Can there be a good God in a world of suffering?

Few questions challenge belief in God more than the problem of evil. If God is loving and all-powerful, why do disease, natural disasters, cruelty, and pain exist? For many people, this is the strongest argument against God's existence. This article examines the question logically and argues that a good God and a broken world are not necessarily incompatible. The key lies in understanding why genuine love requires genuine freedom.

Why would a good God allow bad things to happen?

Whether God is good is a sticking point for a lot of people.

"If God is good, why do bad things happen?"

"If God is good, why is there disease and suffering?"

These are legitimate questions and they deserve serious answers, especially if you're questioning whether God exists in the first place. The answer, I'm afraid, is perhaps disappointingly simple, and none the easier for it: given God's purpose of creating genuinely free beings capable of real love, there was no logically coherent way to achieve that purpose without also allowing the possibility of suffering. In short – our freedom had inevitable consequences.

Can God really be good?

So, let's start by asking whether God can be good in the first place.

The short answer is yes, but that's hardly a satisfying answer on its own. Logically, a God that wasn’t good, would scarcely be worthy of being called a God. So, the real question isn't whether He's good — it's how He can be good, given the world we see around us.

The comedian and well-known atheist Stephen Fry was once asked what he'd say to God if he met Him. Paraphrasing, Fry said he'd ask: how dare you create a world with so much suffering — a world with an insect that burrows into the eyes of children to feed?

For many people, that settles it. A good God couldn't create a world like this. So, therefore the God described by believers can't exist.

Are we asking the wrong question about God and suffering?

On the surface, that seems reasonable. But I think it rests on a misunderstanding. Perhaps a misunderstanding of God for sure, but more relevantly, a misunderstanding of the nature of our existence as understood by believers.

I can't promise you'll find the explanation comforting. Suffering stays difficult no matter what conclusions we reach. But once we clarify this misunderstanding, you'll may least see how someone can genuinely believe in a good God while acknowledging the suffering we see around us.

Who is God?

To clarify this misunderstanding and answer the question of suffering, we should begin by considering who God is.

Without a full theological detour: believers understand God to be perfect. Without flaw. All-knowing, all-powerful, present everywhere. God is the standard against which all goodness is measured.

What does that mean, practically? Well, if God is perfect, He must also be perfectly good — a perfect being that wasn't good would be a contradiction. And if God is perfectly good, it follows that He must be perfect love because a perfectly good being would exude love because goodness and love are inextricably linked. So, goodness and love aren't just qualities God happens to have. They're His nature.

Why did God create human beings?

So then, if God is perfect love, then that love must be expressed outward to remain healthy. Love, by definition, needs an object. Without someone to love, and to receive love back from, love disintegrates into self-love — and self-absorbed people are rarely great company.

So, God's love had to be directed beyond Himself. In simple terms, God needed to create beings capable of receiving His love. As Freddie Mercury put it, He had to "find me somebody to love."

Which is where we come in, you probably guessed.

Why did God give us free will?

We were created to be the object of God’s love, His children, in fact, which is why he is described as our Father. But notice that we are children and not pets. Because there is an important difference between people and pets.

God could have created a world of creatures that instinctively loved Him — the way a dog loves its owner. But that's not the same as the love of a child for a parent. A dog's affection is loyal, but it's instinctive. It lacks a conscious decision or truly free choice. Human love is different because it can be freely given or indeed, freely withheld.

Because, for love to mean anything, it must be voluntary. It can't be programmed or compelled or merely instinctive. It must be free and that means God had to create beings with free will — with the capacity to choose to love Him, to reject Him, or perhaps something else entirely, to remain indifferent to Him. Because without that freedom, our love would have no real value. We would be pets, not children.

The cost of free will

Here's where it gets harder.

Imagine a world of billions of people, each free to think, choose, and act as they wish.

Sound familiar? It should because it’s the world you and I live in. We are free and independent beings living alongside billions of others with that same freedom.

But our freedom is never absolute, is it? It’s limited by society through laws social expectations. We are free, but not without responsibility or restriction. And sometimes people’s freedom can be restricted unjustly, even cruelly. Unfortunately, there have always been those who live under tyranny that limits their freedom. They may face even false imprisonment, or worse. And yet even in these cases, where our physical freedom may be impaired, we still retain some ability to act freely — if only in how we respond to tyranny or injustice. As William Wallace puts it in Braveheart: "They may take our lives, but they'll never take our freedom!"

So, we have freedom, but freedom is not guaranteed or absolute. It comes with consequences, the consequences of our own actions and the consequences other’s actions that may affect us or others.

For example, if I drive recklessly and crash into your car, we both suffer for it. My freedom to speed has directly harmed your wellbeing, perhaps physically but hopefully only financially. Or take a smaller example: if I buy the last ticket to a sold-out concert, someone else inevitably misses out — someone I'll likely never meet or know, yet my choice has still affected their freedom.

Scale that up to eight billion people making countless decisions every day, and conflict becomes inevitable. Sometimes it's trivial — a disagreement between friends, a missed concert. Sometimes it's devastating — the war in Ukraine is a current, stark example of how far-reaching one set of choices can be.

Free will is an extraordinary gift because it makes genuine love possible. But it carries an unavoidable cost. The same freedom that lets us love also lets us harm each other, intentionally or not. Once people are truly free, conflict and suffering aren't merely possible — they're inevitable.

Could a world without consequences exist?

Ok, let’s now imagine a world where people have complete freedom to act however they want without restriction or limitation, and their actions can never cause harm to anyone else. Because if we want a world without suffering, this will have to be the case.  

This world sounds ideal, but is it actually possible? Could we have a world without negative consequences?

