If God is All-Powerful and All-Good Then Why Is There Suffering? Another Take.

I really hate this question.

Don't get me wrong, it isn't that the question intimidates me.  It isn't that I can't reconcile it.  I hate it because of what it reveals about the people pushing it as a rhetorical question.  Nobody who uses this question (and its implied answer) as a justification for opposing faith in God winds up coming off very well except to those who already agree with them.

A few years ago, I had a discussion with a friend, and he raised this very question.  The path our discussion took went into both parts of this question.  (Yes, there are two parts to it.)  

Part I:  Freewill.

The way my friend put it at first was: "How can God be all-powerful and all-good while allowing evil to take place?  Look at Nazi Germany.  How could God allow the Nazis to murder so many millions of people?  Therefore, if God does exist, then He can't be all-powerful and all-good."

On the surface, this seems like a pretty solid argument.  We picture God as a loving father who wants the best for His children.  It's hard to imagine any father sitting there and watching one of his children murder another while doing nothing to prevent it.  

But that's a surface-level argument.  It's very impressive for those looking to justify turning away from God, or those who want to justify their own anti-God views.  It's ironclad as long as you don't think too hard about it.  

The thing is, you should think about it.  You should think hard.  You should think about it a lot.  It's a huge question.  It's a question that does not have simple answers, despite what these armchair philosophers think.  Honestly, does it make sense at all that a question as big as that one should be so flippantly and easily answered with a handwave like that?  Really?

Albert Einstein has been quoted as saying, "Make things as simple as possible, but no simpler."  What he meant by that is that one should avoid overthinking a problem or question, but not simplify it to the point where key elements of the answer become lost.  

Why does God let humans hurt each other?  The answer is freewill.  What is freewill?  Free will is our ability to make choices and behave according to those choices.  

What's so great about freewill then?

For me, the easiest way to explain it is to work backward.  Let's imagine a world in which God does not permit humans to do bad things to each other.  Someone goes to harm another, God intervenes, and the act is prevented.  What does that world look like?  Is it a utopia?  Is it a place where everybody now agrees that God is awesome and starts worshipping Him?  

Well...

Where is the line drawn?

Imagine, in our hypothetical world, you do not have the freedom to choose anything that could hurt someone else.  You're physically restrained somehow from being able to take an action that would injure another person.  Sounds good, right?  The thing is, what counts as hurting someone?  Obviously, you can't push somebody off a cliff, but can you punch them in the face?  Can you yell at them?  Can you call them names?  Can you refuse to invite them to your birthday party, knowing it would hurt their feelings?  Where do you draw that line?  Who gets to decide that?  God, presumably.  So how much harm would one accept and still believe that God is all-powerful and all-good?  

It's easy for us to agree that murder would fall on the "no can do" side.  Could you buy the last box of cereal on the shelf even though another person wanted it?  I suppose most people would say yes because there's no malice, but I doubt that would make any difference to someone looking to justify blaming God for bad things in the world.  They'd just reframe the argument: "If God really were all-powerful and all good, then He'd see to it that there was plenty of cereal for everyone who wants to buy some."  Or, for a more Socialist angle:  "If God really were all-powerful and all-knowing, why do I have to pay for cereal in the first place?"

I'm not building a strawman here.  I'm pointing out that everybody will have a different opinion on just how much harm God should allow, and even what constitutes harm in the first place.  This isn't an effort to confuse the issue; it's an effort to show that the original question is overly simplistic.

Consequences 

That's what you'd be in a world where God directly restrains people from acting on their desires.  And is that even fair?  Ultimately, God wants us to be virtuous and choose good over evil, but does that even matter if we can't choose evil?  What is a good person then?  Someone who didn't want to cause harm?  Ok, well, what difference does it make what anybody wants to do if God is there to block some of those choices?  If it's impossible to cause harm, then it's impossible to do evil, and therefore, there's no fear of any consequences.  If there are no consequences because evil is restrained from happening, then being "evil" doesn't even matter.  So why then should good people have any kind of reward?  Because they didn't choose to do something they couldn't do anyway? 

So yes, there's evil in the world because without it, there is no good.  There needs to be a good contrast with evil because otherwise, what's the point of anything?

We are here on this Earth and in this life to learn about God, and to demonstrate that we have the character to choose whether to follow Him or not.  What happens in your mind isn't what determines that; it's your actions.  How can it be a fair test if your actions are constrained only to do those things that can't be seen as harmful to anyone?

If God exists, then these things matter.  Having the ability to choose between good and evil is at the very heart of why we exist and what our destiny is.  

And let's be honest:  Any evil, no matter how intense and destructive, is temporary.  The Nazis did unspeakable things, but that's over now.  It's been over since 1945.  Yes, the effects of that evil still resonate today, but the evil itself has been stopped.  Would you have wanted to have been one of those tortured and killed by the Nazis?  Of course you wouldn't, but considering the afterlife, if you could choose to be either one of those victims or one of the criminals as their souls exist right now in the present day, which would it be? 

