The Problem of Evil

- Part One -

"Deliver us from evil."  Does God ask us to pray for help to be delivered from the evil that God creates?

If God is good and loving, how does one account for evil and suffering, for example, in terms of the recent events in Haiti?  If the earthquake and aftermath is God's doing, how can we turn to God for help?  Who is responsible for "what happens" in the world?  If God is all-powerful and all-wise, suffering and evil raises a question about what to believe, if anything, about God.

Some might suggest that 'nobody is perfect and we get what we deserve'; others might suggest 'suffering is beyond our capacity to understand and God has His reasons'.  Some might argue suffering is 'corrective pain like a parent's or healing pain, like a doctor's'; others might argue that suffering 'tests and proves a person or can be in a person's best interest'.  How does such thinking, however, excuse God for causing undeserved or innocent suffering?

Two options appear to be the only available answers:  1)  blame the victim to explains suffering and irrational evil, or 2) find God guilty of causing evil and suffering.  What about a third answer?

Can things like an earthquake, an accident, a murder, etc. be independent of God causing them, of God willing them?  Maybe God is as angered, indignant and saddened by a tragedy as most people are.  Maybe God, like most people, recognizes the unfairness of terrible events and wants to respond with compassion to help those suffering or recovering.  We believe that God is God of the widow, orphan and the poor.  Yet how does it happen that they became poor, orphaned and widowed?

The street slang, 's_ _ _ happens', may be more profound than we imagine in explaining evil and suffering.  Everybody understands 'change'.  Things and people 'change'.  Change, however, is not orderly and does not follow a pattern.  Quantum physics argues that things happen randomly.  For example, a human cell may 'change' or reproduce one way and then, unexplainably, another way.  The change may produce chaos, but it is random, not evil.

Could God make us immune to the laws of nature and random change?  Could God make an exception to gravity, for example, for good people and let other fend for themselves against falling?  If one youth dies in an accident and another youth lives, or one person's home is destroyed by a forest fire and another's home not destroyed, is God approving of one and not the other?  What about thousands who perish in an earthquake or another natural disaster?  

Insurance companies refer to earthquakes,. hurricanes and other disasters as 'acts of God'.  Maybe such events are 'acts of nature' as nature randomly changes.

Of course, the bible is filled with God working miracles.  The stories prove that God cares and is good.  The question most ask, however, is 'why me' when evil and suffering occur.