The Big Questions About God Sýnishorn

Why Does God Allow Suffering and Pain?

Possibly one of the biggest questions of all is the problem of how God can allow suffering and pain. It often seems to be the biggest weapon atheists use against Christians.

One of the assumptions behind this question is that pain is bad. I guess we can all agree with that. Hand in hand is the assumption that we’d all be better off if we never experienced pain; the pain has no purpose.

Pain does have a purpose. Let me give you an example.

Leprosy is a horrible disease that still exists in some parts of the world. Untreated, one of the symptoms is the loss of feeling in the extremities, such as noses, ears, fingers, and toes. There have been cases of people with leprosy burning their fingers in a fire or having their toes eaten off by rats in the night, and they never felt a thing. So pain, in real life, tells us there’s something wrong, there’s some danger, something abnormal.

If you put on the hat of atheistic evolution, you’d logically have to say pain and suffering are normal. It’s just the way things are in a world where life has developed due to the survival of the fittest. You might even say pain and suffering have a positive purpose. They weed out the weak and allow the strong to survive. You have to get used to it - grin and bear it.

This thinking contradicts what we know to be true from common sense – pain is abnormal, and it’s there to remind us something is wrong. The Christian explanation for the suffering in the world is much more true to life. Not only that, but it agrees with the aspirations of humanity.

The Christian explanation for suffering begins by agreeing we don’t live in a perfect world. If I designed my perfect world, it wouldn’t include pain and suffering, grief and death! The Bible tells us God created a perfect world, so the pain we see around us is not normal. It’s telling us something is wrong with the world and that something needs fixing.

The Christian story is the story of God’s plan to fix this world. The Bible says there will be new heavens and a new earth, in which there will be no more suffering or pain. That’s a much better story. I refuse to accept pain and suffering as simply normal. I’m looking for a better world.

– Eliezer Gonzalez