By Matthias Carpenter
“I don’t know why God would do this to me.” I sat on my neighbor’s couch and watched dumbstruck as the six-foot-tall Vietnam veteran broke down into sobs. “I don’t know why God would do this to me. I’ve lost one wife already, and now He’s taken my second wife!” His cry is echoed by people everywhere. This world is full of pain, sorrow, and death. If God exists, why doesn’t he intervene? Some, like my neighbor, ask this question from the depths of a heart rent by a horrible tragedy. They approach it drowning in an ocean of confusing emotions. Others, as rational inquirers, ask it from their brain rather than from their heart. Either way, the question is valid and demands an answer.
It appears to be an open-and-shut case: If the Christian God exists, He is all-powerful and loving. But if there is so much pain and evil in the world, He must be either weak or—even worse—evil Himself. Atheist James Fodor lays out the apparently watertight argument against God:
P1. There exist a large number of horrible forms of evil and suffering for
which we can see no greater purpose or compensating good.
P2. If an all-powerful, all-good God existed, then such horrific, apparently
purposeless evils would not exist.
C. Therefore, an all-powerful, all-good God does not exist.
Fodor points out that this logical sequence is a deduction, meaning that—as long as the premises are true—the conclusion can be considered to be extremely reliable.
But are the premises true? Let’s examine them. The first one is rather obvious. I don’t think that many will dispute it. We are confronted with suffering every day. From stubbed toes to cancer to global pandemics to tsunamis, this world is full of suffering. Evil also abounds, from mass genocide to racism to “little white lies” even to secret sins, such as lustful thoughts. For most of these evils and disasters, I do not see how they could lead to a greater good. In fact, you might say that they set off more chain reactions of evil, leading to a greater bad.
The second premise states that God would not allow this evil, at least not if He was loving and omnipotent. This idea is often taken for granted, but it assumes a lot. Because this premise is where the core of the argument lies, it is the one we will address. If God truly loves us, and if He truly is all-powerful, why does He allow this evil?
Perhaps it would be best to start by determining the origin of evil. The Bible makes it clear that we humans are the cause of evil in the world. God initially created the world perfect (Holy Bible, Genesis 1:31). But man (the first man, Adam) rebelled and exalted himself in pride against God (Genesis 3). Therefore, as the apostle Paul says, “[T]hrough one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men, because all sinned” (Romans 5:12). King Solomon expressed the truth of the matter very clearly when he penned these lines:
Truly, this only I have found:
That God made man upright,
But they have sought out many schemes. (Ecclesiastes 7:29)
Three thousand years later, the heavy metal band Theocracy echoed Solomon’s words quite vividly in their song “As the World Bleeds”:
This is the system we’ve created
This is the world so devastated
This is what it looks like when mankind asks You to just leave us alone
This is the monster now awakened
This is our legacy creation
This is the place we end up when we say that we can do this on our own
“As the World Bleeds” album cover
Evil is our fault. Few people actually grasp how inherently wicked the human heart is. Every single day every single one of us commits multiple acts of rebellion against God (called sin). We regularly insult Him and spurn the blessings He has given us. The pain and suffering that exist in the world are a direct result of us rejecting God. We can’t blame Him for its existence. He didn’t cause it. And yet, if He exists, He has the power to stop it. So why doesn’t He?
About a hundred years ago, a man named C. S. Lewis asked the same question, seeking to justify his atheism. He scoffed at anyone who believed that an omnipotent loving God would allow such injustice in the world. But then he was suddenly struck with an even deeper question: Why did he think there was evil in the world? If there was no God to establish an objective standard of justice, why did he find the world so revoltingly unjust? He said, “[I]n the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist—in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless—I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality—namely my idea of justice—was full of sense” (38-39). He discovered that if God didn’t exist, and if there was no right and wrong, he never would have realized that there was so much wrong in the world. And yet, here He was, accusing God of looking on at this evil and allowing it to remain. This was one of several factors that contributed to C. S. Lewis’s conversion to Christianity. He is now known as one of the most well-loved and widely-read Christian apologists.
Many have pointed to C. S. Lewis’s argument and claimed that it answers the evil-God question. However, this is not quite correct. He says that the fact that we can discern between good and evil is a wake-up call for atheists. He raises an important point. However, he does not actually address the question directly. Fodor calls this argument “the inconsistency response.” It claims that the deductive argument presented earlier on is self-contradictory because the atheist has to assume the existence of an objective morality (which must be established by a higher power), thus contradicting his atheism. As Fodor points out, simply demonstrating an error with an atheist’s position does not answer the issues with theism. If one does believe that God exists, then one does believe in objective morality and objective evil, and at the end of the day one is still left with the question: Why does God allow this evil?
