In his book, How Now Shall We Live? Chuck Colson tells the story of Albert Einstein inviting a Jewish rabbi, a Catholic priest, and a Protestant theologian for tea one afternoon. He wanted to hear their explanation on why, if there is a God, there is evil and suffering in the world.
You don’ t have to have the IQ of Eintein to come up with this reasoning for denying the existence of God, or of a loving God.
Not being much of an intellect or a philosopher myself, I don’t expect to be able to answer that question in this post.
HOWEVER, I know someone who has written the best explanation I have heard. I will not do it justice by trying to summarize it here, so I highly recommend you read it yourself.
Here’s an excerpt of Greg Koukl’s article to whet your appetite:
The first step in answering the problem of evil is this: We’ve got to get clear on what this thing “evil” actually is. It does seem to follow that if God created all things, and evil is a thing, then God created evil. This is a valid syllogism. If the premises are true, then the conclusion would be true as well.
The problem with that line of reasoning is that the second premise is not true.
Continue here.
While there is probably no answer to the problem of suffering that will satisfy everyone, especially for someone like Einstein who had a personal struggle with reconciling the sufferings of his own people the Jews, one part of Greg Koukl’s explanation made a lot of sense to me as a mother.
Koukl said this:
Unfortunately, we’ve bred a society that are, in many ways, like a bunch of adult two-year-olds, grown-ups who believe it’s their divine right to feel every pleasure they can possibly feel, to never encounter any difficulty, any pain, any suffering. And if they do, then God must be a cruel God.
Now I realize that some of you might be thinking, Come on, Koukl, you’re really whitewashing this, aren’t you. How can so much egregious suffering be justified?
I don’t at all mean to brush away the terrible impact of evil on people’s lives. But I’m talking about a frame of mind that we do seem to have, a frame of mind that we are first and our pleasures are first and God owes that to us. And if He denies us our pleasures to any degree, then there must be something wrong with Him.
Now if God is a good God, and He denies us our pleasures, then I’ll tell you one thing, there’s a good reason He does so. That’s what it means to be a good God. I’m not going to buy the idea-the infantile idea that Americans have-that in order for God to be considered good, He has to give me everything I want, when I want it, or conversely, He must protect me from every injury and every difficulty. No, it’s fair to say that God has allowed suffering in the world for very good reasons, even though we’re not clear on all of those reasons.
As a mother, I can relate to this reasoning. Does it make sense to say that I am a bad mother if I allow my children to experience suffering? I would say not, yet, we impose that thinking with God. Since there is suffering in the world, than God must not be a loving God. It doesn’t follow.
As a mother, is my wish for my children to be always happy? If that was the case, I’d be giving them candy for breakfast, do their homework for them, and never take them for shots at the doctors. Since my goal for them is not temporal happiness, but to grow up as good citizens with strong character, I have to allow them to experience some suffering to achieve that goal.
Now the question is, asks Koukl, “Was it worth it? Good can come out of evil, but was it worth it in the long run, the measure of good that comes out of the measure of evil in the world?”
Koukl says this in another article:
A world that had never been touched by evil would be a good place, but it wouldn’t be the best place possible. The best of all worlds would be a place where evil facilitated the development of virtues that are only able to exist where evil flourishes for a time. This would produce a world populated by souls that were refined by overcoming evil with good. The evil is momentary. The good that results is eternal.
What good comes out of a drive-by killing, someone might ask, or the death of a teenager through overdose, or a daughter’s rape, or child abuse? The answer is that a commensurate good doesn’t always come out of those individual situations, though God is certainly capable of redeeming any tragedy. Rather, the greater good results from having a world in which there is moral freedom, and moral freedom makes moral tragedies like these possible.
While we value freedom and we would say God is not a good God if he didn’t allow us freedom, we have to accept that people doing evil is part of the package.
Many virtues such a perseverance, mercy, courage, compassion, empathy, self-sacrifice, can only be developed where evil exists.
If you consider all the variables in creating a world, I’d say God is pretty wise in the way he handled every possibility.