Take the earlier example of driving over the speed limit. Suppose I’m speeding, and at the same time I’m well over the legal alcohol limit — yet in a world without consequences, if I had an accident no one would be hurt. How would that even work? Would God have to intervene every time I was about to collide with someone or something? Reach his hand down or send and Angel to stop me from hitting a pedestrian, or prevent my car away from hitting another?

if I ran a red light and you were coming through the other way at the same time, or you stepped of the curb without looking as I was coming past, how could there not be negative consequences? It would seem therefore that in such a world, every reckless decision would need its own miracle.

Or another smaller example: let’s imagine that I take someone else's lunch from the office fridge day after day, but they're never bothered by it. Maybe they lose their appetite. Maybe someone else buys them lunch instead. Whatever happens, my selfish choice never costs them anything. Is that likely? Otherwise, how are they not going to get rather annoyed?

So, a world without consequences sounds appealing, but it soon falls apart under scrutiny.

For a world like that to exist, God would have to intervene constantly — suspending the laws of nature whenever harm threatened or bending reality around every selfish choice, so no one ever lost out. And it would have to be a world populated by saints with inexhaustible patience. Someone stealing my lunch everyday would certainly test my good humour. It simply isn't the world we know. It would be a world where cause and effect had been replaced by permanent divine intervention.

Why is suffering unavoidable?

So how can a good God create a world where bad things happen?

Because given God's purpose — creating genuinely free beings capable of real love — there was no logically coherent way to achieve that without also allowing the possibility of suffering.

To be free is to be capable of real choices: to love God, to reject Him, or to pursue our own interests instead. But once that freedom exists, so does the possibility of conflict, small or large.

Freedom always carries risk. Think of a toddler learning to walk – the possibility of it falling is the risk that needs to be taken for it to learn. The same freedom that allows extraordinary kindness also allows terrible cruelty. The same freedom that makes love meaningful makes suffering possible. There's no contradiction here — the conditions required for genuine love are the same conditions that make pain and conflict inevitable.

In a world of billions of free people, bad things aren't merely possible. They're unavoidable — sometimes small, sometimes catastrophic, but always the natural result of choices that have real effects on other people.

If our actions could never cause harm, they could never carry meaning either. Our freedom would be an illusion.

Why does God allow natural disasters and disease?

One issue remains. We've seen how free will brings people into conflict with each other, deliberately or not. But what about suffering that has nothing to do with human choice — the insect that burrows into a child's eye, the catastrophic earthquakes, tidal waves or wildfires? Why should the world be broken just because we're free?

The answer connects back to the same idea: all freedom has consequences.

The question we’re asking is whether it's plausible for a world to exist where the environment always remains totally safe for its habitants, both naturally within itself, but also despite any of the actions of those inhabits. A truly danger free word, like a children’s playground where everything is soft or padded, but also could never be damaged or wear out, despite the children’s best efforts. Consider what that truly danger-free world would require:

• A perfectly stable climate. Without one, there would inevitable be floods and droughts. Yet science tells us that the climatic stability of the last 10,000 years is the exception, not the rule — the planet's climate usually fluctuates wildly between global deserts and global ice ages. We appear to have arrived at just the right moment.
• No tectonic plates. The earth’s surface would have to remain basically as it is otherwise we’d have earthquakes, tidal waves etc. We couldn’t realistically expect those things to happen only where they don’t bother us. So, no moving tectonic plates, no moving earth of any sort in fact, fault lines etc. The planet's surface would have to be fixed exactly as we find it now and, would have to have always been that way as well.
• A radically different earth’s history. Which means that the history of the planet would necessarily be radically different. If the surface of the earth was basically fixed to prevent earthquakes etc caused by movements, either we’d all be living on the Gondwana, that big supercontinent, or the earth would have to have looked as it does now since its beginning. Which would alter much of our understanding of dinosaurs, fossils, geology etc, and of humankind. Science would have to reimagine our history.

Life itself raises a further problem. How could life exist on the planet in a way that avoided suffering? Nature couldn't function as it does now with food chains etc, because life as we know involves some creatures existing by preying on others which has the effect of controlling the populations of those creatures which prevents unnecessary harm to the environment etc, etc.  Disease-causing bacteria, flesh-devouring insects, and predators like big cats or sharks couldn't exist because they cause suffering to other creatures.

Or are we going to exclude animal suffering— but then where does man as a predator fit in? Yes, we moved into farming etc as we evolved, but we remined hunter gathers to some extent at the same time.

Essentially then, a world safe from both all forms of harm would have to look nothing like the one we live in. It would, oddly enough, resemble the Garden of Eden, where the lion lay down with the lamb, if you recall.

So, the danger, disease and suffering in our world are also a byproduct of freedom, which we know is both a right and a responsibility. We have the right to do whatever we want but we have the responsibility to accept the consequences of our actions. And if we are free then the world we inhabit must also be free, free to pursue its freedom to survive.

Otherwise, we are not free indeed. We would be restricted by our environment, which is the irony of the Garden of Eden story. Adan and Eve might have lived in a garden paradise, but they were not really free until they ate the apple. You might even say that was the point of the story?

Conclusion: Can a good God exist in a world of suffering?

Yes — and once you follow the logic, you can understand why.

This isn't fundamentally a question of sin or evil, or of us simply being "bad." It's an inevitability. If God created beings free to choose whether to love Him, those same beings were free to choose themselves instead — and that possibility guarantees an imperfect world, both in human behaviour and in nature itself. It is the both the right and responsibility of freedom.

We live in a world where people have real freedom and actions have consequences. A world where nothing bad could ever happen, and everyone was always safe and happy, wouldn't be this world. It would be utopia. And utopia’s never really work out as well as we imagine.