Recently I found myself in the midst of a very difficult situation where evil appeared to triumph over good. I found myself asking the same questions many of us ask. How can a good God, the God I believe in, allow suffering and evil? Is He really good? Is He really there? Every fiber in my being cried out against the wrongness of my personal suffering and was heightened by thinking of the harsh pain so many others are facing worldwide. Where was the good, the right, and the just that I and the rest of humanity so rightly longed for?
Wrestling with the problem of evil is nothing new for us, both personally and intellectually. It’s a problem that is harder than most because it’s not purely cerebral. It touches the very core of our being. To think through the why and how of suffering often opens up old wounds, causes current wounds to fester, and is just plain painful. For many of us, the answers we find are unsatisfactory, so we come to the conclusion that either God does not exist, or that if He does He’s evil Himself.
I’ve discovered that in looking for answers to the questions we have, I’m led to more questions, ones I didn’t expect. The problem of evil is no exception. We struggle with evil, but why don’t we struggle with goodness?
Why is it we never flip the question around? If God is evil or does not exist, then we have the Problem of Good. Why would an evil God allow anything good to happen? If He doesn’t exist, how do we know what is good and evil to begin with? Maybe the evil and suffering we abhor are nothing more than the workings of our imagination over minor discomforts in the grand vacuum of a meaningless existence.
Inherent in our questions surrounding both good and evil is an understanding of morality. There is something inside each of us that KNOWS there is truth, justice, and goodness. We rarely question the good because instinctively we know it is how things are meant to be. Goodness is morally good! We accept the good without question because our hearts tell us it’s normal. And we cry out against evil because we recognize it’s abnormal.
Yet for all of our instinctive understanding of good we’re still left with the question of “how?” How do we know what is good? This is an important question because knowing what is good is what enables us to identify what is evil. To claim there is anything immoral is to claim there is a standard of morality that is outside of us. Who, or what, defines that standard of morality? When we rejoice over goodness and mourn over evil, how do we know we are right in doing so?
In Mark’s Gospel a young man approached Jesus and asked, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” The man thought he was asking a straightforward question about moral standards, but Jesus saw into the heart of the matter, drawing out the deeper issue. What is good? Who defines it and sets its standards? So he responded, “Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone.”*
Here Jesus tells us what is good and who defines its standards; God himself. To know what is good, right, just, and moral one must know who God is and the morality that flows from His character, defining goodness for us. The problem of good disappears in the goodness of God who has set morality in our hearts, a morality we respond to whether we affirm it or not.
If the problem of good is answered in the character of God, who alone is good, this sheds light on the evil we abhor. If God has set the moral standard of goodness, then evil is the breaking of that standard. The young man who came to Jesus left him disappointed because he recognized that the standard of goodness required by God was beyond his ability to live up to. He had broken it and would continue to do so. The disciples themselves were disturbed by this, asking, “Who then can be saved?”
The answer Jesus gave rings with as much hope today as it did two thousand years ago, “With man it is impossible, but not with God. For all things are possible with God.”* He then showed us how this is possible. By suffering and taking the consequences for our evil upon Himself, living and being the morally good we fall short of, Jesus demonstrated that the good, right, and just we long for can be ours.
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*Mark 10:17-27
Awesome Sarah. Your beautiful mind is an example of how we ought to glorify our God through our thinking.
I am dancing with the problem of evil at present, and I am so thankful for your input, as it widened my thoughts to the problem of good.
You did mention two conclusions, Sarah, that we come to, us many who found unsatisfactory answers, namely either God does not exist, or that if He does He’s
evil Himself.
Do you think that Alvin Plantinga helped in introducing a possible third option namely: “God created the world containing evil and has good reason for doing so” a satisfactory answer? or would it also be unsatisfactory since one does not have to know, or is epistemological limited to what God’s reasons are?
Your fellow runner in Christ,
Prayson
Thanks for the encouragement Prayson!
I highly respect Plantiga, but I personally don’t find the option that God created the world containing evil and had good reason to do so satisfactory. If you look at evil as the absence of good, how can God, who is perfectly good, create evil? I find it easier to wrap my mind around the idea that God created a morally good world without evil. But part of that morally good was to allow his creation the freedom to choose to either remain in the good or turn away from it, bringing evil. We chose to turn away. I know this raises just as many, or maybe more, questions as it answers. But from what I understand, this makes more sense biblically and logically than to say that God created evil for a good purpose.
Thanks for the encouragement Prayson!
I highly respect Plantiga, but I personally don’t find the option that God created the world containing evil and had good reason to do so satisfactory. If you look at evil as the absence of good, how can God, who is perfectly good, create evil? I find it easier to wrap my mind around the idea that God created a morally good world without evil. But part of that morally good was to allow his creation the freedom to choose to either remain in the good or turn away from it, bringing evil. We chose to turn away. I know this raises just as many, or maybe more, questions as it answers. But from what I understand, this makes more sense biblically and logically than to say that God created evil for a good purpose.
Sarah, I certainly agree with you and I think that the Bible would also agree that God had made everything good, but that we (and I guess Satan also) screwed it up.
Prayson,
I thought Sarah did a good job with the first part of your question. However, allow me to try to answer its tail end.
There is certainly nothing wrong with seeking understanding. I think that God is honored whenever we inquire (James 1:5-8). He wants to be known and worshipped according to who He is (John 4:20-24).
However, you asked if we need answers to the problem of evil. Although I don’t believe that our answers will ever be complete or even completely satisfactory, at least in this world, we do have a responsibility to defend the faith against such challenges (Jude 3; 1 Peter 3:15).