The Problem of Evil I
When Hurricane Beryl made landfall in the summer of 2024, it had already broken records. Not only did it live up to its Category 5 classification and leave over 40 people dead in its wake, but it spiraled from a tropical storm to the highest category hurricane in a mere 42 hours. Beryl claimed lives, destroyed infrastructure, and took down power lines from Grenada to Texas–and some people living in Progreso, Yucatan, blamed more than a freak of nature for the mass destruction.
It’s Poseidon’s fault, some people claimed. Rising from the sea with his signature trident and crown, the statue of the Greek god of the sea had been erected just a few months before Hurricane Beryl. The ten-foot tall, buff-as-a-tank statue had brought tourists to the small town of Progreso, but activists said it had also brought divine vengeance.
Poseidon, you see, is a Greek god. The waters in Yucatan belong to Chaac, a Mayan deity. And Chaac is angered by the idolatry of having a foreign god pollute his waters… or so the story goes. The Mexican government agreed to close the statue and consider having it removed in an act that followers of the Mayan religion hope will spare the region from more storms and suffering.
Throughout history, humans have tried to find explanations for why bad things happen. Take Job, for example. In the biblical book that bears his name, Job doesn’t get to enjoy life for even 13 verses before calamity strikes. Death, disease, loss… the next 42 chapters are difficult to read. His friends provide all sorts of suggestions, telling Job he needs to confess a hidden sin to make this punishment cease, to stop his bellyaching because he’s annoying everyone, to just be happy because everyone else has it much worse, and on and on. The middle of the book reads a bit like a what-not-to-do-when-someone’s-hurting manual. But there’s no “grand reveal” at the end, either: we don’t get a nice explanation for why Job had to suffer. We don’t get a Sunday School answer we can memorize when people ask us why bad things happen. We get a God who reveals Himself in a storm and who, it seems, is acutely interested in Job’s sufferings–and our own.
We may not live in the path of a hurricane like the people of Yucatan, and maybe we haven’t experienced sweeping tragedies like Job, but we, too, experience pain in our everyday lives. Diseases cause suffering and even death. Injuries happen and sometimes don’t ever heal. Acts of terror occur even in the neighborhoods that seem the safest. People die as a result of the sins of others, victims of drunk driving or domestic abuse or a negligent safety inspector. We can pretend that suffering doesn’t matter or explain it away as a natural part of life–up until it impacts us personally.
If there is a god, how could he allow this? Is He seeking vengeance for being slighted–or is there another answer? Is the God of the Bible only interested in human suffering, or is He doing something about it?
In the midst of great sorrow and when confronted with pain and death, it is natural to question God–does He exist? If He does, does He care? If He cares, why won’t He act? Rather than teaching you a script to memorize, our goal is to equip you to engage those around you with the love of Christ and the message of His Gospel. And if you’re someone who has doubts and questions, who’s afraid to ask the questions that you’ve kept to yourself, you’re in good company.
What it Means to Engage the Mind vs. the Heart
There are two broad types of questions people can ask: intellectual questions that are concerned about the mind and having a reasonable answer, and emotional questions that stem from a heart issue and long for a spiritual or beautiful answer.
I had a professor in college who once said, “If you write your term papers the same way you write your love letters, you will never graduate, or never get married, or neither!” In other words, there is a time and place for intellectual arguments and a time and place for emotional arguments. “Why is the sky blue?” and “Why do you love me?” both have the same basic sentence structure and use the same adverb, but they are asking for very different types of proof.
It can be tricky to tell the difference between an intellectual objection and an emotional one, because oftentimes heart issues masquerade as mind concerns. Suffering is a common hidden objection.
A friend of mine once attended a wedding reception for a friend of his family. He struck up a conversation with a man at the table, who happened to be an avowed atheist and who, upon hearing my friend’s Christian convictions, declared, “There is no evidence that God exists.” Over the course of the evening, my friend engaged in friendly conversation with him–and discovered that this man’s daughter had been recently killed by a drunk driver. “I can’t believe in a God who would allow that,” the man finally admitted. What started out as an intellectual call for evidence turned out to be an emotional cry for meaning. This man wasn’t concerned about the ontological argument for God’s existence, the historical evidence for the Bible, or any other scientific proof. The stumbling block that he couldn’t get over was the fact that a seemingly all-powerful God would allow his bright, kind, joyful daughter to be senselessly killed.
An objection can have both intellectual and emotional components to it. After all, we humans have both a mind and a heart, and we rarely (if ever) operate one exclusive of the other. Sometimes, even in the course of a single conversation, we can jump very quickly from mind-thinking to heart-feeling to mind-thinking again.
Consider a martial arts analogy: in traditional USTF Taekwon-Do, there are legal and illegal sparring targets. Illegal targets include the back, below the belt, and the neck. Legal targets fall into two categories: head and torso. Where you attack in a sparring match depends upon what openings your opponent is showing you. If he is guarding his head, chances are his chest is more open to attack. If his guard is chest level, aim for his head. Although it sounds simple enough, it takes years of careful study and drilling in order to recognize and react to openings quickly and effectively.
The same is true when we are engaging others. If we throw an intellectual response at someone who doesn’t have an intellectual question, we become the martial artist who is trying to land a point on a closed target. We will miss an important opportunity to engage in conversations. Learning graceful control, in Taekwon-Do or conversations, is a lifelong pursuit. The goal of a sparring match is to build your partner up, to expose flaws she wouldn’t otherwise see, and to make her a stronger martial artist. When we engage with others, we’re not whaling away in the hopes of coming out on top–we’re gently, respectfully conversing with our questioner where he is at in order to engage him with the truth.
When people come to us with questions about suffering and evil, it can be tempting to try to find the answer that will stop all of their questions. However, this issue isn’t a math problem that can be solved in a detached or emotionless way. We are called to both give an answer to those who ask and walk alongside the hurting, and oftentimes our conversations happen over days, weeks, or years as we build relationships with others. Don’t be afraid to have hard conversations, or to admit when you don’t know the answer to something. He who called you is faithful, and God will strengthen you with His Spirit as you engage the world with the truth and hope of salvation in Christ alone.
Read Part II for more information on addressing the mind vs the heart.