If there’s a God why do bad things happen?

Temi Giwa
Unsegmented
Published in
6 min readFeb 18, 2019

One of the thing that I, and many others I know, have struggled with when it comes to faith is the question of “If God loves us and is all powerful why does he allow, so much evil in the world?”.

It’s an age old question. And one that leads many (including myself) to come to a conclusion that one of the statements must be false. That it is either God doesn’t love us (or is impartial) or that he is not all powerful (and therefore does not exist). It’s an interesting conclusion, but it’s one that I have come to understand as false, for many reasons. There are two main ways I approach trying to understand God’s nature (because of the type of person I am): the logical approach and the biblical approach. So let’s get into it.

The Logical Argument

The first thing I do when I’m trying to make a logical argument is to decompose the core statement or belief I’m trying to analyse, pulling apart the individual parts and analysing them for any assumptions I am making. Then testing those assumptions to see if they are true.

So let’s take the statement and turn it on its head a bit so it takes the form of a logical argument.

If God loves us and is all powerful, he would not allow evil to be in the world. Since there is evil in the world, then there is no God.

Let’s take that everything after “since” out as that is the conclusion and we can not test our statement if we already have a conclusion. So we’re left with:

If God loves us and is all powerful, he would not allow evil to be in the world.

We can now break this statement down into three main assumptions:

God loves us

God is all powerful

Any being that loves and is all-powerful will put an end to evil

The first two arguments I will not touch in this article because … well … it would take all day. So for the purpose of this argument let’s assume they are true. (And they would have to be to even begin to consider the third)

The third statement is really the meat of the argument and requires the most attention. Many people read that line and believe that it’s a statement. But it’s not. At the very least, it’s an assumption. And in order for it to be true it means that there has to be some relationship between love, power and evil. So let’s look at the definition of all three (according to the Oxford dictionary):

Love: an intense feeling of deep affection, a great interest and pleasure in something.

Powerful: having great power or strength.

Power: the ability or capacity to do something or act in a particular way. the capacity or ability to direct or influence the behaviour of others or the course of events.

Evil: profoundly immoral and wicked.

So when we look at these two statements we see that if God was all powerful, then he would have the ability and capacity to control the universe and the actions of every being in it. But when we define love, we notice that it only defines the way a person feels about something. It does not give any mention of our intentions towards that thing or the way we behave towards towards the object of that affection. Evil on the other hand describes a state of being.

And this is the reason that I believe that the idea of mingling God’s love for us, his power over us and the existence of evil to be a false logical conclusion. In fact, I would argue that the two are not related. There is nothing in any of those statements that implies or suggests that love and evil can not abide together. By definition alone it is quite possible to have intense feelings of deep affection for something that is profoundly wicked (however unlikely it may seem).

The Biblical Argument

Whenever I make a biblical argument, I always come from the position of faith. Even in times when I have had no faith, I have approached the Bible from a position of faith. I’m being intentionally repetitive because I want you to understand how important this is. If you read a scientific journal but don’t trust the source, no amount of “good science” will convince you. You have to trust your sources otherwise you’ve failed even before you begin. It ’s the same with the Bible, if you do not have faith in the source, no biblical argument will ever convince you, because you don’t take the Bible as truth.

So for the purpose of this article, I would like to ask you to temporarily suspend your disbelief. For the next few minutes, any verse you read you will treat as truth. Are you ready? Good. Let’s go.

In order to understand why God permits evil to exist in the world you have to understand three things. First: the nature of God, second: the nature of his love for mankind and finally the nature of man.

The Bible has always insisted that God loves us, there are far too many scriptures that state this categorically for me to go into. And since we are coming from a position of faith, we will believe this to be true. Next we’ll go into the nature of this love the Bible is so emphatic about.

According to the Bible, love:

is not conceited (arrogant and inflated with pride); it is not rude (unmannerly) and does not act unbecomingly. Love (God’s love in us) does not insist on its own rights or its own way, for it is not self-seeking; it is not touchy or fretful or resentful; it takes no account of the evil done to it [it pays no attention to a suffered wrong].”

1 Corinthians 13:5 AMPC

https://www.bible.com/8/1co.13.5.ampc

This verse tells us a lot about how God defines love. God is pure wisdom, but because his love for us is not proud or does not insist on it’s own way he does not force his wisdom down our throats. He also ignores the evils that we do to him. It is this love that allows evil to exist.

So if we are created in his image, then why are we capable of evil at all. Well I have a theory, it’s highly controversial, but I’ll say it all the same. We are capable of evil because the one who we are created in the image of is also capable of it. The difference between God and Us, is his infinite goodness and power makes it easier for him to always choose good. I believe this is the reason that the Old Testament God was able to act with such wrath. It’s also the reason I think he didn’t want us to eat from the tree of life and knowledge. He knew that, like him, this knowledge would give us greater access to the parts of him that he has such profound control over. It’s also the reason that the angels could fall. But that’s a debate for another day. Perhaps I’ll write more about it some other time (when I’m less afraid of being burnt for blasphemy).

So back to our original topic. We’ve established that God loves us and what that love means for us. How about the nature of man?

Well the Bible has something to say about that as well.

“This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil.”

John 3:19 NIV

https://www.bible.com/111/jhn.3.19.niv

The first thing I notice about this scripture is that it does not say that we are evil, but that we love darkness because our deeds our evil. So man is different from God because mans’ deeds are evil.

We are not inherently evil, but from the day humankind was created or evolved, we have been torn by the decision of whether to be conceited, rude, proud, self-seeking, fretful and resentful. All the things that love is not.

Our hearts are capable of both good and evil

Even before we knew what evil was, we were drawn to it by our lack of power over our base nature. And that is why there is evil in the world, because while there is evil in the heart of man, we rise above this evil every day. Striving for greatness and kindness, we make our way through life. And from the moment the of our first breath to the day we are returned to the ground, we fight to make sure that our deeds our not evil.

Evil exists not because God does not care, but because we do not.

The conclusion

Whether or not you believe that God loves us or not, whether he is all powerful or not. If you are using the argument that the presence of evil in the world is proof that he does not exist, then would you be willing to consider that the fact that there is good in the world proof that he does?

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Published in Unsegmented

A journey into love, life, labour & leisure.

Temi Giwa
Temi Giwa

Written by Temi Giwa

I write about starting and growing new things. Mostly around startups and how to build your own. I also have opinions … lots of them … come fight me 🤦🏾‍♀️