Answering Skeptics: Can a Good God Allow Evil?

The problem of evil presents a choice between two worlds

Sep 16, 2024

“How to Pray to a God You Don’t Believe In.”

That was the title of an opinion article published in the May 8, 2022 edition of the New York Times.

As I read the article, I learned that the author, besides being a professor of philosophy, was a practicing Jew. Yet he claimed to not believe in God because he couldn’t square God’s goodness with the evil he saw in the world—specifically, disasters like COVID-19 and the war in Ukraine. If God is all-loving and all-powerful, he argued, then nothing bad or evil would ever happen.

This is what’s commonly known as the “problem of evil”, an argument that philosophers have leveled at Christianity for centuries, but has only really become popular in recent years. The Enlightenment philosopher David Hume first articulated the problem back in 1779: “Is [God] willing to prevent evil, but not able? then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? whence then is evil?” In other words, if God exists, evil stands as evidence against his goodness. Evil categorically rules out the possibility of an all-good, all-powerful deity. Based on this argument, the author of the Times article concludes that “the problem of evil poses a serious barrier to religious belief.”

I want to spend some time examining the author’s charge against God’s goodness. The author claims that anyone who worships God is worshiping a moral monster, or nothing at all. But is that true?

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Before I explain why I think the problem of evil does nothing to jeopardize God’s goodness, I want to call the author’s bluff. Frankly, I doubt the author and anyone like him who says they fell away from the faith because of the philosophical problem of evil. Why do I say that? The simple explanation is that our author is a historical anomaly. Past generations faced far more evil—more violence, more death, more human rights violations—and had far more reason to disbelieve God on the basis of his perceived inaction in the world, yet were undeniably more religious than we are.

As the Bubonic plague decimated a third of of Europe’s population, peasants still flocked to their priests. And as the ancient world was wracked by economic instability, slavery, war, and high infant mortality, pagans of all stripes kept worshiping their idols. The world’s major religions were not founded in ages of prosperity, but in antiquity and pre-antiquity, when the average lifespan was 20-30 years and the average person worked from dawn to dusk in the market, the craftshop, or the field just to keep their family alive—if they happened to be free (slavery was ubiquitous in the ancient world, as seen in Rome, where around a third of the population was enslaved).

And the professor writes that he just can’t bring himself to believe… because of COVID? A far-off war that has no tangible effect on him?

Some might respond that social media has made evil much more distressing by exposing us to more of it. But that’s simply untrue. According to the research, the sheer number of moral transgressions online actually has a “numbing effect” on observers: “When there are many victims rather than just a few, people are motivated to disengage from a conflict and not act… As the number of victims in a scenario increases, the likelihood that people will take prosocial action like donating money actually goes down.” Social media breeds indifference, not empathy.

In 1759, the philosopher and economist Adam Smith described our tragic inability to empathize in his Theory of Moral Sentiments. He imagines a European “man of humanity” who has just heard that all the inhabitants of China have been wiped out by some calamity. His first response would be to express his sorrow at their passing, and extemporize on the vanity and frailty of human life…

And when all this fine philosophy was over, when all these humane sentiments had been once fairly expressed, he would pursue his business or his pleasure, take his repose or his diversion, with the same ease and tranquility as if no such accident had happened. The most frivolous disaster which could befall himself would occasion a more real disturbance. If he was to lose his little finger tomorrow, he would not sleep to-night; but, provided he never saw them, he would snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred million of his brethren.

All that to say, I highly doubt our philosopher friend wakes up in the morning just burdened with the weight of human suffering (and shaking his fist at God for not stopping it). Instead, I imagine he, like many others, is like Adam’s Smith’s “man of humanity”: expressing remorse over the sorry lot of humankind one moment, and worrying about his stock portfolio the next.

So, far from being the kryptonite of religious belief, the philosophical problem of evil is often–not always, but often–just another intellectually acceptable reason for rejecting the claims of Christianity–especially the claims it makes on one’s life, finances, and vocation. Jesus said we must “take up the cross” (Matt. 16:24-26). Fallen as we are, we will come up with just about any reason to avoid doing so.

