If God Loves Us, Why Does He Allow Evil

And Suffering To Exist?

This is an age-old philosophical question that is usually used as an argument against Gods
existence. If a sovereign and benevolent God really loves us, then why does he allow us to
experience such tremendous amounts of pain? Why not make us happy all of the time? This is
admittedly a difficult question to answer, and one that haunts the faith of many. As Empicurus
asks, Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not
willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then why does evil exist? Is he
neither able nor willing? Then why call him God? This is one of the most common arguments
used against Gods existence.
I think it is reasonable to believe that if God exists, that He has a morally permissible reason for
allowing evil and suffering to exist in our lives. Lets say you get robbed and mugged in an
alley, and you come out with a broken nose and have lost 500 dollars. Obviously, the thought of
being mugged produces a horrible emotional experience, but what we need to consider is
whether or not it is logically incompatible for both this experience and God to exist
simultaneously. We need to treat this as an intellectual problem, and put aside our emotional
reactions for a moment to not have our reason tainted by our feelings.

If one is to use the presence of such kinds of evil as an argument against Gods existence, the
burden of proof is on this person to demonstrate that it is either logically impossible or highly
improbable that God and such evil could co-exist. God doesnt exist, because if He did, He
would not let His creation suffer. But of course, to reject the claim that God would have a
morally permissible reason to allow suffering would just be pure speculation. How could we be
certain from our little spec of dust planet with our tiny mushy brains and narrow imaginations
that God would not be justified in allowing this suffering to occur? How could one carry such a
large burden of proof while having such limited cognitive and epistemic abilities? There is no
explicit or implicit logical inconsistency with the presence of such evil and with the existence of
an omnipotent, loving, all-powerful God because there is no reason to believe that God could not
possibly have a morally adequate reason for permitting suffering. Let us explore why.
A first step we need to take is to abandon the idea that we are Gods little pets and it is His job to
make us the most comfortable and happy as possible. We seem to think that God is a sky-daddy
who created humans to take a cakewalk through life. In dealing with the problem of evil and
suffering, we need to remember that we are eternal physical souls having a temporary human
experience. We have existed eternally in some form or another, and will continue to exist
eternally in some form or another after we leave our physical bodies that we are inhabiting for
mere moment in infinity. So let us take the example of being mugged. If God does exist and
loves you beyond imagination, what possible reason could God have for allowing something like
this to happen to you?
Perhaps Gods reason for allowing this is to show you what it is like to be at the receiving end of
pain and hardship. Maybe you were a bully growing up, and have lived a life physically abusing
others without realizing the effects it has on other people. Maybe God allows this to happen to
show you empathy and compassion towards others who are in the same position as you. It is
much easier to show kindness and love to someone who has been physically abused when you
yourself have been a victim of it.
Or perhaps God allowed this to happen to push you to a personal breaking point, where you will
then begin to see through your egoic sense of self, and live a more morally responsible,
spiritually grounded and fulfilled life. We have such a limited and narrow scope living in body
in a space-time existence, and even with our finite imaginations it is still easy to come up with
possible reasons for an infinitely loving God allowing us to suffer. These being to catalyze
growth, personal progress, spiritual and emotional evolution, moral agency and responsibility, to
dissolve personal barriers, and perhaps even to bring us closer to Him by seeking Him through
hardship using our own free will. Maybe our being mugged is to serve as a warning to us, or to
somehow point us in a better direction to prevent even greater evil from taking place in our lives.
And we havent even touched the possibility of alleviating past-life karma or incarnating to learn
specific life lessons, which is an entirely new paradigm we could explore. I personally entertain
the idea of reincarnation, and believe that we are here to learn what we need to in order to evolve
our souls according to their deficiencies. God, in this case, would allow suffering to exist in
order for our souls to gain the knowledge and wisdom they need in their current incarnation. It
seems to me that the existence of God and personal suffering are not incompatible, for it is
possible that God would be morally justified in permitting suffering for the personal evolution,

