How can there be a God in a world with so much suffering?

The Problem of Evil, interrogated.

Welcome to Cosmic Junkyard, a biweekly newsletter about the world’s most interesting unanswered or unanswerable questions. Today I tackle a big one — the Problem of Evil and how God and religions justify suffering. In the process of writing this, I actually, maybe, found an answer. Thank you for reading.

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During my 10-day Vipassana retreat in July, I felt a deep sense of discomfort welling up in me. During 100+ hours of silence, I followed it down through many labyrinths until I reached its source.

What I discovered was that in the center of my heart, there lies a great pool of grief about how much suffering there is in the world.

This question, more than any other issue, has made it difficult for me to fully engage with spirituality or believe in God throughout my life. This question has also tormented and dogged religions and religious philosophical thinkers since time immemorial. It is the Problem of Evil, and it is probably something I’ll be thinking about forever.

I really want to believe in a benevolent god in spite of all the evils in the world. Sometimes I even feel like I do.

But the Problem of Evil rears its head again and again every time I hear a story about a human suffering so deep I can’t even imagine it, or when I fall down the rabbit hole of my own mental health issues.

Over five days in late September, I spent some time exposing myself to some of the most depraved examples of human suffering in the world.

I wandered through the Killing Fields and the Tuol Sleng torture prison in Cambodia and saw piles of skulls stacked on top of each other, some of them so tiny they could fit in the palm of my hand.

I also went to the War Remnants museum in Vietnam, where I saw the effects of Agent Orange and the unimaginable horrors of that unnecessary war laid bare. I crawled through cramped tunnels where Viet Cong members spent years sweating in the darkness as US soldiers exploded thanks to the landmines above. These wars and this violence helped no one, achieved nothing, and leave lasting scars on generations.

As I write this, of course, bombs are falling. Incomprehensible horrors occur in Palestine and Ukraine and Sudan and so many other places in the world. Hurricanes ravage the United States, providing glimpses of the infinite natural disasters that are still to come as global temperatures rise. Horrible tragedies also strike those I love.

And so I keep asking: Why would God allow these things to happen, if there is a God at all?

Here’s my effort at understanding.

Answer #1: Free Will

The most common answer to the Problem of Evil is probably that God made the benevolent decision to allow us to have free will. God decided to basically let us do whatever we want, while giving us the tools we need to awaken to the reality of our interconnectedness on our own time.

This still is hard for me to accept, because it still raises the question of why God created the world with so much evil and temptation and suffering in it in the first place. Why would God place the serpent in the garden at all?

But on the other hand, I can understand the argument that a God that controlled our every move would not be a benevolent God but rather a dictator. We want our children to be free because it is undeniably better that way; allowing them to fail and learn is much better than eternally protecting them and keeping them locked up in towers, and perhaps God feels the same.

But it seems like a pretty massive failure to allow us to commit genocides. Bombs fall on Lebanon. I ache for the state of the world whenever I turn on the news. Life is deeply, deeply unfair. People do not deserve to suffer so much. I can’t wrap my head around why all of this would be allowed if there was a benevolent god.

Maybe, the free will argument goes, all this suffering is the price of freedom. Maybe our freedom is a great gift from our creator. After all, most of these evils I mentioned before were enacted due to someone’s desire to control someone or something else, with perpetually bloody consequences. No matter how we try to justify violence, no one has ever truly been forced into committing these acts. There has always been a choice.

Answer #2: Karma

This is the Vedas’ and the Buddha’s answer to the Problem of Evil. The theory of karma says that all suffering is the result of past misdeeds.

When I was staying at a Buddhist nunnery in Thailand, the head nun gave an extremely elegant explanation of karma. She told us that each of our actions essentially creates an energetic, elemental imprint on our eternal souls. It is this imprint that, at the moment of our death, casts our souls into our next life. This takes away the presence of some kind of ultimate judge at the end of life, which I always found flawed. Instead the universe simply responds to the imprint of our actions.

Regardless, I do appreciate that karma creates space for overcoming past misdeeds through present good deeds. But I still have some issues with the whole karma concept regardless. It just upsets me to think that every horrific thing that happens to people happens because of something their soul has done in a previous life, and that the more bad you do, the more impossible it becomes to escape the cycle of karma. I don’t believe punishment is always the best way to heal wounds, and I especially balk at the idea of Hell or any kind of eternal damnation.

