FAITH & CULTURE PROJECT: Why Does Evil Exist?

************************

Many refuse to believe in the existence of God because of all the pain, suffering, and evil in the world. They argue that no all-benevolent, all-powerful God would allow such misery and malevolence to exist and persist for thousands of years. Therefore, the idea of a creator God is incompatible with the reality of our world. Numerous examples illustrate this point. People have endured physical and psychological abuses so inhuman they defy explanation.

For instance, during the , in March 2009, recounted the horrifying story of Josef Fritzl, who locked his daughter in the basement of his home and raped her thousands of times over 24 years. Hitchens describes how his daughter, Elisabeth Fritzl, would hear her father coming down the stairs to rape her and God never responding to her prayers. As Hitchens puts it, if there is a God, He watched this horrific scene from heaven for 24 years with His arms crossed and with complete indifference. God says, “Yes, I’ll watch that.” Hitchens asks how God could ignore Elisabeth’s prayers for so long. He answers that “no true god could remain silent. And thus, God does not exist.”

Many arrive at the same conclusion by pointing to the Holocaust during World War II and the slaughter of millions of innocent people. An interesting quote from an article entitled, “The extermination procedure in the gas chambers.” This can be found at www.auschwitz.org: “When large numbers of transports were arriving in 1944, the people assigned to death in the gas chamber in crematorium V also disrobed in the open air. After the Sonderkommando [work units made up mostly of Jewish prisoners] was quartered in the undressing room in crematorium IV, the people sent to die there undressed in a specially constructed barracks.

The SS men kept the people fated to die unaware of what awaited them. They were told that they were being sent to the camp, but that they first had to undergo disinfection and bathe. After the victims undressed, they were taken into the gas chamber, locked in, and killed with Zyklon B gas.

After they were killed, Sonderkommando prisoners dragged the corpses out of the gas chambers. They cut off the women’s hair and removed all metal dental work and jewelry. Then they burned the corpses in pits, on pyres, or in the crematorium furnaces. (Until September 1942, some of the corpses were buried in mass graves; these corpses were burned from September to November 1942.)

Bones that did not burn completely were ground to powder with pestles and then dumped, along with the ashes, in the rivers Soła and Vistula and in nearby ponds, or strewn in the fields as fertilizer, or used as landfill on uneven ground and in marshes.”

It is also reported that Hitler had his own gold fillings made from the fillings extracted from the corpses. Again, how could God allow this to happen? Is He an absentee Father? Does He care at all? Why didn’t He intervene? For those who have experienced severe hardship and suffering these questions are more than just theological or philosophical; they are deeply personal and emotional, often accompanied by a profound sense of personal guilt, confusion, and anger. It becomes easy to doubt the love of God or even His existence after watching family members tortured and brutally murdered. Many wonder how a loving God could allow this. If He’s really there, wouldn’t He protect His own people?

Of course, Christians are hardly immune to pain and suffering; some even commit suicide. I once had a friend from my teenage years. A few years later, we both became Christians around the same time. Yet at the age of fifty-three, his various challenges became so overwhelming that he took his own life. I couldn’t believe it.

As many have learned the hard way, it is a false gospel that promises coming to Christ will eliminate all of your problems, or that you can expect physical blessings and an easy life. In his book , refers to this as the “.” He states, “If you believe that coming to Christ will make life easier and better, then you will be disappointed when suffering comes your way. Storms destroy our homes. Cancer eats up our bodies. Economic recessions steal our jobs. If you see God as a vending machine, then you will become disillusioned when your candy bar doesn’t drop. You may get angry and want to start banging on the machine. Or maybe you will be plagued with guilt, convinced that your suffering indicates God’s disapproval of something you’ve done. When we emphasize the temporal blessings that come from following Christ, we plant the seeds for a harvest of heartbreak.”

This rings true. The life of a Christian is often filled with grief and misery, sometimes even more so than those outside the faith. Even the strongest Christians have doubted God’s love and His very existence in the face of extreme hardship and tragedy. Imagine what the pastor who backed over and killed his four-year-old daughter in his driveway must have been going through. How could God allow such a thing? Shouldn’t we be protected from something as horrific and gut-wrenching as this?

Stories like this abound. I once spent the day working for a Christian man who had just lost his only daughter to a shark attack in Hawaii, and just two weeks later, his wife passed away. Almost overnight, his life was turned upside down. I also worked with another man who, at the age of five, lost his entire family—parents and siblings—in a car crash. They had to use the jaws of life to cut him out of the wreckage. It took hours. He was the only survivor. He carries this memory and loss with him every day of his life. You wonder how some people can go on.

