Why does God allow it

What this group of questions is

The first thing to say is that this is not one question. It arrives as one — why does God allow suffering — and it is asked in at least three registers that need different answers. Running them together is how most replies go wrong.

There is the philosophical version, which is old and formal: if God is able to prevent it he would have to be unwilling, and if he is willing he would have to be unable, and it has not stopped. That is an argument, and arguments can be argued with.

There is the evidential version, which is harder. Not that suffering is logically incompatible with God, but that this much of it, distributed the way it is, is very poor evidence for one. A child’s leukaemia is not a premise in a syllogism. It is a fact about the world that has to be weighed.

And then there is the version most people who type this into a search box are actually asking, which is not an argument at all. Something has happened, and the question is whether there is anyone there. That question does not want a proof, and handing it one is a kind of insult.

A website cannot tell which of the three you are asking. So the pages in this group do something more modest: each takes one narrow piece of the problem and says what the text does and does not do with it.

What the answers here have in common

Three things keep turning up. They are worth stating in advance, because they are the closest thing this group has to a thesis.

The first is that the Bible complains. A great deal of Christian consolation has been built on a picture of faith as calm acceptance, and that picture is not in the source material. Something close to a third of the Psalms are complaints. Job spends thirty-five chapters accusing God of running the world badly, is never once rebuked for it, and at the end is told he spoke rightly about God while the friends who defended God did not. Jeremiah tells God to his face that he has been deceived. The line “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” appears in the Bible twice: once in Psalm 22, and once in the mouth of Jesus, quoting it, from a cross. Whatever else the tradition contains, it contains a great deal of shouting, and the shouting is in the text rather than in an appendix to it.

The second is that the text is much less interested in explaining suffering than its readers are. There is no passage anywhere in which God explains to a sufferer why. Job asks directly and receives a speech about wild goats and the sea and the storehouses of the snow which answers none of it, and the book presents that as the answer anyway. Anyone who tells you the Bible contains a theodicy is describing a system assembled centuries later out of a handful of verses that were doing something else at the time.

The third is the hardest to state without sounding as though it is being used to change the subject. The pattern in the Gospels is not removal but presence. Jesus does not empty the sickbeds of Galilee; Mark has him leave a town with sick people still in it, on purpose, and the reason he gives is not that they did not deserve it. At Lazarus’s tomb, minutes away from raising him, he cries. That is either the most important thing in this group of questions or the most convenient evasion in it. Both readings are available, and this site is not going to pretend the second one is not.

What is not here

No page on this site says that suffering is a lesson, that it builds character, that everything happens for a reason, or that God will not give you more than you can handle. The last of those is a misquotation of a verse about temptation and has its own page. The others are things people say to fill a silence, and they cost more than the silence does.

There is also no page here that resolves the philosophical problem, because it is not resolved. The serious Christian responses — that free will requires the possibility of harm, that a world with reliable causes must be a world where the causes sometimes fall on you, that souls are made rather than issued — are real answers with real costs, and each leaves a residue that its own best defenders admit. Where a page in this group takes a position it says so. Where the evidence stops, it stops.

If that is unsatisfying, it should be. The alternative is a website claiming to have settled in nine hundred words something that has not been settled in two and a half thousand years, and you would be right not to believe it.