The first post in this series can be found here.

Sometimes the question “Why does God allow suffering?” is used not so much as a question, but an argument against the existence of God. And that’s fine; I think it’s a very reasonable argument to make. If suffering wasn’t a major question at some level, passages about it wouldn’t feature so much in the Bible!

At popular level, this argument is often based on the ‘logical problem of evil’ and goes something like this:

If there really is a God who is all-knowing and all-powerful and entirely good, then why does he allow suffering (like the terrible pain and death caused to millions of people by coronavirus)? If such a God sees people suffering terribly and could act, why doesn’t he stop COVID-19 right now?

Since God hasn’t stopped the suffering, one of the following must be the case:

1. An all-powerful and entirely good God does not exist.
2. God would like to prevent suffering but is not capable, lacking power (or knowledge).
3. God could stop the suffering but doesn’t want to – so he is not entirely good and loving.

Conclusion: An all-powerful and entirely good God cannot exist.

(Note: I am aware that amongst scholars the ‘logical problem of evil’ is considered defeated and rather ‘old hat’ these days, but it’s still very common at popular level and a good starting point.)

Fair Question, Flawed Options

The above seems pretty powerful when you first hear it, especially if delivered well. The questioner gives three options – either God is not all-powerful, or God is not entirely good and loving, or God doesn’t exist. It’s fairly clear that none of these sit very comfortably with the Christian message about God! But there is a hidden flaw. And as usual for popular yet flawed arguments, that flaw is in an unspoken assumption. Also as usual, be very careful when a challenger declares they have thought everything through and are certain these are the only answers you may give. But hey, let’s look at each possibility anyway:

Option 1 – God does not exist?

The first option (God does not exist) is the one the questioner is trying to convince you to believe by eliminating the alternatives.

Note that if the questioner wants to pick this option, they still have their own burden of proof: A theory that denies the existence of God plenty of problems of its own from a philosophical angle (eg – accounting for the characteristics, and external nature, of the necessary cause which began our universe)…and from the ‘pragmatic’ angle even if option 1 is true, it’s hardly better off on the suffering issue. As a world view, atheism has far less explanation, less comfort and no lasting solutions to offer the sufferer (because nothing material lasts!) than the Christian message can give.

Of course, the idea here is to show the Biblical God to be internally inconsistent, and thus false. But does the argument succeed? Is option 1 the ‘last option standing’? No, as we shall see…

Option 2 – God is incapable of stopping suffering?

The second option (God is unable to stop coronavirus) seems unlikely, since any being capable of causing all space, physical laws and matter to begin and continue to exist by sheer expression of his will would surely have full knowledge and control of that creation. It’s pretty absurd to think of him being unable to do anything about a virus, or even create a world with no suffering at all. Note: Some will try to say that God is all-powerful but has elected to restrict his ability/right to intervene (for one reason or another) and therefore cannot stop the virus despite being all-powerful. Possible, but most of us will notice that really this is option two (God chooses not to stop the virus) but with more of a feeling of trying to dodge the question. You may as well go straight to option three (which is also plainly taught in the Bible!) and avoid the feeling of making excuses!

Option 3 – God chooses not to prevent the suffering?

Apparently, the Biblical answer is option three. The Biblical documents repeatedly and variously indicate that God is fully capable of stopping both moral evil and all suffering, and has ‘set a day’ to do just that. Clearly this is ‘not yet’, so the question remains ‘why not yet?’. For now, option 3 in the above discussion is the nearest to the truth, but ‘God could stop the coronavirus but doesn’t want to…so he must not be entirely good and loving‘ also contains the flawed assumption…

*Is it really true *that any God who is good and loving he must want to prevent all suffering from ever occurring? How did the questioner reach that conclusion? They assumed it. And it’s a clever move, because it’s the kind of assumption that makes someone look bad for even thinking about questioning it! But an assumption is not a very good ground for determining the truth of anything, so test it we should. Let’s see how well the assumption holds. Do completely loving and completely caring people always want to prevent all suffering?

Does a good person always seek to prevent all suffering?

No, there are plenty of occasions when a perfectly loving and compassionate person will not prevent someone else from suffering, even though it is within their power. For example, should a compassionate and loving prison officer let all the inmates out because he doesn’t want to see them suffer? No, he should be fair and impartial, attentive to his duties and yet maintain that compassion. Is the fact that the judge sent the person to prison in the first place evidence that the judge must be mean and unloving? No, but perhaps the judge is loving towards more than just one person, and his job is to protect the vulnerable from those who would exploit! This logic is like when a child has a tantrum and says ‘if you give me I want then you don’t really love me’. And as we all know, there are often larger issues – and other people – to bear in mind. Issues of which the young child is unaware. This means that a loving and compassionate parent will definitely not always do what their child wants, because ultimately it would not be good or loving to do so. There are examples we all understand:

• Placing some limits on the sweets-versus-nutritious-food ratio. Despite the child’s protests at these restrictions, he parent knows their child will suffer far more if they get rotten teeth, stunted growth or the symptoms of malnutrition.
• When walking around town, preventing your three-year-old from running too far ahead where you can’t see them or get to them if they end up in danger.
• Actively preventing the child from certain harmful choices, like physically restricting a three-year-old who (in a tantrum) is trying to run away or wants hit the dog. You know they won’t like the results (getting lost, getting bitten) and so you use moderate physical force to ensure they do not do the harmful things.
• Ensuring a six-year-old gets enough sleep, even if they would rather stay up all night! You know that sleep deprivation will be terrible for their growing brain, and that they’ll need their brain to achieve what they hope for in later life!
• Sometimes a loving person has limited options – eg rescue the pensioner from the burning building or the toddler? Whilst we may have different opinions
• Sometimes delaying help when the child asks for it but encouraging them to tackle the problem themselves for a little longer, so that the child grows in perseverance and problem-solving skills and realises their own choices can have a real effect on their life.
• Under no circumstances is a child’s desire to start a camp-fire on their bedroom floor more important than their long term need to have a home to live in!