It honestly upsets me to think that people who sinned — even the worst people of all time — are trapped in Hell forever. Yes, I believe people should experience consequences for their actions. But I do not believe in violent torture as a way of remedying evil, ever, and that’s basically Hell, right — eternal violent torture?

I think everyone should have the chance to be redeemed, and I think with time and real reparative justice, everyone can be redeemed eventually. It’s hard for me to think that any kind of truly benevolent God would ever support eternal damnation.

No way out? I can’t accept it.

Answer #3: There Is No Benevolent, Humanoid, All-Powerful God; or, God Is Energy/Nature/Everything

Most religions do include some version of evil, chaos, or destructiveness in their cosmologies. In my opinion (and many philosophers would agree), the presence of these things indicates that God actually may not be all-powerful and/or all-benevolent.

Many religions and thinkers have also explained suffering by saying that actually, all the suffering in the world is necessary — either as a way of learning lessons or because the suffering we experience today is actually the lesser of possible evils. Perhaps all this great suffering was needed to generate much larger amounts of good.

After all, unfortunately, great reforms usually only occur when disaster strikes. And personally, some of my own worst experiences have blossomed into my greatest teachers and have led me into my most profound and wonderful changes.

Still, I believe that this does not account for why an all-powerful God would create a world that requires so much suffering in the first place unless God was not wholly all-powerful or wholly benevolent. This was Plato’s view of God — that God is finite, and also subject to the universe’s constant battle between order and disorder.

Personally, I actually prefer the idea that God is all-powerful but is not entirely benevolent. I also believe this argument isn’t nearly as negative as it sounds.

In Susan Jeffers’s book Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway, she writes about how the universe basically just is energy that responds to whatever we put out. So if we are putting out belief in the benevolent side of the universe, we will see evidence of benevolence and interconnectedness — and of course, if we believe the universe is a terrible, evil place and constantly engage with and feed that energy, that is what we will see.

This argument ultimately feels much more convincing than the idea that a benevolent and all-powerful God would still allow so much suffering to happen.

I also think that believing in this idea actually opens up space to love the universe and God even more deeply. Honestly, my logical mind just probably will never accept the concept of an all-powerful, all-benevolent God while accepting all the suffering in the world. (I also have a lot of other problems with most major religions: anything that says there is only one right way or one truth, or anything that sees religious stories as realities and not lesson-filled myths, has just never made much sense with me).

Ultimately, I find it easier to consciously choose to love a benevolent creator and Source while also acknowledging the presence of other energies and simply choosing not to engage with them when I can.

I have always accessed God and spirituality most easily through nature and creativity. Both nature and creativity have wild, destructive aspects to them. Nature is all about death and rebirth — storms and rot, survival and hunger, roses and thorns.

Meanwhile, the best stories and oldest myths usually involve some kind of underworld journey and destruction that culminates in alchemy and triumph. It seems that wherever you look, there’s proof that there really are all kinds of energies in the world. And not all of them fit neatly into good/evil binaries.

So perhaps God is not all-benevolent, at least not in the way we see benevolence. The Native American concept of Coyote the trickster god sees our creator as someone endowed with a sense of humor and wildness and a sense of creative chaos, and that aligns a lot more with what I’ve seen of the nature of reality around me than the idea of a stately God obsessed with rights, wrongs, perfection, strict moral codes — who would also allow disasters and horrors and genocides to happen.

Change and nuance and wildness and freedom seems to be the nature of our temporary existence on Earth. Which brings me to my next theory:

Answer #4: We Are Immortal Souls Here to Learn Temporary Lessons

I’ve been encountering this idea over and over on my travels — the idea that we are immortal beings from a collective consciousness made of infinite love, who are briefly here on Earth to learn lessons and grow as souls.

This means that all of life is just basically a video game. We are here to play it out. Death is not the end, because death means we will all return to a state of infinite love. So there is no loss and no reason to mourn or get all caught up in terror and horror at it all because this is all just a simulation, and our true nature is eternal love.

