Why does a good God allow evil?

A common issue that comes up when discussing the existence of God is the prevalence of pain, injustice, and (general) evil in the world. “If God exists, then why does He allow people to do nasty things to each other, and why are there wars and disease amongst us?” is the common refrain. 

This is a valid, reasonable question, and all those who believe in an omnipotent, loving God should be able to provide a clear answer. Here, I will try to provide a Biblical answer, in brief. For a more detailed response, I would encourage you to read The Problem of Pain by C.S. Lewis.

When God created mankind, He had a choice: should He create a kind of creature that would do as He commanded automatically, or should He create one that could choose whether or not to obey Him? Asked differently, did He want a robotic being, which does what it is programmed to do, or did He want a being that could have a real relationship with Him? According to the Bible, God chose the latter. He wanted to make people who were capable of relating to Him in a real and loving way, rather than in an automatic, robotic manner. Simply put, God chose love.

Love: the surprising answer to a vexing question

Love is a central theme in the Bible, as it is the core tenet upon which God rests His kingdom. God declares that He is love (1 John 4:8). When Jesus was asked which were the greatest commandments that God wants man to obey, He replied: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like it: You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” (Matthew 22:37–39). He further declared that all of the Old Testament commandments hang on these two core principles. 

The main reason that Jesus came to earth was to display God’s love for mankind: For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. (John 3:16). Clearly, love is essential to God.

It is, therefore, not surprising that when He made human beings as a special part of His creation (Genesis 1:26), He wanted them to be capable of loving Him. Love and obedience are intimately connected in God’s Word — the simplest test of whether someone loves God is to find out whether they obey Him (John 14:15; 1 John 5:3). It was this test that God set before Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. The instruction was a simple one, yet they disobeyed it.

Obedience is the test of loving God

Love and hate are two sides of the same coin, as are obedience and disobedience. No one can be forced to love: they must choose to do so voluntarily. Similarly, true obedience can only exist if there is a real option to disobey. God could not, therefore, have created Eden without making at least one thing forbidden. If there were no forbidden fruit, then Adam and Eve’s ‘obedience’ would not have been real. 

God created people with a free will so that they could choose to love and obey Him, but this meant that there had to be an option to disobey Him. The path of disobedience is the one that we have chosen, and this is the reason that there is pain, injustice, and evil in the world today.

“But if God knew that mankind would disobey Him and that this would lead to pain and suffering, then why didn’t He put us in a world where disobedience would be impossible, and we could all live happily ever after?” This is another valid, reasonable question. Yet the answer is the same: God chose love. In such a world, love would be impossible, and human beings would thus be incapable of loving.

A world without love, without evil

Imagine your life without love. Consider that your family and friends, your nearest and dearest, meant nothing more to you than a means to an end. Consider a life where every relationship you have has the simple purpose of aiding your own survival and reproduction. 

You appreciate your parents only because they brought you into the world and you have their genes. Similarly, your siblings and cousins are valuable to you insofar as they share some of your genetics. Friends that can provide you with wealth and health are useful; those that cannot assist you in these ways are unimportant. Furthermore, the person you ‘fall in love with’ is really just a potential provider of the other chromosomes necessary for reproduction.

This is the world that would exist had God not chosen love, or if God did not exist, or if an impersonal force ‘created’ the world. The impersonal force that many people believe in today (to take the place of God) is evolution. If evolution were the single driving force that ‘created’ the world, then love would simply not exist. 

On the flip side, no one living in such a world could define evil, either. The terrible things that we call ‘evil’ (rape, murder, etc.) in the world we live in would be known as normal behavior driven by ‘selfish genes’, just as it is in animals. 

Love makes no evolutionary sense

Love provides no evolutionary advantage to those who have it. An arranged, loveless marriage or a marriage of convenience can provide the couple with as many children as a marriage based on true love can. Indeed, marriages without love make it easy for the people involved to be unfaithful to each other, which provides even further opportunities for reproduction. 

Yet a loving couple who is incapable of having, or have decided not to have, children, may remain faithful for their entire lives. In terms of evolution, the latter couple are pathetically unsuccessful. Thus, evolution would have destroyed love (if it existed in the first place) within the first few generations of its operating on primitive hominids.

In an attempt to explain away the existence of love, some evolutionists suggest that love is an illusion. The chemical workings in our brains activated by some gene in our DNA allow us to have this ‘loving feeling’. Evolution, in its great ‘wisdom’ (despite being an impersonal force) has allowed the ‘love gene’ to persist for the survival of mankind. 

The examples I provided above destroy this argument. A couple that is ‘deluded’ into believing that they are in love has no evolutionary advantage — and many potential disadvantages — when compared to a couple that lives with no such delusion.

Will you choose love?

Finally, if you can imagine a world without love, then you can imagine one without God. As I said earlier, the God of the Bible declares that He is love. I have heard the saying that: “I won’t mind going to Hell, because all the fun people will be there”. The definition of Hell is a place from which God has withdrawn His presence. You may indeed find former friends there, but you will not love them. Love cannot exist where God will not enter. 

In contrast, Heaven is an eternal celebration of the love of God. Perfect love of God will go hand-in-hand with perfect love for each other as those in Heaven spend eternity in His presence. If you can imagine a world of pure love without evil, where everyone present does God’s will and lives for Him and each other without reservation, then you are contemplating Heaven.

Just as Adam and Eve had a choice, so do each of their offspring. I ask you today, will you choose love?