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But there is a deeper reason to question the author’s argument: logically, it doesn’t hold up. Tim Keller dismantles it piece by piece in chapter three of his book, Reason for God, appealing to logic, philosophy, as well as Christian eschatology.

The lethal blow comes when Keller points out the absurdity of questioning God’s goodness as an atheist. The very statement “If God exists, he cannot be good” assumes that there is a way God ought to act, which presupposes the existence of a moral law, which necessitates the existence of a moral law-giver (God). Concepts like good and evil only work within a theistic framework. In atheism, pain and suffering are qualitatively no different than beauty and happiness, as they are just amoral byproducts of the life process. We are animals driven by blind survival instinct. We live, procreate, and die. End of story. Thus, atheists have no ground to stand on when they argue against God from morality.

But there are two other serious problems that he points out, both of which are related. First, our inability to see a divine purpose in human suffering does not imply that there is no purpose. Because there is a gap of infinity between God’s knowledge and ours (Isa. 55:8-9), we can’t possibly know why he does everything he does. Atheists assume that God is transcendent enough to stop evil in its tracks, but then double back and say he’s not transcendent enough to have good reasons for allowing evil that are beyond our finite comprehension. A mother takes her baby to get vaccinated, but all the baby feels is the pain of the needle. Does that mean that the mother was acting with mal intent? Of course not. The gap in understanding may produce confusion, but it does not imply wrongdoing. Second, Keller observes that, for many, “most of what they really needed for success in life came to them through their most difficult and painful experiences.” If we recognize that God has good reasons for allowing some evil, why not all? Again, the difference lies only in our understanding relative to his.

While the problem of evil is weak from a logical standpoint, Keller demonstrates that it is Christian doctrine that deals the crippling blow, for two reasons.

First, Jesus proved his goodness and care for us when he faced the eternal agony of hell in our place as the sin-bearer. Jesus not only hung naked on a Roman cross as he slowly died from blood loss and asphyxiation; he also faced total separation from his Father, who loved him infinitely and eternally (John 1:1). Imagine losing a close member of your family. Now multiply the pain of that loss by infinity. That is similar to what Christ went through. In addition, he faced the unmitigated fury of God’s wrath against all sin, past, present, and future. That is a level of relational pain that beggars description: to be first disowned and then punished by your eternal Father, the very source of love itself. But he did it for us, and he did it knowing that many would reject him. If that isn’t love, I don’t know what is.

Second, by taking the penalty for our sin, Jesus made available to us eternal life. All our suffering will be exchanged for glory in the New Creation, where there will be no more pain, crying, or death (Rev. 21:4). Keller states that just as we love someone more for having thought they were lost or dead, so we will enjoy life with God more for having suffered in this life. I would add that the same applies to the suffering incurred by our sin; Jesus said “Whoever has been forgiven much, loves much” (21:4). Suffering is the result of sin (Gen. 3), and when sin is forgiven, there is joy; how much more joy will there be when sin and suffering are abolished? Dostoyevsky strains to convey something of the magnitude of this event in his 1880 novel, The Brothers Karamazov:

I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidian mind of man, that in the world’s finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, of all the blood they’ve shed; that it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened.

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The New Creation is a uniquely Christian outlook. There is no New Creation in atheism, no redemption–only the heat-death of the universe. In addition to the logical and theological argument against the problem of evil, there is a practical argument. Atheists may beg to differ, but, after logic and experience, the strongest evidence for a worldview is the degree to which it works in practicality.

In his classic work, Man’s Search for Meaning, holocaust survivor Victor Frankl observes that, more often than not, survival in the Nazi death camps came down to what one put their hope in. Those who were atheist or turned atheist during their imprisonment were the first ones to slip into depression or despair, or ally with their Nazi guards. All their earthly hopes had vanished, leaving them hollow shells. Meanwhile, those who rededicated themselves to religious belief tended to live longer and have peace in the face of unimaginable suffering.

