Ep. 59 - Why Does A Good God Allow Bad Things？
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
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Summary
Why do bad things happen to good people? Is it God's fault? Or are they the result of human choices? In this episode, I try to answer this question and explain why God is not responsible for all the evil in the world.
Transcript
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So before I went on vacation, I received an email that I wanted to respond to, but that
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I ran out of time, so I thought there's no reason why I can't go back and respond to
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Matt, you are constantly giving God credit for good things that happen, but I notice
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that you never blame him for all the evil in the world.
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If your God exists and he is good, as you claim, how do you explain a world filled with
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rape, murder, torture, terrorism, sex trafficking, and so many other evils?
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It's clear to me that there is no evidence for any kind of God.
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There especially is no evidence for a good God.
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All right, so this is the classic why do bad things happen to good people objection, and
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I think it's a good and important and complex question, and it's one that Christians have
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been talking about and debating and writing about for centuries, since the beginning.
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I also think it's kind of a weak argument against the existence of God, so it's a good
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I don't think it's a great argument against, you know, for the atheists.
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I don't think it's a good argument in the atheist corner.
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I also think that my friend here in the email didn't even use the best version of his own
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He made the same oversight that a lot of atheists surprisingly make when it comes to this objection,
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There are two forms of bad things that might happen to a person, just broadly speaking,
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There are two categories of bad things that happen in the world.
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There's the kind of bad thing that the email describes, which is rape, murder, and so on,
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things that are the result, in other words, of human choices.
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If you're the victim of rape or murder, that is the result of the choice of not yourself,
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but somebody else, the person who is victimizing you.
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Then there are the bad things that may happen to you as a result of your own choices, and
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then there are the bad things that happen to you as the result of a combination of your
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So take, for example, a man who commits a crime, goes to jail, and then is murdered in
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Well, the fact that he was murdered is the result of the choice of the person who murdered
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him, but the fact that he was in jail to be murdered was the result of his own choice.
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And I think a lot of bad things are kind of explained that way, where there's a combination
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of, there's a kind of a whole storm of bad choices blowing this way and that from
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all different directions, and it results in all kinds of bad things.
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The other category, the one that this atheist didn't even mention, but which I think presents
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a greater challenge to believers, that is the category of bad things that happen seemingly
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Well, of course, and there are diseases that are the result of choices that we make, but
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there are many, many, many tragic, millions of tragic examples of people being killed by
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horrible diseases completely apart from any choice at all that they made.
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Take the most tragic example of all, of course, would be a child who dies of cancer.
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How could God create a world where a five-year-old, obviously through no fault of his own, dies
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Or a world where anyone could die of any kind of horrible, agonizing disease at all?
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Now, I'm going to try my best to answer both of these.
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I should warn at the beginning that I am not a theologian, and the answer that I give is
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Now, it's an answer that I hope is grounded in Christian teaching and in Scripture, but
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my point is, if it's a bad answer, or incomplete, or poorly conveyed, then blame me for it, okay?
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Now, to understand these things, we have to go back to the Christian doctrine of the
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And it seems like there are a lot of atheists and secular people who just simply don't
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understand this doctrine and have made no attempt to understand it.
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And that's a problem, because if you're going to raise these kinds of objections against
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Christianity, then you have to understand, at least on some level, this doctrine, because
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Now, it's our belief as Christians that God created, originally, human beings who were
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in complete harmony with him, with each other, with themselves, with nature, with the world.
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So, when an atheist says, well, if God is loving, why didn't he create a utopia?
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Why didn't he create a world filled with nothing but love and happiness and kindness and peace
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And he also created many other forms of life on earth.
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But the thing that separated—and here's the rub, okay—the thing that separated human
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life from all other forms of life is that human life was made in the image of God.
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And to be in his image meant that these humans were not merely slaves to instinct or to nature.
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They were given a will of their own, a free will, the ability to choose between one thing
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or another, and that still is the primary thing that separates us from the animals, is that
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we can make judgments about what we ought to do and what we ought not do.
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And if they make any kinds of choices at all, I'm going to run this way or that way, it
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And even those choices, in the end, go back to instinct.
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We, however, are above that, and so we can assess, this is right, this is wrong, I'm going
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to do the right thing, or I'm going to do the wrong thing.
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And that will, that incredible power that God gave us, is one of the primary things that
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Now, as long as these humans chose to obey God and to remain in communion with him, they
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were happy and they were safe and they were in paradise.
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God ruled over man, and through man, God ruled over nature.
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So we say that man had dominion over nature, dominion over the animals.
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Well, of course, God is really the one who had dominion over nature and the animals, but
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he had dominion over nature, over the animals, through man.
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He ruled through man, and man was able to enjoy that.
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He was able to enjoy that dominion, so long as he submitted to God's authority.
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Now, if you're an atheist, you don't, let me just step to the side here for a minute.
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If you're an atheist, you don't believe that any of this happened.
