Over the past 50 years, there have been celebrity atheist guests on TV and radio talk shows who ranted about “what kind of God, if He exists, would allow such suffering in the world?”

They obviously haven’t studied the Bible, where John 12:31 states: “Now judgment is upon this world; now the prince of this world will be cast out.” In this passage, Jesus speaks of the impending judgment and the defeat of Satan through His crucifixion and resurrection. The term “prince of this world” underscores Satan’s current influence but also foreshadows his ultimate expulsion and defeat. Topical Bible: The Ruler of This World

By ruling the world, does not give the devil all power over the world, but it shows the influence he has in tempting people into sinning while working with his demons who are scattered around the globe (remember, the devil can only be in one place at a time, unlike God who is omnipresent).

The apostle Paul underwent a life of enormous suffering. Despite this, he wrote:

We do not lose heart… For this slight, momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, because we look, not to the things that are seen, but to the things that are unseen; for the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal. (2 Corinthians 4:16-18)

Paul was aware that his life in this fallen world was finite and that a better world after death, one with God, one that is eternal, awaited him. For Paul, suffering for Christ and suffering for others can be used and turned to good.

It’s true that God sometimes chastises humans, like the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, which was justified, but the story of Job is way above my intellect to understand and remains a mystery, as are many Old Testament stories. The Old Testament makes quantum theory look like a walk in the park. It also has to be studied in its original Hebrew, and it’s infused with metaphor and symbolism.

Questions on these stories on the problem of suffering and the problem of evil have been asked for millennia by different religions, writers, philosophers and ordinary people. To examine the problem here, we will follow a distinction that separates evil into two categories: Moral evil and natural evil. The key word here is Theodicy:

An explanation of why a perfectly good, almighty, and all-knowing God permits evil. The term literally means ‘justifying God.’ Although many forms of theodicy have been proposed, some Christian thinkers have rejected as impious any attempt to fathom God’s purposes or to judge God’s actions by human standards. Theodicy | Theological Solutions to Suffering & Evil | Britannica

Moral evil is the pain some humans inflict on one another due to freedom of the will. Natural evil concerns tragedies that sometimes occur in nature, e.g. earthquakes, tsunamis, tornadoes, volcanic eruptions and other natural disasters that inflict immense suffering on humans.

The emotional response to evil and suffering leads atheists and many Christians alike to ask the ‘Where was God?’ question. How can a benevolent, all-powerful God allow human misery and suffering?

To present an answer, we need to look at what some philosophers and theologians have to say on the matter. Many leading atheist philosophers believe God cannot exist because an all-powerful, all-loving deity would not allow suffering in the world because he would have created a world without pain or suffering.

However, on the Christian worldview, God did create a world without suffering but, through sin and rebellion of the first primordial beings, Adam and Eve, both humans and the world have been, and still are, in a fallen state.

But people still question God on this highly emotive issue. About 13 years ago, the former atheist journalist turned Christian, Lee Strobel, commissioned George Barna, the public-opinion pollster, to conduct a nationwide survey in America. The survey included the question: ‘If you could ask God only one question and you knew He would give you an answer, what would you ask?’

The most common response, offered by 17 per cent of those who could think of a question, was, ‘Why is there pain and suffering in the world?’ If God is all-powerful, why does he not prevent most of the bad things happening, things like war and murder, etc?

For the theologian Johann Baptist Metz, it is only through God that war or evil can be fought. His earlier enthusiasm for secularism can be viewed as naïve; but he later became more sceptical when it became apparent that a godless universe is one in which not only does evil not exist but good also. In other words, without God and objective moral values and duties, who is to say the Soviet gulags or other European death camps were ‘good’ or ‘evil’?

Most secular Humanists are decent, well-intentioned people. But why should one be obliged to be ethical in a world devoid of objective rights and wrongs?

The Humanists say they strive for ‘the greater good of humanity’. But the ‘greater good of humanity’ is often twisted by evil men and women. Many dead dictators (and live ones today) had their own ideas on what is best for society, and we know how well that worked out.

A regime working for the ‘greater good of humanity’ have only themselves and their laws to answer to if everything is morally relative. But such a regime, should it act immorally, can only be brought down by appealing to a law above the law, a supreme moral lawgiver.

According to the philosopher William Lane Craig, for all we know, God may well have morally sufficient reasons for permitting the suffering in the world. We all know cases in which we permit suffering because we have morally sufficient reasons for doing so.

