Suffering and evil in the world

The Book of Genesis tells us that everything that God made was “very good” and that is true (NRSV, 1:31).  And yet you and I know from our own experience and from watching the television news that many bad things happen in the world.  There was the attack on the New York World Trade Centre in 2001; the Indonesian tsunami in 2004; an earthquake caused terrible loss of life and damage in Haiti in January 2010; and then a huge earthquake hit Chile in February 2010.  The summer of 2010 saw terrible suffering in Pakistan as the result of floods.   A huge earthquake and tsunami occurred in Japan in March 2011.

We hear of burglars robbing people and beating them up and we know that bullying can and does happen in schools and workplaces.  When bad things happen people often ask “Why didn’t God do something to stop it? Why did he allow it?”  Going back a step further people may wonder how it is that a world created by God as “very good” has so much evil in it.

In the examples above, we can distinguish between bad things that happen because of the evil actions of people (e.g. attack on the World Trade Centre, robberies, bullying); and bad things that happen as a result of Nature (e.g. tsunamis and earthquakes). 

Moral evil

Free-will

In the case of the evil actions of people (moral evil), we need to remember that God made human beings with free-will – indeed having free-will is one of the things that makes us different from animals.  God made us to love him and that meant that he made us as real persons with wills of our own.  If he wanted us just to obey him and no more, it would have been enough to make us all like mechanical toys.  But he made us to love him and that is something we have to do ourselves of our own free will.  You can force someone to obey you but you can’t force someone to love you. 

The downside of free-will is that human beings can choose to use their free-will to harm other people.  They can also, of course, choose to do an enormous amount of good in the world.