A Challenge To Religion (The Problem of Evil)

A Challenge to Religion

I am a failed Christian. For the first twelve years of my life I attended church, prayed, and had faith in God. However, as I got older, I began to look around. I realized that all was not right with the world. I came to the conclusion that the idea of an all powerful, all knowing, and all good being just didn’t make sense. I couldn’t believe in God, no matter how much I wanted to. Ever since then I have viewed religion as coping mechanism for death. Still, I would not call myself an atheist. For now, I am a very skeptical agnostic because I recognize that there is so little we can actually know about the universe, and that anything is possible, no matter how unlikely it may seem. For this reason, I would like to publish a series of articles covering various reasons for my lack of faith in the hopes that someone will be able to prove me wrong. I encourage any arguments against the points I bring up and hope to have an enlightening discussion about these topics. This brings me to my first problem.

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The problem of evil. According to most monotheistic religions, God is an All-PKG (Powerful, Knowing, Good) being. If God knows everything, can do anything, and truly loves and cares about us, how can one explain the evil that exists in our world? Every day, innocent people are raped and murdered. Hundreds of others are tortured by a fellow human being, or are tortured by an incurable disease that they have no hope of overcoming. How can these truths be reconciled with our idea of God? If God is all knowing, he is aware of the suffering in our world. If he is all good, then he cares about us and doesn’t want to see us in pain. If he is all powerful, then he has the ability to stop suffering. However, in the history of our planet hundreds of wars have brought murder, famine and poverty upon millions of innocent people. Why would God let this happen?

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Some people have told me that everything happens for a reason. When something bad happens, it is God’s way of testing us. Our struggles and our pain make us stronger, and help us grow as people. For most cases, I would say that argument could work. If I lose my job, it could be an inspiration to pursue a better career. But, there are far too many cases where this explanation doesn’t jive. How could anyone grow as a person from being murdered? When you’re murdered, you’re dead, that’s it. How could my violent death, and the suffering of all my loved ones, possibly have any positive effect? What about innocent babies that are killed, or starve to death, or die from some uncontrollable disease? What could the purpose of that be? What about other countries--entire nations of people--that suffer from epidemics of disease and hunger? Why does God show preferential treatment to some of his followers, and simply not give a damn about the rest of them?

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Another argument that I’ve heard on this subject is about freewill. Some people claim that God gives us free will, so that we can choose how we act. Therefore, to allow freewill, God  has to permit these things to happen. Well, that might be able to apply to things like murder and war, but how does freewill keep God from feeding a starving child, or eliminating a terrible disease? The idea that God gives us freewill is something that I also question, and will discuss more in my next post: The Problem of Hell.