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But the question that I was asked, and that atheists ask all the time is, why would a good
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I'm just trying to explain how Christians can believe in a good God who allows bad things.
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And this is one of the problems that we run into when it comes to, you know, discussions
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between atheists and theists, is that every conversation eventually goes back to an argument
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And of course, inevitably, it will come back to that.
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But if you're trying to understand, you know, individual Christian doctrines, and if you're
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trying to understand not just our belief in God generally, but the kind of our belief in
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the goodness of God and in the nature, the good, loving nature of God, if you're trying
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to understand that, then you have to be able to put aside for a moment your objections about
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the existence of God completely, and instead look at the individual doctrines.
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So before we got there, now, we just got into the rebellion.
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But before we got to that point, everything makes sense in terms of, well, this is what
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Garden of Eden, paradise, even from an atheist perspective, even though you don't believe in
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God, but I guess you probably would say, well, yeah, if there was a God and he really was
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a good God, that's the kind of world he would have made.
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That's the kind of world he did make, according to Christians.
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That power, that will, that free will, that choice that he gave us.
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So man took that choice, and he used it to rebel against God.
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And for the purposes of this conversation, it doesn't really matter what exactly that
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The exact nature of that choice for this conversation doesn't matter.
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The point is, he was given at every moment a choice between serving himself and serving
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And for a period of time, he chose to serve God.
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Now, the objection to that is, well, why would anyone choose that?
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I mean, it's unreasonable to claim that somebody could be in paradise and then choose to destroy
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Well, it is, in the end, an unreasonable choice.
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But it is, but is it unreasonable to believe that, that a, that a person in paradise would
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You have made in your own life, if you're going to be honest about it, you have made smaller
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I'm sure there have been points in your life when, you know, you have been in a situation
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where there is relative harmony and ease and happiness, and then you do something that
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And later on, you look back on it with a little bit of maturity and wisdom and hopefully with
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some self-awareness, and you say, why did I do that?
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Or take a more extreme example of, but a very common example of somebody who's in basically
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a happy marriage, a peaceful marriage, a marriage with harmony and unity, and then one day they
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And even the affair itself, there's that fleeting physical pleasure that comes with the affair,
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but it's also caked in on both sides and guilt and secrecy and lies and misery and all of that
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And then in the end, it ends up destroying this good, wonderful thing that the adulterer had.
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And that person is going to look back on it later, and they're going to say, why did I do that?
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You know, when they're divorced and they're living alone in their one-bedroom apartment
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and their spouse hates them and their kids hate them, they're going to look back on that
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wonderful thing they had, living in that, you know, in that nice home with the white picket fence
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and the kids and the nice family and the vacations, and now they're just alone in misery.
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So the point is, you know, it's not that hard to understand how a man in paradise could choose
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to destroy it, because people have continued making exactly that choice over and over and
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over again, and you yourself have made it on some level at various points in your life.
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So a man chose to rebel, and there was this break.
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You know, I use the example of marriage for a reason, because that's the example that Scripture
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In describing man's relationship to God, the image of marriage is used frequently.
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And God, through the prophets in the Old Testament, is constantly accusing sinners of being adulterers.
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Not because they're literally committing adultery, although sometimes they are,
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but what he's saying is that they are adulterers because they are betraying him,
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And so it makes sense to say that at the fall, there was this split, this divorce.
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And the unity, the harmony, was destroyed by the free choice of man.
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Man had separated himself from God, and in the process, he had lost, in many respects,
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He found himself at nature's mercy, because he had stepped out of line.
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Well, man extricated himself from that process and ended up literally in the wilderness,
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And so in some sense, he still has dominion over nature,
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And this is where things like disease and senility and human frailty and all of that
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But then the next question is, okay, well, so it makes sense that the first human beings
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Well, then why do we all have to suffer the consequences?
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God could have corrected the problem right away.
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He could have corrected it, balanced the account, changed everything.
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During mankind's first generation, but he chose not to.
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Well, I mean, nobody can speak absolutely to the motivations of God.
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I think that's a very dangerous thing to try to do.
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I'm not even going to attempt it, but I will say this.
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We have to understand that a change occurred, not just to the individual people involved at
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the time personally, but a change occurred to the human species, to the human race.
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These being the first humans, our first parents, them stepping out, them stepping away from that
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Well, kind of logically, by doing that, they took all of us out of harmony.
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Again, it's not that hard to understand when we look at, on a personal level, we look at
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examples that are all around us now, maybe examples that are in our own lives.
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Think about a father who chooses to be abusive, a father who chooses to be an abusive tyrant.
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Well, when the father decides to be like that, a change occurs to the family itself, to the
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nature of the family, and the consequences will be felt through the generations.
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I think a better example is, let's go back to divorce.
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There was the divorce that when man at the fall betrayed God, there was that divorce.
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Think about divorces in, you know, actual personal marriages.
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And let's say it's a divorce where one person, where a man decides to abandon his family.
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Well, in doing that, he has broken the family apart without the direct consent of all the
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And he has set the family on a new course, a bad course.