This is similar to Buddhism’s ultimate idea of Enlightenment, which says that by seeing our true ephemeral self-less nature, we can escape the wheel of suffering, death and rebirth entirely. Yet it feels more open and accessible than Buddhism, which generally says Enlightenment is only achievable few brilliant minds and can only be achieved after many, many lifetimes of suffering.

The immortal-souls-temporary-on-earth theory, meanwhile, says we all come and go from this state, every single time, and we all elected to come here and try living again.

I enjoy believing this. I sometimes even do really believe it.

In both Buddhism and the less codified immortal-souls theory, the answer to evading suffering lies in the mind. If we can understand that we are all impermanent and eternal and interconnected, then we can escape suffering entirely.

That doesn’t entirely explain why escaping the wheel of suffering is so damn hard or why our souls elected to go to a place with so much suffering. But maybe our souls wanted a challenge. Maybe it’s part of the game.

Most worthwhile experiences in this life seem to require some sort of challenge and sacrifice and grit and sweat. An existence without any suffering at all might be blissful, but perhaps our souls knew somehow that in order to grow even more, we had to go through all of this.

I still am not sure if that exactly explains the horrors I saw in Cambodia and Vietnam, and that are unfolding across the globe, and always seem to be plaguing humanity. But I do know that it seems that people facing the worst and most extreme suffering do have a tendency to find and connect with God and spirituality.

Many of the survivors of the Cambodian genocide spoke about finding peace and forgiveness through meditation. In Man’s Search For Meaning, Victor Frankl was able to write about finding meaning and dignity in the jaws of Auschwitz. Many people have spoken about finding Source through near-death experiences.

In my hour of darkness, sing the Beatles, she is standing right in front of me.

Which brings me to my final answer to the Problem of Evil, which seems like the weakest argument of all for the existence of an all-powerful, all-benevolent God in a world with so much evil, but I think it is actually the strongest and the only one I truly can say I can get behind.

Answer #5: We Can’t Understand and Must Have Faith

The world is far more complex than it seems, and there is so much we do not know and cannot understand. Perhaps and probably, in my opinion, our very existence necessitates suffering in ways that are truly unavoidable, even by the most completely all-powerful being.

Perhaps that all-powerful being is not separate from existence itself, but rather is existence itself, flowing through all of us, generating and destroying everything with each inhale and exhale. Perhaps not. Perhaps we cannot know and will never know.

This is one of Christianity’s best answers to the Problem of Evil, I think, and possibly the only answer that will ever satisfy me: that we cannot fully understand the Problem of Evil, and instead must have faith anyway even though we cannot entirely comprehend God’s actions.

I think of Leonard Cohen’s lyric from Suzanne:

Jesus was a sailor when he walked upon the water, and he spent a long time watching from his lonely hidden tower,

and when at last he knew that only drowning men could see him, he said

all men will be sailors then until the sea shall free them.

Only drowning men could see him. The wound is where the light gets in.

Suffering can often connect us to incredible faith and deep, unshakable belief. For reasons we cannot understand, suffering, like love, can be a direct portal to communion with the divine, which may be our true purpose on Earth.

I do know that during my absolute worst times, I’ve instinctually thrown my hands up to the universe. I’ve asked a benevolent God who loves and cares for me and will always protect me to come and take the wheel.

There are points in life when intellectual posturing just doesn’t feel accurate or even intelligent anymore. When our souls scream what they know on a much deeper level than our thinking minds — that in spite of everything, there is a benevolent God taking care of us, and we are loved and protected, we are here for a reason, and we will be okay.

That it is all okay. Because God is with us. Even if we do not understand. Even in the darkest night when we cannot see, or perhaps especially on these nights, it walks with us through the valley of death.

My intellectual mind balks at the idea of having faith in something it cannot understand. In many ways, the Problem of Evil should be a trump card against God. The concept of an all-powerful, all-benevolent God in a world with so much suffering does not make sense logically.

And yet again and again I am reminded that my mind is flawed — that it often does not have my best interests at heart — and that true insight comes not from the mind, but from the body, and the heart, and deeper connections to places and energies that exist beyond words.

That is where faith comes in.

That is where the light gets in.

And sometimes, in spite of all this or maybe because of all the suffering, I can accept that I do not know the answer to this great problem, and sometimes, I even believe anyway.