growth, and self-realization that is necessary to reach perfection as a soul. If God made everyone
to already be endowed with perfection, there would be no learning, and therefore no real
experience. Existence as a sentient being would be meaningless without the possibility of
progress.
Ok, so I could see why God would allow me to suffer heartbreak or abuse to learn lessons and
evolve in this life before I return back home, but what about extraordinary accounts of evil such
as the Holocaust? Why let millions of people be tortured to death for no reason?. I honestly
grieve for the people who had to experience this. They are safe and painless now, but one could
only imagine what kind of fear, sadness, and trauma had to be endured by the victims of the
worlds be horrendous crime. But let us look at this problem emotions aside, and consider the
implications that would arise from God intervening during the holocaust.
If God were to prevent the actions of the Nazis, He would be impinging upon their freedom of
will of action. So often we wonder why God created such an evil place, not realizing that it is
really just us misusing our free will in ways that create disharmony. All crime and immorality
you see in the world today is created by our own free actions. What would a world look like
where God could intervene every time a person was about to violate the rights of another?
There would be no freedom of will. A world without perfect free will would also mean a world
without personal growth, since without mistakes there would be no learning and no progress. No
mistakes are possible if we dont have the freedom to make our own choices. Imagine every
time you were about to say something mean to somebody, a mental block occurred that made
you forget what you were about to say. Imagine you being literally incapable of ever
emotionally or physically harming anyone ever. If God intervened every single time we misused
our freedom, where would He draw the line on stopping us from causing harm to each other?
Every time we were going to lie? Every time we were going to steal? Every time we had a
mean or hateful thought about somebody? Would living a life even be possible if God stopped
permitting perfect freedom?
We would be predetermined robots living out a pre-existing timeline since we would not even be
able to choose our own thoughts and actions. It is hard to imagine how one could evolve or
develop as a soul if they were unable to choose their own actions as the wished. There would be
no genuine experience because there would be no way for us to explore anything outside of the
prescribed boundaries.
There would also be no moral agency and no moral responsibility, for to say we ought behave a
different way is to say we can behave a different way, but we would not be able to do anything
other than what we have been programmed to do. So now we must ask ourselves a question.
What is more evil? A world with no freedom of will, moral agency, progress, growth, evolution,
learning, and experience? Or a world with progress, moral agency, growth, evolution, learning,
and experience, but with perfect freedom of will that we happen to misuse sometimes?
It turns out that in asking God to intervene during one kind of evil, He would be introducing an
even greater evil, for the world would be far more evil and imperfect if God were to intervene
every time an evil action was being carried out. It is important to note that God, being the

greatest conceivable being, could only create the most perfect world. In asking God to remove
evil every time it occurs, we are asking God to take away the previously mentioned properties of
life that make existence meaningful. If God obeyed us and took evil away, he would be making
the world less than perfect, which is logically impossible since it contradicts His very nature.
Can God do that which is against His essential nature?

Let us look at the evil of disease. Perhaps a bacteria infects your body. What is really happening
when a bacteria makes you sick? It is a living creature that is going on its journey through life
and decides to make a home for itself in your body and try to raise a family and reproduce. Is
that not what we are doing on this planet? To say that God should intervene whenever a human
body becomes infested by another organism is to say that not all life forms have as equal right to
compete for their own survival. This would be blatant speciesism, an unjustified bias towards
ones own species.
What about natural disasters? Are we asking God to stop wind from circulating, stop the
tectonic plates from shifting and rubbing together, stop the earth from relieving stress by erupting
a volcano, and to stop the tides from rising? There is vast number of chronologically prior
events that lead up to the occurrence of any natural disaster, most of which result from the free
play of chemical and physical processes. Should the free play of chemical reactions and physical
processes be interrupted by God if they are to produce an event that is non-benificial to a certain
species? This would be a request for determinism.

Upon reflection, it turns out that these very processes we are complaining about are in fact what
created the planets and drove stellar, chemical, and biological evolution. Without these
processes, nothing would have evolved, the earth would not have developed the appropriate
conditions for life, and we would not be able to live here. In asking God to stop natural disasters
every time they produce a disharmonious result for us, we are asking God to take the wheels off
of natures multibillion year old processes that created everything we in the universe (including
our bodies) for the sake of our temporary comfort.
When we really consider what it would mean for God to intervene during certain kinds of evil,
He would be initiating a far more evil consequence. We would not be able to engage and enact
our own free will, life forms would not have equal rights to compete for their own existence, and
the natural processes that created the earth and its lifeforms would be shut down to accommodate
the safety of one certain species. Of course, these answers do not exhaust all possibilities of evil
and suffering, but they do make us consider what the implications of divine intervention would
be every time something unfavourable happened to us. With no free will, learning or growth,
would living a human life even be purposeful?
Some of you reading this may be going through difficulty in life, and may have lost a loved one
in a way you see as unfair. Just know that everything happens for a reason, even if the reason is
unseen to us and even if it is an emotionally unappealing reason right now. You are loved by
God, and you will spend an eternity in His presence someday after we leave this schoolhouse we
call life. We are all hear to evolve as souls and learn the lessons we need to during this brief
flicker of time. While it is sad that we do not always understand the reasons for God permitting
suffering in the world, it would be even more sad if we missed out on the comfort, happiness,
and bliss that comes from a personal relationship with God because we dismissed His existence
due to the evil we see in the world.
Why doesnt God reveal the reasons for permitting evil and suffering?:

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