A four year old will not usually understand or care about the consequences of crossing these boundaries until they start to notice the consequences, by which time the damage is done and suffering (regular dental surgery, stunted growth, crippling injuries from running into the path of traffic) may be ongoing. The loving parent cares about the child’s whole life! As long as there are potential long term consequences which are beyond the child’s perception (or there are other people to consider such as siblings), a good parent will lovingly yet firmly enforce healthy boundaries. Of course, the aim is to gradually increase the child’s freedom over time, until as an adult there are no longer parent-enforced boundaries at all.

Allowing suffering, maybe…but deliberately causing it?

Is there ever a time when, deliberately and as a true act of love, a compassionate parent will create suffering for another person? Surely not?

Yes, even here. The key is that the parent ultimately wants to give their child freedom, and so recognises that their earlier their child learns to make wise and good choices on their own, the easier that learning will be. Ideally, they hope the child will learn from simple explanation…but if the child is inclined to have to learn things ‘the hard way’, it’s actually better that they experience consequences soon, while they can still avoid the bigger long-term problems.

• Sometimes deliberately introducing short term artificial suffering (we call it a ‘sanction’) if the child does bad things like punching a sibling or stealing. Why? So that the child experiences for themselves early on that ‘crime doesn’t pay’ in a small way…rather than having to learn that same lesson from long term life-affecting consequences like getting a criminal record, getting fired, or starting a fistfight and discovering the hard way that their target is armed. The parent knows it’s always better to learn our lessons much sooner than that.
• Protecting one person from another! If you see a frail person being bullied by a strong person, it is unloving not to actively fight to defend the weak. Here’s an example in which a father beats another man severely and it was absolutely the right thing to do! There is a kind of wrath that comes directly out of love…love for the victim. Let’s remember that if God loves everyone equally and has no favourites, we are absolutely capable of being selfish enough to end up on the receiving end of that sort of wrath.
• Giving the child horrible-tasting medicine that will prevent them getting a dangerous disease, even though the child may absolutely hate and not want the treatment. So, as compassionately as possible, you do make them take the medicine.

So sometimes, a loving person will not only allow but will deliberately cause suffering. In fact, there are some occasions when not causing the above kinds of suffering is neglectful and unloving, even though the sufferer may disagree at the time!

What I’m not saying.

1. The above does not mean anyone is supposed to get any satisfaction from causing suffering, or be cold and uncaring. We may have in our minds the echo of a hundred ‘cruel master’ TV characters saying the usual “it’s for your own good” whilst indulging their obvious enjoyment of cruelty. No ‘justification’ can make such selfishness count as loving. I’m only saying we all understand that a parent should take the longer view of the child’s life, and this may involve doing things that the child views as ‘causing them to suffer’, even though the parent remains genuinely caring. As a general rule, it’s probably good if the child is likely to ‘thank the parent later’ once they really understand the issue.

2. I am not offering any of the previous analogies as the answer to why God allows suffering…I just want us to slow down and test the assumption that a truly good person will always prevent suffering. We see from our own lives that there are at least some times when a loving person allows the one they love to suffer (even though or perhaps even because they love them), and is morally right to do so. Of course we also know that whenever this is the case, a truly caring person would still feel compassion for the sufferer. And this happens even when the person suffering (eg a child) has no idea why the other person allows it.

What we’ve learned so far…

This exposes the flaw in the questioner’s third option – it is very conceivable that a good God may have good reasons to allow or sometimes even cause suffering. Hopefully we are sensible enough to realise that such an infinite mind capable of designing the whole universe has always known plenty of things we don’t, and so our lack of explanation for something does not give us good grounds to think God has no good reasons. And that means the argument fails to push us logically to option 1 (‘God doesn’t exist’), which was its main purpose.

It’s tempting to stop there, but even though the ‘logical problem of evil’ has defeated philosophically (I mean by real philosophers, not this article, hah!), we’d hardly call the issue resolved. Yet this was a good ‘jumping off’ point to help us realise that there potentially might be a good God who allows or causes suffering, and has good reasons! We don’t know if that’s the case yet. If the logical problem presented above seemed convincing initially, then we should also notice that it’s easy to be fooled by a poorly (or perhaps cleverly?) worded question. Proverbs 18:17 applies in all truth-seeking endeavours.

If we ensure the question is presented fairly and does not make us choose from a skewed set of options, then it’s a great question:

If there is a God who is all-knowing, all-powerful and entirely good, then why does he allow suffering (like the terrible pain and death caused to millions of people by coronavirus)? If God is good and sees people suffering terribly and could act, why didn’t he stop COVID-19 (or spanish flu, black death…) before it really got going?

I hope you’ll agree this is a fair rendering of the suffering question and that I’m not trying to dodge anything. Far from it, because this is an important question on the hearts of those who are suffering right now, and flimsy answers comfort no one.

Next time, we explore whether the Biblical sources actually give any good reasons for God to allow or cause suffering in our world as it is now.

After that we’ll explore whether the same sources suggest any good reasons for the next-level question: “Why didn’t God come up with a way to create the world that would have avoided the need for suffering in the first place?”