Why Does God Allow Suffering? — The Question That Has Broken More Faith Than Any Argument
Wrestling honestly with the problem of evil — the question that has shattered more belief than every atheist book combined.
A five-year-old gets diagnosed with leukemia. She doesn’t understand why her body hurts, why she can’t go to school, why mommy keeps crying in the hallway when she thinks no one’s watching. She did nothing wrong. She made no choices that led here. She’s just a kid who wanted to be a ballerina.
A tsunami hits the coast of Indonesia on a Sunday morning. 230,000 people are dead before lunch. Entire families erased. Children ripped from their parents’ arms by water that didn’t care about prayers or goodness or innocence.
A man walks into a church in Charleston and murders nine people during a Bible study. They had welcomed him in. They were praying.
If you’ve never felt the weight of these realities press against your faith until something cracked — I’m not sure you’ve been paying attention.
The Argument That Actually Works
Here’s the thing most Christian books won’t do: present the skeptic’s argument at full strength. So let me.
The philosophical “Problem of Evil” isn’t some angry Reddit post. It’s one of the oldest and most devastating challenges to belief in God, and it goes like this:
- If God is all-powerful, He could prevent suffering.
- If God is all-knowing, He knows about all suffering.
- If God is all-good, He would want to prevent suffering.
- Suffering exists — massively, relentlessly, and often falling on the most vulnerable.
- Therefore, either God lacks one of these attributes, or God doesn’t exist.
That’s not a strawman. That’s a genuinely powerful argument. Philosopher J.L. Mackie called it a logical contradiction at the heart of theism. And honestly? When you’re sitting in a hospital watching someone you love deteriorate, it doesn’t feel like a philosophical exercise. It feels like the truest thing anyone’s ever said.
David felt it too:
For the Chief Musician; set to “The Doe of the Morning.” A Psalm by David. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from helping me, and from the words of my groaning?
That’s not polite church language. That’s a scream. And it’s in the Bible.
The Responses — Honest and Incomplete
Christianity has offered several responses over the centuries. None of them are fully satisfying, and I think we need to say that up front. But some of them carry real weight. Let me walk through them honestly.
The Free Will Defense
The most common response: God gave human beings genuine free will, and genuine free will means the genuine possibility of choosing evil. A world of puppets who can only do good isn’t a world of love — it’s a simulation. Love requires freedom. Freedom allows horror.
There’s something real here. A huge amount of the suffering in the world — war, abuse, oppression, cruelty — comes directly from human choices. The Holocaust wasn’t a natural disaster. It was millions of individual decisions to participate in evil, or to look away.
But here’s where the skeptic pushes back, and rightly: what about natural evil? The five-year-old with leukemia didn’t get cancer because someone chose freely. The tsunami wasn’t a moral agent. Earthquakes don’t have free will. So this defense, while it carries weight for moral evil, doesn’t explain everything. And we should be honest about that.
The Soul-Making Theodicy
Philosopher John Hick proposed that suffering serves a purpose: it’s the environment in which character, compassion, and genuine virtue can develop. Without struggle, there’s no courage. Without loss, there’s no real love. Without pain, there’s no empathy.
Think about the people you most admire — the ones with the deepest wisdom, the most genuine compassion. Almost without exception, they’ve suffered. There’s something about walking through fire that forges a kind of beauty nothing else can.
And yet — does a five-year-old with terminal cancer need “character development”? Does a village wiped out by a mudslide need soul-making? The theodicy works at a general level, but it becomes obscene when applied to specific cases. We should never look at someone in agony and say, “This is for your growth.” That’s not theology. That’s cruelty wearing a cross.
The Cross — God Enters the Suffering
This is where Christianity says something that no other worldview says, and I think it’s the most profound response — even though it’s not technically an answer.
Christianity doesn’t claim that God sits in heaven, distant and unmoved, watching us suffer. It claims that God entered the suffering. The cross is God submitting Himself to the worst that human evil and natural cruelty can produce — torture, abandonment, death. Jesus doesn’t explain suffering from the outside. He walks into the center of it.
