If God is good, why is there so much suffering?

01The objection

At full strength

Children get cancer. Earthquakes bury whole towns. Animals suffered and died for ages before any human being existed. People do terrible things to each other. If an all-good, all-powerful God exists, why does he allow any of it? If you are asking this because of your own pain, it is not a debating point, and nothing here is meant to tidy it away.

The Catechism calls this question “as pressing as it is unavoidable and as painful as it is mysterious,” and says that “no quick answer will suffice.”¹ It quotes St Augustine on his own search: “I sought whence evil comes and there was no solution.”⁷

Start with the evil people choose. Then we will come to the evil nobody chose.

02Moral evil

Freedom, and good brought out of evil

God is in no way the cause of moral evil. He permits it because he respects the freedom of his creatures, and he knows how to bring good from it.³

Aquinas answers his own objection with Augustine: “Since God is the highest good, He would not allow any evil to exist in His works, unless His omnipotence and goodness were such as to bring good even out of evil.”⁶

“You thought evil against me: but God turned it into good, that he might exalt me, as at present you see, and might save many people.”

But freedom does not explain an earthquake, or a deer dying in a forest fire.

03Beyond free will

Animals, earthquakes, and a world on the way

Free will explains a great deal of human cruelty. It does not explain suffering in nature that no one chose. An honest answer has to say something about that, or admit it has nothing to say.

The Catechism asks the question directly: why did God not create a world so perfect that no evil could exist in it? Its answer is that God freely willed a world “in a state of journeying” towards its ultimate perfection. In that process some beings appear and others disappear, with “both constructive and destructive forces of nature.”²

Aquinas argued from the order of creation in the same way: “the perfection of the universe requires that there should be inequality in things, so that every grade of goodness may be realized.” One of those grades, he says, is “the good which can fail in goodness.”⁹

He applied this even to animals: “if all evil were prevented, much good would be absent from the universe.” His example is the lion, which “would cease to live, if there were no slaying of animals.”¹⁰

“Because the creature also itself shall be delivered from the servitude of corruption, into the liberty of the glory of the children of God. For we know that every creature groaneth and travaileth in pain, even till now.”

Be clear about what this does. It is an argument about the whole of creation. It is not a comfort for one creature in pain, and the Church does not offer it as one.

An argument about the whole still leaves a question: does God stand outside the pain he permits?

04The centre

God on the inside of suffering

“And Jesus wept.”

Jesus did not heal every sick person he met; his healings were signs pointing to a deeper healing, the victory over sin and death through his Passover.⁴

On the cross Christ took upon himself the whole weight of evil.⁴ He did not explain suffering from a distance; he entered it, “becoming obedient unto death, even to the death of the cross.”¹³

“And about the ninth hour, Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying: Eli, Eli, lamma sabacthani? That is, My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

The worst evil ever committed, the rejection and murder of God’s only Son, became the place where God brought about the greatest of goods: the glorification of Christ and our redemption.¹⁵ Because of this, suffering itself has a new meaning: it can unite us with his redemptive Passion.⁴

“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.”

And just as important: what still remains mystery.

05Honest limits

What remains mystery

It does not claim that evil is secretly good: “evil never becomes a good.”¹⁵

It does not claim we can see the reason for this suffering, in this life, now. Faith holds that God would not permit an evil without bringing good from it, “by ways that we shall fully know only in eternal life.”⁵

And it does not offer a single sentence as the answer: “Only Christian faith as a whole constitutes the answer to this question.”¹

Aquinas wrote the objection first. The Gospel writes the tears first. Both are honest.