If God, Why Evil?
Have you ever questioned God because of the suffering you see in the world? Have you ever thought to yourself: “is there any meaning to my life after all?” It is likely that if you have been on this earth long enough, you’ve asked questions like these. These questions mask a deeper feeling common to us all: we desperately want to know whether our actions, desires, and the things that happen to us have ultimate meaning.
Human beings are creatures who look for, create, and are sustained by meaning. We build our lives, make decisions, live in communities, and craft our image based upon what we think and believe to be meaningful in our lives. For there to be meaningful things, there must be a framework through which our lives can take shape. That framework is goodness.
As we go through life, we are guided by the idea that there is overall meaning and purpose to the things we do and the things that happen to us. Very few of us wake up and approach our days as if life were truly meaningless: we tend to make decisions, approach problems, and treat others as if there is a coherence to life, and the coherence is found in the belief that life is essentially Good.
We can clearly see this fundamental belief in goodness in the question of “why” after any tragedy. It only makes sense to question the meaning of seemingly meaningless events if there is the belief that tragedies somehow don’t fit the way things should be. Be it a terminal illness, the death of a loved one, the ravages of a tsunami, the acts of a murderer, or the callousness of nature, we look upon these things and desire that they not be. In other words, we question the goodness of the world in the face of tragedy.
However, the disconnect we feel is not that we believe the world is meaningful and that evil exists, for human beings can find meaning out of chaos and disorder and have done so from the beginning. The reality at issue here is the bigger assertion that the world is good and meaningful because there is a God who created it, yet within this creation there are evils. This is the origin of “the problem of evil:” the claim that the world is meaningful and good because God is creator, yet evil exists. To put it in classic terms: how can God be considered “good” in a world full of suffering and evil?
What is evil to you? Depending on your socio-economic background, your status, the time period you live in, and your family of origin, “evil” may have drastically different interpretations to all of us. What may seem like evil to a Westerner may seem more like everyday life to someone living in another part of the world. So, we must ask ourselves: What is evil? And where do we lay its responsibility?
Most of the time, we see evil, feel it press against our conscience, and immediately question God: “How could you allow such a thing to happen?” However, sometimes our incessant questioning of God can hide the real “problem” of evil. One could say humans are so concerned with evil because, most of the time, they are the ones committing it. Evil is, simply, anything that separates the creature from its creator and ultimate hope. It is, literally, meaningless: it is opposed to goodness and hope. Evil is not an abstract “thing,” but is rather all the ways in which humans hurt, degrade, separate, destroy and shame themselves, others, and creation. We ask the wrong question when we ask “Does God allow evil?” Rather, we should ask “why do humans continually commit evil?”
From a Christian standpoint, the answer to why humans continually commit evil is because they have habitually turned away from the one who intends Good for them and instead have chosen the things that are anti-God. What Christians mean by sin is the disease of the heart that causes humans to habitually degrade, destroy and shame themselves and creation. We have turned our freedom – something God meant for our good – and turned it into something that slowly destroys us.
This is the source of the hopelessness we tend to feel: we look around and see the brokenness of the world around us, and cry out: “how could a good God allow such things?”
We are right to concern ourselves over the goodness of God: for if God is not good, then there is no such thing as evil. Evil is only a “problem” in the light of God’s goodness, and God being Good is the edifice upon which the whole structure of our morality and meaning is found. A simple truth we tend to forget as we go through life is that life is a gift: we did not choose to exist, nor can we grant ourselves life. We simply are, we have been given a life to live. This is why, when we look for ultimate meaning, we tend to look outside ourselves, for we intuitively know that meaning and purpose must come from the one who grants life. To put this in Christian terms, life’s purpose and meaning are found in the God who created it, and that God pronounces that “it is good.”
The God of the Bible and Christian belief is unequivocally Good. The God of Christian scripture is the creator, the source of all that exists, and the one in which our true purpose is found. Rather than being outdated philosophical ideas, Christians proclaim the nature of God as good news. One of the most profound ideas in the Christian faith is that the moral meaning of life is grounded in the fact that God is Creator: God will not allow the creation he intends for good to wallow away forever in meaninglessness.
The great mystery of creation is that God freely created and intends Good for all things, and in so doing granted us true freedom to live and do as we please. Are we then left in a hopeless situation, where humans have destroyed and utterly degraded God’s good creation? No! For there is good news at the heart of our wrestling with our brokenness: God has responded to our evils and has done so emphatically.
God’s answer to evil is Jesus. The Christian story proclaims as God, Jesus has conquered sin and death, the very things that separated us from the goodness of God. God’s response to evil, in Jesus, is to enter into our utter broken state and offer us true hope once more. What Christians call the Gospel is a simple, yet profound statement, that God has entered into the very brokenness of our situation, went to the depths of suffering and death, and lifted us up, proclaiming that “it is good.” On the cross, we hear Jesus cry out the very fear of our hearts, “why have you forsaken me,” and a Christian’s hope is that God’s answer is “I have not.” The resurrection of Jesus is God’s final answer to suffering and death, proclaiming his victory over their hold in our lives. As God says at the end of Revelation, “See, I am making all things new.”
After all reflection, there may be no adequately rational answer to the “problem of evil,” but for centuries, Christians have not proclaimed a rational defense, but rather a hope. This hope is that God has proclaimed his creation to be good, and he will not abandon us regardless of how hard we turn from him. In the face of evils committed by others or ourselves, we look to Jesus and hear God proclaim that goodness is found in him, and all things will be made right. How and what this may look like we can only venture guesses, but we can be assured that God has announced judgment on the sin that destroys us and separates us from him.
So at the end of the day, Christians can say the brokenness of the world is God’s problem, and just because it is God’s problem, that is good news.
-Zach Bennett