What will your answer be 10 years from now?  The same.   What will your answer be in 1,000 years in the afterlife?  The same.  In the eternal timeline, you'd gladly choose to endure that suffering if given a choice between that and the consequences of being the one causing it.

Part II:  Nature.

So after a little discussion, my friend altered his argument to exclude evil.  "Well, what about natural disasters?  Humans suffer from lots of natural causes that have nothing to do with evil.  There are kids being blinded by worms that burrow into their eyes.  Why does God allow that?  Why did God even create those worms to begin with?"

This is a more difficult question because it uses emotion to provide impact.  Nobody likes the idea of a child suffering blindness or any other affliction as a result of parasites or disease.  This question deliberately chooses a particularly revolting example.  I wonder if my friend got this example from an interview with actor Stephen Fry, where he made the same point with the same example.

It's not easy being wiser and more moral than God

Again, let's think about it.  Does anybody want to be blinded, let alone by a parasitic worm?  No, absolutely not.  I am fortunate to have lived my entire life so far with two functioning eyes, glasses notwithstanding.  

Would I choose to lose an eye if it meant my brother was still alive?  Yes, I would, absolutely.

We all suffer from pain and tragedy in our lives.  Horrible as it is to have a worm in your eyeball, I'd choose that over the pain of the death of my brother.  We all have pain.  We all experience suffering and loss.  Many of us have medical problems from many causes.  We live in a fallen world ever since Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden. 

That doesn't answer the question, though, of why God lets it happen.

So again, let's work backward.  What would the world look like if this argument really made sense?  Imagine a world with no earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, or natural disasters of any kind.  Imagine a world with no disease, parasites, or accidental injuries.  Imagine a world with no pain, no disabilities, no tragedies of any kind.      

Have you ever heard of such a place?

This wouldn't happen in Heaven...

Yep, you sure have.  That's how it is where God lives.  The argument is basically saying that God must not be all-good and all-powerful because if He were, we'd be pretty much living in Heaven already.  

Talk about entitled...

As I said earlier, there is no suffering we can endure on Earth that compares with the eternity of the afterlife.  If I'm someday killed in a tornado, am I really going to still be upset about that in a thousand years?  My loved ones who survived me will be together with me again anyway.  What's my lifespan compared to eternity?  Mathematically, it's practically nothing.  And yet people will use that mathematical nothingness to justify throwing away the hope of a joyful, eternal future.

My brother died a very unpleasant death from a hereditary condition that I, thankfully, did not inherit.  I miss him.  I miss the things we did together, the things we talked about.  I miss his sense of humor (sometimes) and the way he spoke and shared with me.  Am I supposed to take that pain and use it to lash out at God and call Him unfair and cruel?  Why?  I will be with my brother again.  We will talk again and hang out together again and walk trails and go for drives and maybe, eventually, forget that we were ever parted.

Us together in the past... and the future.

See, we've moved on from talking about choosing good over evil.  Now we're talking about something even nobler and spiritual.  Now we're talking about faith.  I don't mean a stubborn, ignorant "faith" driven by fear, cognitive dissonance, or confirmation bias.  I'm talking about a genuine faith that doesn't crumble when we're in pain.  It's a faith that says, "Father in Heaven, I have committed myself to following You not only when my burden is easy, but also when it's hard."  When there's pain and difficulty in life, we can let it crush our faith and ruin not only our short-term but also our eternal destiny, or we can take a more enlightened perspective.  When something bad happens in my life, what good does it do for us to somehow turn that into an argument against God?  How does it benefit us?  In what way are we better off dismissing God because He didn't shield us from experiencing the trials and tribulations of life, rather than handing us an eternal reward we haven't shown ourselves to be worthy of?

It's basically demanding that God let us watch TV without having to do our homework at all, rather than letting us watch only after the homework is done.

It's a demand that calls upon God to prove His omnipotence and omnibenevolence on our own terms and not on His.  It's basically saying, "God, if You want to prove that You're really good and powerful, then here are the standards that I am setting, and if those standards aren't met, then You simply can't exist.

Can you imagine a more arrogant and sanctimonious thing than that?

Isn't it weird to try and judge God by a set of standards that we derived from Him in the first place?  We only have a sense of good and evil in the first place because of God, and now some of us think we can apply those morals better than He?

Why do bad things happen in the world?  Because that's how our faith is tested.  That's how we're tested to see if we can endure to the end and not have our faith crumble.  We all suffer.  Some more than others, certainly, but no matter how much we've individually had to endure, there's someone who has had it worse than us.  What does it say about us if those who have suffered more than we have did so while managing to maintain their faith, while we abandoned it?

Not good things.

God understands the Universe better than we do; is that not fair to say?  So maybe He also knows the best way to teach us, to test us, and to maximize our understanding and strength of character, and it isn't the easy way.  

The real question is, can you handle it, or not?