been committed will be addressed, and the books will balance.

Miroslav Volf, writing out of the Balkan wars, observed that the belief in a God who does not judge only looks attractive from a comfortable suburb. Among people who have watched a village burn, a God who shrugs is not good news.

So the Christian answer to the problem of evil includes a courtroom. That should sober us as much as it comforts us, since the standard applies to me as well, which is exactly why the cross had to happen.

Where it ends

The Bible does not finish with an explanation. It finishes with a scene. God dwelling with His people, wiping away every tear, and death itself abolished, Revelation 21:4.

Notice that tears are wiped rather than denied. The griefs were real, and they are met with tenderness rather than with an argument. Paul says the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us, which is a statement about proportion rather than about triviality.

That is where I put my weight. Not that suffering is small, but that it is temporary and that it is going somewhere, which I set out further in the new heaven and new earth.

Talking to someone in the middle of it

If a friend raises the problem of evil while grieving, do not answer the philosophy. Answer the person. Ask what happened, and be prepared to sit with a silence you did not fill.

Resist the sentences that make things worse. God needed another angel. Everything happens for a reason. He never gives you more than you can bear, which is not what that verse says. I have heard all of these delivered with real kindness and watched them land like bricks.

What you can say is that God is not indifferent, that Jesus wept, and that you are not going anywhere. I write about this more practically in how we comfort those who suffer.

Living with an unfinished answer

I have been a minister long enough to have buried children and to have sat with people whose suffering I could not explain and would not try to. The problem of evil is not solved in my study, and I have stopped pretending otherwise.

What I have is enough. A God who is good, who has entered the suffering personally, who has defeated death in public, and who has promised to finish what He started. That is not a complete explanation and it was never offered as one.

Faith in Scripture is not certainty about every detail. It is trusting a person whose character has been demonstrated, in the dark, on the strength of what you saw in the light.

The friends who made it worse

Job’s comforters deserve a section of their own, because they represent the standard religious response to the problem of evil and Scripture judges them for it. They arrive with the right doctrine and apply it at exactly the wrong moment.

Their argument is straightforward and almost entirely wrong. God is just, therefore suffering is punishment, therefore Job must have sinned, therefore he should repent and the trouble will lift. Every premise is defensible in isolation, and the conclusion destroys a broken man.

God’s verdict at the end is startling. He tells Eliphaz that His anger burns against them because they have not spoken of Him what is right, as His servant Job has, Job 42:7. The man who complained is commended and the men who defended God are rebuked, which should make every one of us slower to explain another person’s grief. I take this further in whether all suffering results from personal sin.

Two things that are not the same

It is worth separating the intellectual difficulty from the emotional one, since they need different treatment. The intellectual problem of evil asks whether the existence of God is compatible with suffering, and it can be discussed calmly over coffee.

The emotional weight asks whether a God who permits this is worth trusting, and no argument reaches it. That question is answered by a person rather than a proposition, and usually over a long period, in the company of believers who stay.

I have watched people accept every argument I offered and remain unable to pray, and I have watched others with no theological vocabulary find their footing again through a hymn and a faithful friend. Knowing which problem is in front of you is most of the pastoral skill involved.

So, now what?

If you are the one suffering, take your complaint to God rather than about Him. The Psalms give you the words, and He has never once been offended by an honest lament.

If you are the friend, turn up and stay. Bring food, do the washing up, and resist the urge to explain. Presence outlasts argument every time.

And if the problem of evil is what stands between you and faith, ask yourself whether you are looking for an explanation or for someone who understands. Christianity offers the second more readily than the first, and it offers it from a cross. Which of those were you actually asking for?

He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.

Revelation 21:4, ESV

For Further Study

Millard Erickson gives a careful survey of the philosophical arguments and the main Christian responses, and Charles Ryrie treats the entry of sin and its consequences with useful economy. For the pastoral side, Don Carson’s work on suffering is honest about what doctrine can and cannot do at a bedside, and C. S. Lewis wrote both a theoretical treatment and, after his wife’s death, a raw record of grief that undercuts his own earlier confidence in places. J. Dwight Pentecost and John Walvoord are worth reading on the final removal of evil and the restoration of creation. Above all, read Job slowly, and notice that the man who complained most bitterly is the one God commends at the end.