And on the cross, Jesus quotes that same Psalm:
For the Chief Musician; set to “The Doe of the Morning.” A Psalm by David. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from helping me, and from the words of my groaning?
God Himself, screaming the question. If that doesn’t stop you in your tracks, I don’t know what will.
This doesn’t answer why. But it answers whether God cares. And for many people in the depths of suffering, that actually matters more.
The Book of Job — The Answer That Isn’t One
If you want to understand what the Bible actually says about suffering, you have to deal with Job. And Job is deeply uncomfortable.
Here’s a man who did everything right. The text goes out of its way to establish that. He was righteous, faithful, generous. And then everything is taken from him — his children, his health, his wealth, his dignity. His friends show up and spend thirty-plus chapters trying to explain why. Bad theology dressed up as comfort: “You must have sinned.” “God is teaching you something.” “Just repent and it’ll get better.”
God’s response? He shows up. But He doesn’t explain.
Then Yahweh answered Job out of the whirlwind, “Who is this who darkens counsel by words without knowledge? Brace yourself like a man, for I will question you, then you answer me! “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Declare, if you have understanding.…”
That’s it. No explanation. No theology lesson. No “here’s why your children died.” Just: I am God, and you are not, and the universe is more vast and complex than you can comprehend.
This is either the most unsatisfying answer in the history of literature, or the most honest one. Maybe both.
What’s remarkable is that Job is satisfied. Not because he got an explanation, but because he got a presence. God showed up. And somehow, in the economy of the soul, that was enough.
I don’t fully understand that. But I’ve seen it happen — people in the worst suffering of their lives who encounter something they can only describe as presence, and it doesn’t fix anything, but it holds them together.
What I Won’t Say
I won’t say “everything happens for a reason” — at least not the way most people mean it. The idea that God specifically designed your tragedy to teach you a lesson is a theological claim I can’t support and won’t make.
I won’t say “God never gives you more than you can handle.” People break. People collapse. People lose their minds with grief. Clearly, sometimes it is more than we can handle.
I won’t say suffering is an illusion, or that it’s not that bad, or that heaven makes it all worth it in some simple transactional way.
What I will say is this:
We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, for those who are called according to his purpose.
Notice what this doesn’t say. It doesn’t say everything is good. It doesn’t say everything feels good. It says God works in all things — even the worst things — toward something. That’s a very different claim. It’s a claim about redemption, not design. It’s saying God is the kind of being who can take even the most horrific raw materials and, over time, bring something out of them.
And Paul, who wrote those words? He’d been beaten, shipwrecked, imprisoned, and would eventually be executed. He wasn’t writing from a comfortable study. He was writing from the middle of it.
For our light affliction, which is for the moment, works for us more and more exceedingly an eternal weight of glory,
“Light and momentary.” Paul calls his suffering — which was severe — light and momentary. Either he’s delusional, or he’s seen something on the other side of the equation that changes the math entirely.
Where This Leaves Us
I can’t give you a clean answer. I don’t think one exists this side of eternity. And I’m suspicious of anyone who claims otherwise.
What I can tell you is this:
The problem of suffering is real, and it’s devastating, and you’re not wrong to feel its weight. If this question has shaken your faith, you’re in good company — it’s shaken the faith of saints and scholars for millennia.
But the existence of suffering, as powerful as it is as an argument against God, is not a proof. It’s a problem. And problems can be sat with, wrestled with, held in tension with other things we know or have experienced.
The Christian faith doesn’t offer a world without suffering. It offers a God who suffers with us, who promises to one day make it right, and who — if the resurrection is true — has already demonstrated that death and pain don’t get the final word.
That’s not a neat answer. It’s not a comfortable one. But I think it might be a true one.
And if you’re in the middle of suffering right now and none of this helps — that’s okay. Sometimes the most faithful thing you can do is scream at God. The Psalms suggest He can handle it.
Job screamed. David screamed. Jesus screamed.
You’re allowed to scream too.