If the Goodness of God is Real, Why Does Evil Exist?
The Unchanging Goodness of God in His Creation
God is good completely, consistently, and beyond human comprehension. This truth is affirmed repeatedly in Scripture (Luke 18:19, Psalm 73:1, I Timothy 4:4, Psalm 34:8, Psalm 100:5, Psalm 135:3, Psalm 145:9, Jeremiah 33:11, Lamentations 3:25, Nahum 1:7, I Peter 2:3, Psalm 119:68, and Psalm 107:1, etc.) God is not merely good in what He does-He is good in His very nature. God is so good to His creation because He is entirely without evil. (Psalms 92:15, John 1:5) Not only is there no evil in Him, but He cannot tolerate evil. (Psalm 5:4, Habakkuk 1:13) Finally, God actively does good-He does not remain distant but takes action within His creation. Before the foundation of the world, God already knew the cost of creating humanity that He would enter His creation, suffer, and ultimately die to redeem it. (Hebrews 3:4, Genesis 1:1, Ephesians 1:3-4, I Peter 1:17-21) David declares in Psalm 145:9, “The Lord is good to all; he has compassion on all he has made.” When I consider the works of His hands and all that He has done, I must agree with David. The Lord is good to all! Yet when we look at the world around us, this truth raises a difficult question.
The Reality of Suffering and the Problem of Evil
Darkness undeniably exists in the world. There is hate, anger, and pettiness realities that are deeply troubling to witness. People harm themselves and others. Beyond this, there are also the harsh and impersonal realities of suffering in the natural world. Children contract terminal illnesses, people die on the freeway on their way home from work, in storms, in freak accidents, and in other natural disasters. In his 1995 book, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life, Richard Dawkins wrote,
The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there is ever a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored.
He concludes the thought with this striking summary of the universe: “The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.” This raises a pressing question: how can a good God allow all of this to exist?
If you have not yet wrestled with this question, you likely will. And I think it is important that we be able to have a defense for our hope in the Lord Jesus (I Peter 3:15). While a short article cannot fully explore this issue, we can consider several key ideas that point toward an answer.
How Objective Morality Proves the Goodness of God
First, there is an argument that was originally proposed by Thomas Aquinas in his work “Five Ways” and popularized in modern times by C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity. People who assert that a good God cannot exist and allow evil are basing this on the axiomatic presence of Good and Evil. And this ultimately proves that God exists and is the source of all that is good. C.S. Lewis writes: “My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?”
If the universe is just a “blind, pitiless” process (as Dawkins suggests), then would we have any sense of good and evil at all? The fact that we feel a moral outrage suggests that we are comparing the world to a standard that exists outside of it. If there is such a thing as an objective evil, then there must be an objective good. And if objective good exists, it must have a source. That ultimate source is God.
Human Choice and the Brokenness of Creation
Second, God created the world, and at the end of His creation, “… God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good” (Genesis 1:31). What God created was very good. What happened? How did things go so wrong? Creation was broken when Adam and Eve disobeyed the command of the Lord (Genesis 3:1-24). “Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people, because all sinned.” (Romans 5:12) God is not the source of what is wrong with this world-we are. Solomon says in Ecclesiastes 7:29, “See, this alone I found, that God made man upright, but they have sought out many schemes.” God made us in His image, to carry out His good purpose for us. But we have all gone astray. (Isaiah 53:6) When prophesying to the people of Judah concerning the coming judgment of the Lord, the prophet Isaiah writes of this very principle,
The earth mourns and withers; the world languishes and withers; the highest people of the earth languish. The earth lies defiled under its inhabitants; for they have transgressed the laws, violated the statutes, broken the everlasting covenant. Therefore a curse devours the earth, and its inhabitants suffer for their guilt; therefore the inhabitants of the earth are scorched, and few men are left. (Isaiah 24:4-6)
Who was to blame for the suffering of the people of Judah during the siege and captivity? Was God to blame? No, God is not to blame. The people sinned and had to bear the consequences of their actions.
This brings me to the next point. Some of the suffering that we see in the world is the direct consequence of the choices people have made. (Ultimately, all of the evil in the world is the consequence of mankind breaking God’s good creation.) If we ask God to prevent all evil, we must consider what that would require. Should God prevent every harmful action for every person? What about the consequences for our actions? Should God prevent punishment for criminals? For God to eliminate all evil, He would also have to eliminate our ability to choose. But without choice, love, obedience, and righteousness would be meaningless.
The good news is that God has already provided a solution to the evil in the world. Rather than preventing evil from occurring for all time, He loved the world so much that He entered His own creation as a man and paid the price for our sins: “that the world might be saved through him” (John 3:16-17). God did not remain distant from our suffering-He stepped into it. God provides the ultimate solution to repair His broken creation. No one can say God does not understand (Hebrews 4:15). He cared enough to personally remedy our mistakes, to fix what we have broken. (Romans 5:6-8)
The scriptures reveal that God knew before He created the world that mankind would fall short of His glory. And in sinning, we would break His good creation and put ourselves in a position we could not escape. God created the world anyway, with a plan to pay the ultimate price. Why create the world at all, knowing it would be broken, full of suffering, and need a Savior? God created the world so that He might bring “many sons to glory.” (Hebrews 2:10) This means that life is an opportunity an opportunity from God to know and live for Him. And finally, be with Him eternally after our earthly journey is done. And it is not as if this world is only suffering; there is so much of God’s goodness for us to enjoy. God continues to pour out His blessings on His creation even now. (Acts 14:17) His ultimate blessing is the gift of eternal life through His Son. The Lord is “not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.” (II Peter 3:9) The presence of evil does not disprove the goodness of God-it reveals our need for Him. And in Jesus Christ, God has already begun the work of restoring everything that was broken.