We must not assume that God is oblivious to the pains of existence on this earth. According to the Bible, God Himself came down to earth in human form in the person of Jesus to experience our pain, weaknesses, and struggles. The anonymous author of Hebrews said,
Inasmuch then as the children have partaken of flesh and blood [a human body], He Himself likewise shared in the same, that through death He might destroy him who had the power of death, that is, the devil, and release those who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage.… For in that He Himself has suffered, being tempted, He is able to aid those who are tempted. (Hebrews 2:14-15, 18)
Jesus has put Himself through the trials common to all humans, plus more. He suffered beyond our imagination, dying by one of the most excruciating means imaginable. God is not ignorant of your suffering. He understands it perfectly well. But it is almost certain that you do not understand His suffering. And yet the question remains: Since He is intimately familiar with suffering, why doesn’t He end it? Why doesn’t He intervene and eradicate evil from the world?
He will. The Bible makes that very clear. He will come back to earth and restore His original creation, destroying evil and all its effects and rendering justice for every sin committed on the earth. But there’s a catch. In order to destroy evil, He will also have to destroy us. And because He is a loving God, He has postponed that day until now. In the days of the apostle Peter, some doubted that Christ would return. “Where is the promise of His coming?” they said. “… [A]ll things continue as they were from the beginning of creation” (2 Peter 3:4). Peter told them, “The Lord is not slack concerning His promise, as some count slackness, but is longsuffering [patient] toward us, not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance” (2 Peter 3:9).
That’s why He hasn’t intervened yet. He is giving us time to repent. Even though many never will repent, He still holds out His offer of forgiveness. In an article published in the International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, Dylan Balfour presents a novel idea that is actually as old as the world. The article is titled “Second-Personal Theodicy: Coming to Know why God Permits Suffering by Coming to Know God Himself.” God wants a relationship with you. He would be perfectly justified if He zapped you with a lightning bolt the very first time you sinned. But He hasn’t. He is patiently waiting and giving you an opportunity to accept Him. Thus, it is because of—not in spite of—His love that He allows evil to live on for the time being.
In the meantime, the presence of evil is not wholly purposeless. A national survey of 1,000 Americans in 2020 found that fewer than two percent experienced either an ebbing or complete loss of their faith in the face of the Coronavirus pandemic (Beyerlein et al. 495). On the contrary, 31% of the Christians who were interviewed said that the pandemic increased their faith (504). When the respondents were asked why they thought the pandemic happened, 64% said, “God is telling humanity to change” (504). I don’t know the mind of God, so I won’t advance a theory on the cause of the COVID-19 pandemic. But I do know that pain often serves as a wake-up call to break our attention from our temporary lives here and to place our focus on eternity. If God guarded us from all the consequences of our sin here on earth, how would we expect to understand its eternal consequences?
When we realize that God allows evil because of His love, the second premise of the argument against His existence falls, the rest of the deduction collapses like a house of cards, and the rational inquirers have their answer. However, a logical answer does not address an emotional question. For those who are struggling with grief or heartache, it is important to understand that God not only sees your pain, but He has also experienced even greater pain Himself. What physical pain could be worse than crucifixion? What heartache could be greater than watching your son die in agony? And yet He did it for us. That is something that I earnestly hope and pray that you—and my neighbor—will one day understand.
Works Cited
“As the World Bleeds.” Genius Lyrics, genius.com/Theocracy-as-the-world-bleeds-lyrics. Accessed 30 Apr. 2025.
Balfour, Dylan. “Second-Personal Theodicy: Coming to Know why God Permits Suffering by Coming to Know God Himself.” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, vol. 88, pp. 287-305, 2020. doi.org/10.1007/s11153-020-09763-x.
Beyerlein, Kraig, et al. “Theodicy and Crisis: Explaining Variation in U.S. Believers’ Faith Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic.” Sociology of Religion, vol. 82, no. 4, pp. 494–517, 2021. Oxford University Press, doi.org/10.1093/socrel/srab042.
Fodor, James. “The Problem of Evil: Still a Strong Argument for Atheism.” James Fodor, 25 Nov. 2023, jamesfodor.com/2015/10/13/the-problem-of-evil-still-a-strong-argument-for-atheism/. Accessed 30 Apr. 2025.
Holy Bible, New King James Version. Thomas Nelson, 1982.
Lewis, Clive Staples. Mere Christianity. San Francisco, HarperSanFrancisco, 2001.
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