If God is all-powerful, God can eliminate evil. If God is all-good, God would eliminate evil. Yet suffering persists. This is the deepest challenge to faith.
Premise 1: If God is omnipotent (all-powerful), God can prevent all suffering.
Premise 2: If God is omniscient (all-knowing), God is aware of all suffering.
Premise 3: If God is omnibenevolent (all-good), God desires to prevent all suffering.
Observation: Yet suffering exists throughout the world. This problem combines intellectual difficulty with visceral human experience. When a child dies of cancer, when injustice crushes the innocent, when natural disaster kills thousands—intellectual arguments seem hollow and inadequate.
No single response is complete. Together, they address different aspects of the problem from multiple angles.
Genuine Freedom Requires Possible Evil
Suffering Develops Virtue & Character
God's Hiddenness Preserves Freedom
God Sees Greater Purposes We Cannot
Human Knowledge is Severely Limited
God Knows Possibilities, Not All Futures
Love requires freedom to choose. A world with genuine love requires the possibility of evil. God created humans with free will because forced love isn't real love. Much evil results from human choices, not God's design.
Evil entered through human sin (Genesis 3). The world wasn't created with suffering—it came through the Fall. Natural disasters, disease, and death are consequences of living in a broken world affected by sin.
Romans 8:28 promises God works ALL things for good. Suffering produces: character, compassion, dependence on God, eternal perspective. Gold is refined through fire; Christians are refined through trials. Joseph said to his brothers: 'You meant evil against me, but God meant it for good' (Genesis 50:20).
A child born into poverty or disease has made no choice to deserve suffering. This raises questions about justice and God's care for the vulnerable.
When facing deep suffering, intellectual arguments seem inadequate. This question demands not explanation but presence—God's companionship in darkness.
When wrongdoers escape consequences and victims suffer lasting trauma, God's justice seems absent. Why doesn't God stop the cruelty?
Some suffering seems gratuitously excessive—torture, genocide, the slow death of a child. What greater good could possibly justify such agony?
Animals cannot choose sin, cannot understand moral lessons. Yet they suffer from disease, predation, and disaster. What explains this?
In moments of deepest pain, God seems absent. Why doesn't God reveal Himself obviously when suffering people cry out?
The most profound Christian response to the problem of evil is not an argument but a person—Jesus Christ, and specifically the cross.
God did not remain aloof from suffering. God entered into it. Jesus experienced severe physical suffering—flogging, crucifixion, slow agonizing death. Jesus experienced emotional suffering—betrayal, abandonment, mockery. Jesus experienced spiritual suffering—the cry of abandonment.
The cross is not an explanation of suffering. It's a demonstration of divine solidarity. When believers suffer, Jesus has walked that path. Jesus suffers with them.
Jesus's suffering accomplished redemption. This shows that suffering, when united with Christ's suffering and offered in faith, can be redemptive. Our pain can have meaning. Our tears can matter. Our suffering can transform us and serve purposes beyond ourselves.
"He was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities"
— Isaiah 53:5
Christianity offers more than philosophical arguments—it presents a God who enters into suffering with us.
Jesus, who was God, became human. Jesus did not remain distant from suffering but experienced physical pain, betrayal, abandonment, and death.
Jesus experienced the cry of abandonment: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" God understands spiritual anguish intimately.
Jesus's suffering accomplished redemption. This shows suffering, when borne faithfully, can be redemptive—for ourselves and for others.
The resurrection shows that death is not final, that evil is not ultimate. God has won the victory over death and suffering.
God promises a new heaven and new earth where suffering, pain, and death will be no more. Ultimate justice and restoration await.
While faith doesn't eliminate suffering, it transforms its meaning. Suffering borne with faith becomes a pathway to deeper character and compassion.
This interactive page covers key philosophical and biblical answers, but the full resource includes in-depth discussions of free will, natural vs. moral evil, divine sovereignty, the role of suffering in soul-making, and why atheism fails to account for objective evil.
✓ 18+ pages • ✓ Philosophical theodicy • ✓ Biblical answers • ✓ Free will defense