God’s justifying reasons might never appear in our lifetime or locale. “Suppose, for example, that God’s purpose for human life is not happiness in this life but the knowledge of God, which is an incommensurable good,” says Dr Craig. “It may be the case, for all we know, that only in a world suffused with natural and moral evil would the maximum number of people freely come to know God and find eternal life.”

So, according to Craig, it seems the summit of existence is Heaven and it may be that for the maximum number of souls to reach that state of bliss that the sufferings of this world have to be endured. If the world was filled with bliss, then Heaven would not be a big deal.

Craig also points out that God could have created a world with little or no suffering, by creating only rabbits. Or, as the philosopher Alvin Plantinga points out: A world containing creatures who are significantly free (and freely perform more good than evil actions) is more valuable, all else being equal, than a world containing no free creatures.

CS Lewis said the case against Christianity that is made out in the world is quite strong. Every war, every shipwreck, every cancer case, every calamity, contributes to making a prima facie case against Christianity. He said: “It is not easy to be a believer in the face of this surface evidence. It calls for a strong faith in Jesus Christ.”

As mentioned, the atrocities carried out by humans against humans, especially in war and sometimes in the name of God, are usually at the forefront of the list of arguments against a morally good God.

But if philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche is right and God is dead, then the logical conclusion of what happened during the Great Wars was neither right nor wrong and ‘evil’ and ‘suffering’ are nothing more than the behaviour of funny-looking creatures at the mercy of physics, chemistry, environment and time; a multitude of molecules in motion on a speck of solar dust called planet Earth.

Think about it. In a godless universe, the guards at the gulags and death camps would not have free will. And even if they did, they would be under no obligation to act in the interests of other fellow ‘primates’, as objective morality would be an illusion.

Surely this is evidence for God’s existence to be more probable than improbable because what happened in the death camps was a moral abomination and not chunks of matter in motion in a meaningless universe?

Some things are really pure evil and, in a strange way, provide evidence for the existence of God. God’s reason for permitting such evil might not emerge until hundreds if not thousands of years’ time.

Consider a micro-example of this on a much more immediate timescale: A person enters a train station platform and sees a crying baby in a pushchair. First thoughts: how could a selfish, evil mother abandon her baby? Surely this is a case of pure moral evil?

The bigger picture paints a different story of a caring, loving, good mother and wife: The mother said goodbye to her husband as she and the baby waited for the train to go shopping. A minute later, a loud crash and scream can be heard on the street outside the station. The mother, in a moment of shock, panic and hysteria, runs out of the station and out onto the street where her husband lies unconscious on the road after being hit by a car.

Crying frantically, she realises the baby is left at the station’s platform and runs back to rescue her child. In summation: We don’t know the full ‘picture’, which only God knows. Furthermore, on the Christian worldview, we are not machines made of meat or God’s cuddly pets.

We live for a relatively short period of time in a fallen, broken world and have freedom of the will to love or hurt other people. But what about the problem of natural evil, the ‘hard question’? In a godless universe, on atheistic naturalism (materialism), there is nothing evil about a tsunami if it brings wonders to the surrounding marine life, including a ‘free lunch’ for both sea creatures and food for ‘pesky human eaters’ (on atheism and those who are Malthusians).

Also, the tectonic plates that shifted and caused the earthquake that resulted in the tsunami regulate temperature within the Earth for its life giving properties. Without tectonic plates, would there be intelligent life on Earth? This might be of no comfort to the survivors of a huge killer wave that took the lives of their loved ones.

However, did God also create tens of billions of ‘perfect’ planets void of tsunamis, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, planets without victims uninhabitable and unsuited to life? From a worldly perspective, it is tragedy that people are the victims of a natural disaster. Even a young child dying of disease could possibly be traced back to the free will of a human industrialist or humans wittingly or unwittingly contaminating, polluting, some environmental feature like a river where the child swam in.

But an all-loving God and eternity awaits many victims, both those who received special revelation and gave themselves to Christ, and those who have never heard of Christ before He was born, have general revelation written on their heart and are morally good.

But surely God could have created a world with different laws of nature where natural disasters never occur? If God did create such a world, then you the reader would not be the same person that you are now. In other words, your identity is the result of this world you were born in. And if you preferred to have been born in a ‘perfect’ other world, you would lose the individuality of the person you are now.

Is it worth the sacrifice in a world where our earthly lifespan in the West is relatively short compared to an eternity with God in Heaven? In The Problem of Pain, CS Lewis wrote that to enter Heaven is to become more human than you ever succeeded in being on earth.8 And Revelation 21:4 tells us:

And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes: and death shall be no more, nor mourning, nor crying, nor sorrow shall be any more, for the former things are passed away.