One such person was Corrie Ten Boom (pronounced “Ten Bohm”), a Christian who was sent to Ravensbruck, along with her sister Betsie, for hiding Jews in her home in Nazi-occupied Holland. Despite her dim horizons, God became tangibly real to her like at no other time in her life. Being one of the only strong Christians in the camp, she was able to start a nightly Bible study in her barracks, which led to many women being saved and experiencing the peace of God for themselves. God even used fleas–another “senseless” evil–to protect her Bible study from Nazi intrusion. She would later write of the experience: “My mind rushed back to our first hour in this place. I remembered Betsie’s bowed head, remembered her thanks to God for creatures I could see no use for.”

Betsie would later die from the awful conditions, but her last words to her sister have lived on for over half a century, and will continue to live on: “We must tell people what we have learned here. We must tell them that there is no pit so deep that [God] is not deeper still. They will listen to us, Corrie, because we have been there.”

Another sufferer, Reverend Richard Wurmbrand, spent 14 years in a communist prison in Romania, where Christians were being tortured for their faith. Despite seeing unimaginable horrors–from a man having his fingernails ripped out to a father watching his son be beaten to death–Reverend Wurmbrand said he saw “beautiful things.” He recalls being locked in freezers, beaten senseless, and stabbed with hot poker irons as the glory of God numbed the pain. He recalls how he and his fellow prisoners made a bargain with the guards: “we preached and they beat us.” How for the privilege of preaching to his cellmates, one prisoner joyfully endured beatings, after which he would painfully straighten his battered body and ask them where he had left off. He writes how prisoners shed tears of anguish as they evangelized to their captors even as they beat them. In his words, the persecution always produced better Christians: those who survived invariably emerged more zealous for God and the salvation of the communists. He wrote, “I have found truly jubilant Christians only in the Bible, in the Underground Church and in prison.”

As an addendum to this argument from practicality, it is deeply ironic that the two regimes the above Christians suffered under–Nazism and Communism–were both explicitly atheist in their ideology. Hitler and Stalin—taking cues from their favorite atheist philosophers, Nietszche and Marx, respectively—took the idea of a godless universe and turned it into a reality, murdering millions of people in the process. And no wonder. As Father Zossima says in The Brothers Karamazov, “if you have no God, what is the meaning of crime?” So not only do we see that God and suffering are not, in fact, incompatible–just ask anyone from the persecuted church, and they will tell you–belief in God is the only solid basis for protecting human rights, and preventing the very suffering that atheists blame God for allowing.

From the preceding paragraphs, we can now construct a reasonable argument against the claims made by the Times opinion piece: The problem of evil is (1) usually never the root reason for most atheists’ unbelief, (2) logically insupportable from an atheistic perspective, because it assumes the existence of a moral law, (3) overruled by the goodness Christ displayed on the cross, (4) can be overcome by belief in God, whereas belief in atheism only makes it more unbearable, and (5) because the problem of evil is insupportable from an atheistic perspective, atheists have no obligation to treat fellow humans any better than livestock, as evidenced by the atrocity-factories of Nazism and Communism.

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So the problem of evil is not so much God’s problem as it is ours—our ignorance and sinful nature make it so. Whether or not God is good is a question all of us will have to answer for ourselves.

Our experience of life flows from the assumptions we make about it. If we believe God is good, we will see his goodness, just as Corrie Ten Boom and Reverend Richard Wurmbrand did. If we believe God is evil or not present, we condemn ourselves to a life of despair and meaninglessness. God is a good Father, after all: he gives us what we want. If we want his goodness, we will get it. The same applies to those who want a godless universe where they’re in control—control that suffering quickly proves to be an illusion.

Of course, we will never know why certain things happen. There is no magic pill for the pain caused by famine, leukemia, or civil war. But the evidence suggests that a good God can allow evil. And my Bible tells me that there is one who has been through it all, and bottles up every tear… and promises that all will be made right.