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And it is a, and he has set off a series of consequences that will be felt all through
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down the line, that will be felt by his children, and his children's children, and his children's
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Even 15 generations later, you could look at children that are being born 15 generations
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later, and you could say correctly that they would not be quite like this if not for the
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You know, there is this, we're all, we are all connected, right?
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We're, especially in a family, we're all, we are all connected, and the choices that we make
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affect others, and the choices that we make as parents have effect on our children and all down
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So it makes sense that this horrible choice that our first parents made would be felt all
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So that's all kind of on the first aspect of the question.
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That's my very brief and insufficient explanation about how disease entered the world and why
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we are suffering the consequences of the fall today.
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But let's look at the second aspect of the question.
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What about all the bad things that happen as a result of people victimizing each other?
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Now, this, I think, is easier to understand, especially in light of what we just talked about,
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Just as he gave Adam and Eve the power to choose, he also gives us the power to choose.
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And though they chose wrongly, and we inevitably suffer the consequences of that wrong choice,
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Now, you can't help it if you were born to a broken family, divorced parents, abusive father,
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Because your likelihood of making the same choice may be increased because your parents
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were terrible, but you don't have to make the same choice.
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And if you end up in the same situation, you know, if your parents were abusive, terrible,
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and then you end up abusive and terrible, I think your parents deserve a lot of the guilt
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and blame for that because they set you on that course.
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But you also deserve 100% of the guilt and blame because in the end, you still made a choice.
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Because choice and the potential for a bad choice is necessary for love to exist.
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And if we really are going to love God and love each other, we have to choose it.
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If you don't choose love, then love is meaningless.
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If your wife doesn't choose to love you, then her love for you means nothing.
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If your wife wants to leave you and leave the marriage, and your only way to keep her with you
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is to lock her in the basement, then the fact that she is still with you and in the marriage
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She's only there because she has no other choice but to be there.
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If we have no choice but to love God, then we are just God's robots.
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And in that case, in a world without choice and without meaningful chosen love,
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then we would have to look at all the misery and all the suffering
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and say that it's all part of some weird, awful game or stage play that God is putting on.
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He wants us to be virtuous, to be holy, to be good, to have joy.
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But choice, the choice to do something, presupposes the option of doing the opposite.
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If you have the choice to do X and X is good, then you must also have the choice to do Y,
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If you had no choice but to do X, then you never had a choice and you didn't choose to do X.
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And if God gives us the choice to do bad or good, but then every time we try to do bad,
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he just reaches out his hand and blocks us from doing it every single time,
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So, why does God allow, you know, a man to set a building on fire?
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For the same reason he allows a man to rush into a burning building and rescue a child from it.
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If a man can't choose acts of cowardice and evil and destruction,
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then he cannot choose acts of courage and self-sacrifice and generosity.
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If we do not want a world with the potential for evil,
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then that means we don't want a world with the potential for good.
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And that's not to say that good is dependent upon evil.
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It's not to say that this isn't dualism we're talking about here.
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I'm merely saying that the point of life is to choose God and choose good.
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And such a point, such a purpose can't be achieved in a world where the opposite choice is impossible.
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God could not have created a world where there is love but no free will.
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God's love is perfect because his will is perfect.
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Which isn't to say that he doesn't have a will.
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But this idea that, well, why didn't God choose a,
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why didn't God make a world where there's love and happiness and harmony,
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And we're all just automatons programmed to always do the good thing.
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can God make a, you know, create a boulder that's so heavy he can't lift it?
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And to say, well, could there be a world with love but no choice and no will?
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It's like saying, can there be a world with up and no down?
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It's just, it doesn't, it doesn't make any sense.
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As Christians, you know, it's like we can't leave this part out of it.
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and if you're trying to understand the Christian belief,
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Man chose to abandon that, chose to serve himself rather than God.
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And that choice has been repeated billions of times down the generations by everybody.
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And many horrible things happen as a result and continue to happen.
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He did, he's not just sitting back and saying, whoops,
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he's not just sitting back and saying, well, you know, sorry about all that, guys.
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God himself came to earth, incarnate, to redeem mankind,
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They talked about the example of the, you know, of the burning building
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Well, God himself was the man who rushed into the building to save us.
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And so even though we live in a world now where there is misery and misfortune
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and pain and suffering and agony and all of those things,
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And this is not the whole picture, the whole story.
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The full point, the full purpose will be realized in the next life.
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But it is inevitable in the meantime that choice is a part of the story
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and that we have to continue making the right choices.
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So hopefully that was a somewhat sufficient explanation.
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Although if you're, I'm trying to find it, I can't find it.
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If you're really looking for, I had the book somewhere.
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If you're really looking for a better explanation as to, you know,
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if you want a better answer to this question, oh, here it is.
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Pick up this book, Problem of Pain by C.S. Lewis.
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It's, you know, it's really short and thin here.
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And he addresses this same question and he does it much better than I do.
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And you can read this whole book in like a couple hours.