If God is Good, Why is There Evil?
This is the hardest question skeptics ask - and it deserves a real answer. Not "just trust God." Not "it's a mystery." A genuine, thoughtful response that takes the pain seriously and still makes sense.
First: Take the Question Seriously
When someone asks this question, they're often not just being philosophical. They might have lost someone they loved. They might have been hurt deeply. They might be watching news of war, famine, or abuse and genuinely struggling.
The first thing a thoughtful Christian should do is not rush to an answer. Acknowledge that the question is real. The pain is real. And the question deserves more than a slogan.
With that said - there are actually very good reasons to believe that the existence of evil and suffering is compatible with a good, all-powerful God. Let's think through them carefully.
Two Types of Evil
- AMoral evil - evil caused by human choices. War, murder, abuse, theft. This evil flows from people choosing to do wrong things.
- BNatural evil - suffering caused by natural events. Earthquakes, cancer, tsunamis, disease. This type is harder, because no person directly caused it. But the Bible traces it back to the Fall: when Adam sinned, death entered the world, and the whole creation was "subjected to frustration" (Romans 5:12; 8:20).
The two types need different responses. Most of the evil in human history is moral evil - caused by humans. The question then becomes: could God have made a world without moral evil?
The Free Will Defense
For moral evil, the most powerful response is the Free Will Defense, developed by philosopher Alvin Plantinga.
The argument goes like this: love and goodness are only meaningful if they are freely chosen. A robot programmed to say "I love you" doesn't actually love anyone. God, wanting creatures capable of genuine love, goodness, and relationship, had to create beings with real free will.
But here's the problem with free will: if it's real, it can be used to choose evil as well as good. You cannot have a world where people genuinely love, serve, and choose God - and also guarantee that no one ever does anything wrong. The two are logically incompatible.
Philosopher Alvin Plantinga showed that the existence of evil does not logically contradict the existence of God. Even an all-powerful God cannot create beings with genuine free will and also guarantee those beings never choose evil. That's not a limitation of God's power - it's a logical impossibility, like making a square circle.
What About Natural Evil?
Natural evil is harder. Why would a good God allow earthquakes and childhood cancer? A few responses:
- 1A world broken by sin. The world God made was "very good" (Genesis 1:31). Disease, disaster and death entered through the Fall. God told Adam, "Cursed is the ground because of you" (Genesis 3:17), and Paul writes that "sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin" (Romans 5:12). Natural evil is not part of God's original design. It is the result of a world that turned away from Him, and God has promised to put it right (Revelation 21:4).
- 2The soul-making argument. Philosopher John Hick argued that a world of constant comfort and safety couldn't produce courage, compassion, patience, or faith. C.S. Lewis wrote: "God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains - it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world." A caution: Hick went further than the Bible does. Before sin, the world was "very good" (Genesis 1:31), and heaven will have "no more death or mourning or crying or pain" (Revelation 21:4), so goodness does not need suffering in order to exist. What the Bible does say is that in a fallen world, God uses suffering to shape us: "suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope" (Romans 5:3-4).
- 3We can't see the whole picture. A young child in a doctor's office receiving a painful shot has no idea why the parent is allowing this. From the child's perspective, the parent seems cruel. But the parent sees something the child doesn't. This doesn't mean we shouldn't grieve suffering - but it suggests humility about concluding that no good purpose could possibly exist.
- 4The Bible doesn't promise a pain-free life - it promises presence. Christianity doesn't claim God will prevent all suffering. It claims God entered into suffering Himself (in Jesus), walks through it with us as "the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles" (2 Corinthians 1:3-4), and promises that suffering is not the final word.
The Problem of Evil Cuts Both Ways
Here's something most people miss: the Problem of Evil actually assumes objective moral standards - which, as we learned in Lesson 2, point toward God.
When someone says "there is too much evil in the world for God to exist," they're assuming that some things are genuinely evil - not just unpleasant or unpopular. But objective evil requires an objective moral standard. And objective moral standards, as the Moral Argument shows, require God.
The very complaint against God - "this is truly evil" - smuggles in a premise that actually supports the existence of a moral lawgiver.
Common Objections
"God could have just made people with free will who always choose good."
Plantinga addresses this directly. God can create people who have free will, but He cannot make their free choices for them, because a choice God makes for us is no longer ours. This does not mean a free being can never be perfectly good. God Himself always chooses good, and He is perfectly free, because goodness is part of his essence, part of who He is. One day everyone God has rescued will be made like that too and will never sin again (1 John 3:2). But in this world, God chose to make people whose choices are still open, people who can genuinely say yes or no to Him. God could have created robots that always behave well - but that would not be the same as creating beings capable of real love and genuine goodness.
"The Holocaust was so extreme - no good purpose could justify it."
This is the most emotionally powerful form of the objection, and it deserves respect. A Christian should never minimize the Holocaust or claim to know exactly what God's purpose was. The honest answer is: we don't know why God permitted it specifically. But "I don't know why this happened" is different from "there is no God." Our inability to see a purpose doesn't mean no purpose exists - it may mean we don't have God's perspective. This calls for humility, not certainty in either direction.
- If God removed all suffering from the world right now - by preventing every bad choice - what would have to be removed along with it?
- Can you think of a time in your life when something hard eventually led to something good? Does that change how you think about this argument?
- How is the Problem of Evil actually an argument that assumes God's existence at the same time it argues against it?
- What is the difference between an intellectual answer to suffering and an emotional response to suffering? Do both matter?
According to the Free Will Defense, why didn't God simply make people who could never do wrong, who would never sin?
The existence of evil does not disprove God. Moral evil flows from the free will that makes genuine love possible. Natural evil may serve purposes we can't fully see from our limited vantage point. And ironically, calling something "truly evil" already assumes an objective moral standard - which points back toward God.
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