Why does God allow evil?

Question 60106.

Moral evil is the wickedness that people do to one another, and it is the sharpest form of the oldest objection to the Christian faith. If God is good, He would want to prevent it. If He is almighty, He could. Evil exists. Something in the argument has to give.

I want to deal here with the evil that human and angelic beings choose, and leave earthquakes and cancer to their own article. The two questions are related but they are not the same, and running them together muddles both.

Where Moral Evil Came From

Scripture is clear that evil is not eternal and not part of the original creation. God pronounced everything He had made good, and there is no rival principle of darkness standing alongside Him from the beginning. Whatever else moral evil is, it is a latecomer.

It entered through the choice of created beings. Before Eden there was a rebellion in the angelic realm, and in Eden there was a command, a temptation and a decision. In both cases the creature had genuine alternatives and took the wrong one.

That means moral evil is not a thing God made. Augustine’s insight remains useful here: evil is not a substance but a privation, a corruption of something good, in the way that rot is not a thing in itself but the spoiling of a thing. Nobody creates a hole; they remove what was there. See what is original sin.

Why Freedom Makes Evil Possible

God chose to make creatures capable of love, and love that cannot be withheld is not love. A machine that says it loves you when you press the button has told you nothing. To make beings who could genuinely love Him, God had to make beings who could genuinely refuse.

That is the free will defence in its simplest form, and I think it holds. It does not say that every instance of moral evil produces a greater good, which would be a much stronger claim and a harder one to defend at a graveside. It says that a world containing creatures with real moral agency is a world in which evil is possible.

Notice that the alternative is not obviously better. A universe of beings incapable of wrong would also be a universe incapable of courage, faithfulness, forgiveness or sacrifice. The capacities that make us capable of great wickedness are the same capacities that make us capable of anything worth admiring.

Permission Is Not Approval

A distinction has to be drawn here that Scripture draws constantly. God permits moral evil; He does not cause it, approve it or share responsibility for it. James 1:13-14 says God tempts no one, and that each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire.

The clearest illustration is Joseph. His brothers sold him into slavery, and years later he tells them that they meant it for evil, but God meant it for good. Two intentions, two moral verdicts, one set of events. Their guilt is not diminished by God’s ability to work through what they did.

So the biblical picture is not a God pulling strings behind every wicked act. It is a God who has granted real agency, who holds people accountable for how they use it, and who is nevertheless not defeated by it. There is more at does God control or permit evil.

Why God Does Not Simply Stop It

The obvious follow up is why God does not intervene in the particular case. He could stop the man before he raises his hand. Why does He not?

Part of the answer is that we have no idea how often He does. Prevented evils leave no trace, and a world in which God restrains a great deal would look, from inside, much like this one. Scripture does describe such restraint, and it warns that when God removes it the results are appalling.

Part of the answer is that consistent intervention would empty moral agency of meaning. If every misused freedom were blocked at the point of action, then freedom would be a formality, and we would be back to the machine that says it loves you. God appears to have decided that a world of real agents is worth the cost, and the cost is enormous.

What God Has Actually Done About It

This is where the Christian answer separates from every philosophical treatment, and it is the part that matters most. Christianity does not offer a theory that makes moral evil tolerable. It reports an action.

God did not stay outside the problem issuing statements. He entered the world as a man, was betrayed by a friend, tried in a rigged court, tortured by an occupying army and executed on a charge He was innocent of. Every category of moral evil in the human repertoire was concentrated on Him in a single day.

And at that point, Scripture says, the worst act in human history became the means of the world’s rescue. Acts 2:23 holds both truths together without flinching: delivered up according to the definite plan of God, and crucified by the hands of lawless men. God does not simply permit evil; He defeats it by absorbing it, which is a far stronger claim.

The Objection That God Should Have Known Better

A sharper version of the argument runs like this. If God foresaw that His creatures would use their freedom for moral evil on this scale, and made them anyway, then He is responsible for the outcome.

The answer, so far as Scripture gives one, is that God judged the end worth the road. Revelation describes a redeemed people from every tribe and language and nation, a new creation with no death or mourning, and a relationship between God and His people deeper than anything Eden contained. If that outcome is only reachable through a world with genuine freedom, then the calculation is not obviously wrong.

I hold that answer with a certain reticence, because it is easier to write than to say to a grieving parent. What I would not do is pretend the question has no force. It has enormous force, and Scripture never treats it as a debating point.

Where This Ends

Moral evil has a termination date, and that is a large part of the Christian answer. The Bible does not say that evil will be explained. It says it will be judged, ended, and undone.

There will be an accounting. Every act of cruelty that went unpunished, every abuser who died comfortable in his bed, every atrocity nobody was ever charged for, will be dealt with by a judge who missed nothing and cannot be bribed. That is not a vindictive doctrine; it is the only ground I know for hoping that justice is real.

And then the removal. No more death, mourning, crying or pain, because the former things have passed away. The problem of moral evil is not answered by the New Testament so much as it is outlived. See what about the problem of evil and what is theodicy.

Moral Evil and the Angelic Rebellion

Scripture indicates that moral evil did not begin with human beings. Before the garden there was a created being who fell, and the temptation in Eden came from outside the human pair rather than arising within them.

The Bible is restrained about the details, and I would be careful not to build more than the text supports. What it does say is that the devil sins from the beginning, that he is a liar and the father of lies, and that he was not made evil but became so.

That matters for the shape of the answer. Moral evil is not a flaw in the design of humanity. It entered a good creation through the misuse of freedom by creatures at more than one level, and it will be ended by judgement rather than by redesign. See John 8:44.

Why This Answer Is Not Enough on Its Own

I want to be honest about the limits of everything above. The free will account explains how moral evil is possible. It does not explain why this particular child was taken by this particular man, and no argument I know does.

There is a gap between the general and the particular that philosophy cannot close, and pretending otherwise is how well meaning Christians end up saying appalling things to people in grief. The right response to a specific horror is not an explanation but silence, presence and, eventually, the cross.

So hold the framework for the seminar room and the honest questioner, and leave it at the door of the hospital. Both settings are real, and they require different things from us. See how do we comfort those who suffer.

So, now what?

If moral evil is your intellectual objection to Christianity, notice that you have to account for it too. On a purely material view, cruelty is a rearrangement of atoms and your outrage has nothing to stand on. The problem of evil is only a problem if good is real, and good being real is easier to explain if God exists than if He does not. See the moral argument.

And if it is not an argument but a wound, then let me say the only thing I would say in person. God is not indifferent to what happened to you. He has not explained it, and I cannot. But He came into the middle of it Himself, and He has promised an end to it, and He is nearer to the broken hearted than to anyone else in the room. Where are you actually taking this?

As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today.

Genesis 50:20 (ESV)