A few years ago, I spent a week in the hospital with . I was reminded that things could be much worse by a sign on the wall that read: “Every day 17 people die in hospitals waiting for an that never arrives.” Imagining myself lying there, waiting for an organ transplant that was likely never going to come was sobering. Can you imagine losing a loved one this way?

We do however find some comfort in our suffering in the book of Romans (8:28), “And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose.”

This passage is of course reassuring, but it doesn’t answer the question of why. What exactly are God’s purposes? Did He create a messed-up world just so His Son could die in it? This question may sound like something from a sarcastic atheist, but this is nevertheless an accurate way of putting it.

God could indeed have created a world without sin, but that kind of world would not have met with His purposes. Instead, and as would say, He created the best possible world where He could expand or extend the joy He finds within Himself to creatures made for that very purpose. Although God is complete in Himself and requires nothing, there is nevertheless something about the nature of joy—by definition—that continually desires to be shared with others.

But, again, if this is the case, then why is there so much pain and misery in the world? Why does evil exist? To answer these questions, we must understand God’s purposes and what He wants us to know about Himself. Scripture teaches that God desires to be known and worshipped in the fullness of His nature and character. He wishes to be recognized not only for His goodness, love, care, and provision—as we see in the Garden of Eden—but also for His grace, mercy, holiness, vengeance, sovereignty, justice and wrath.

The kind of world necessary to accomplish this goal would require the existence of evil and the ability to choose it. This goal would also necessitate the creature to ultimately fail, plunging the world into a fallen, cursed state. This is precisely why evil exists in the world. To put it another way, evil exists in the world because it is good that evil exists in the world. If it wasn’t good, it could not possibly be here. in speaking on “the [properness] that the shining forth of God’s glory should be complete” writes:

“Thus it is necessary, that God’s awful majesty, his authority and dreadful greatness, justice, and holiness, should be manifested. But this could not be, unless sin and punishment had been decreed; so that the shining forth of God’s glory would be very imperfect, both because these parts of divine glory would not shine forth as the others do, and also the glory of his goodness, love, and holiness would be faint without them; nay they could scarcely shine forth at all. . . .

. . . If it were not right that God should decree and permit and punish sin, there could be no manifestation of God’s holiness in hatred of sin, or in showing any preference, in his providence, of godliness before it. There would be no manifestation of God’s grace or true goodness, if there was no sin to be pardoned, no misery to be saved from. How much happiness soever he bestowed, his goodness would not be so much prized and admired…

. . . So evil is necessary, in order to the highest happiness of the creature, and the completeness of that communication of God, for which he made the world; because the creature’s happiness consists in the knowledge of God, and the sense of his love. And if the knowledge of him be imperfect, the happiness of the creature must be proportionably imperfect.”

Does this mean that God purposed ? Yes, it does. Did God intend for a world in which His Son would die? Yes, he did. However, it is important to note that God is not culpable for the sin of our original parents. God never forced ’s hand; both Adam and made their decisions as free, volitional creatures. By creating a world that would eventually require a deliverer, God made it possible to manifest His goodness, love, grace, and mercy—and at the same time—His justice, wrath, vengeance, holiness, and sovereignty.

We could learn about God’s character and attributes from angels or books, but we would never truly understand them in a meaningful and experiential way. The joy that God desires to extend to us would never be fully realized. Despite all the pain and suffering in this world (and because of it), there is no better plan conceivable for fulfilling God’s purposes. As far as the end product is concerned, God is happy and pleased with the world He has created.

This is what life is truly about. We are not necessarily here for self-fulfillment and personal happiness, at least not in worldly categories. We are here to learn and experience all that God would have us to know. All of life is discipleship. All of life is sanctification. Through what seems like endless trials and tribulations, we are ultimately being prepared for the life to come. I like this quote from , “Man, the bravest of animals, and the one most accustomed to suffering, does not repudiate suffering as such; he desires it, he even seeks it out, provided he is shown a meaning for it, a purpose of suffering. The meaninglessness of suffering, not suffering itself, was the curse that lay over mankind so far.”

This is why evil exists. This is why God created a world He knew would ultimately fail. Most of our lives are chaotic, confused, and often miserable, but we can take comfort in knowing that they are supposed to be. And that it’s not all for nothing. This is how God designed the world, along with each of our individual lives, and it's all going someplace—a joyous place.

“But as it is written: “Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, Nor have entered into the heart of man The things which God has prepared for those who love Him.” —

About the Author

Roger Ball is a Reformed Christian writer who lives on the Florida Spacecoast. He writes on Christian theology, apologetics, psychology, and culture. Contact: rogerball121@gmail.com