If God is good, why does He allow evil, pain and suffering?
Many people I know can't defend this question adequately. "God's ways are higher than our", "Our limited minds can't understand an infinite God and His ways" and other excuses just leave unbelievers feeling like they won the discussion. So can I answer better? Sure I can…
Allow me to give some background:
Christianity proports that originally God made a perfect world. And not just perfect like the Utopia you see in the movies - Shangri-La. Way beyond more perfect than that. In Genesis, the Bible describes a world perfect in ways we've never thought of:
- There was no death - the Bible explains that death came about later
- There was no killing - all animals and humans were vegetarians. God allows eating meat only after the Flood
- There was no sickness or disease
- No one was lonely
- There was no pain in child-birth
- Adam and Eve were truly equal
- They had their every need met
- They were innocent of evil
- They had purpose/work - to multiple and fill the earth, to subdue it. And God specifically set Adam and Eve to tend the Garden
- There was no toil, work was not hard
- There were no thorns or thistles - they came later
- It never even rained - Genesis 2:6
- God daily walked with Man
This isn't even an exhaustive list! You may see beauty in nature around you now, but it's been in decline for 6,000 years. Imagine what it must have been like originally.
But clearly the world is not that way anymore! What happened? Well, we know what happened. Adam and Eve disobeyed God. They sinned, and with that Death entered the world. All the "bad" stuff we have in the world today was allowed to operate from that moment on.
But that still doesn't explain where evil came from. Where did evil come from? Why would a good God create evil? Well, the Bible explains that too. God was not created. It's impossible to make a logical argument that God was created. If God was created, then who created God? A bigger God? And who created the bigger God? An even bigger God? The only thing that makes sense is that God is the infinitely big God. If God exists at all, then He is the eternal, omniscient, omnipotent God. We know what God IS good (Matt 19:17). Not that God does good, wants good, likes thing to be good, think good is best etc - but that He IS good. He is the embodiment, the personification, the definition of good. See, we are made in God's image - we are able to choose to obey Him or not. Now if it is possible for us to not choose God, it must be that there is something else for us to choose. And the opposite of God is not (a mathematical "not" - as in "A is not equal to B") good - we call that evil. So, God was not created, and neither was evil. Evil is just the alternative to God.
So God didn't create evil, but why did He choose to make us capable of evil? God wanted us to choose Him. You can force someone to hate you - it's very easy to cause someone to hate you. But it's not so easy to have someone love (agape) you. God gave us a world where we would be able to choose Him, or not Him. God gave Adam and Eve the choice to obey Him, or not. He didn't have to create the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil - but He did. All the pain and suffering in this world can be traced back to someone somewhere doing something that is not what God wanted.
So humans, that's Eve first and then everyone since, humans buggered up this world. It, therefore, only seems fitting that God would give us opportunity, even require us, to make it right. But He didn't say to us "Go, sort it out" and leave us to it. He first of all made it possible to get ourselves sorted out. This is Salvation. And it's not actually us sorting anything out, but rather accepting we screwed it up, and that He sorted it out for us in Christ's death on the Cross and subsequent Resurrection. Once we are sorted, we are to help everyone else get sorted. This is Evangelism. And this is not just doing anything more than sharing what Christ has done for us.
God can associate with us in our suffering
But there's one step further. One step more that will happen at the end of the Age. When Christ returns, He will restore this decaying world to its former glory - perfection. Listen to what God says in Revelation 21 verses 1,3-5a 'Now I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away. Also there was no more sea… 3 And I heard a loud voice from heaven saying, “Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and He will dwell with them, and they shall be His people. God Himself will be with them and be their God. 4 And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes; there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying. There shall be no more pain, for the former things have passed away. 5 Then He who sat on the throne said, “Behold, I make all things new.”'
But we're not done yet. God is good; He made a perfect world; man screwed it up but God has provided us a way for us, through Him, to make it right again. And it will be made right eventually, whether we do something or not.
God is the only means for fixing the world, restoring it to perfection. Nothing else offers any possibility to restore humanity - not Buddhism, Islam, Atheism or anything else you can cling to. So to reject God because of suffering, and embrace something that cannot resolve that same suffering, is madness. But it's only madness if God did make a perfect world, and can and will restore it again.
For me, the "problem of pain" is not a reason to reject God, it is a very compelling reason to accept God.
God will come and make everything good again. But until He does, He has left it in our hands to tidy this mess up - after all, we caused it. If we reject God because there is pain and suffering in this world we are merely attempting to absolve responsibility for our part in creating this mess. And since anything chosen to replace God cannot fix the mess, we either are, at best, completely misguided, or, at worst, a hypocrite.