If there is a God, why is there so much evil?

The question assumes certain things about man’s notion of God. Let me list them:

1. God, being the creator of the universe, existed before the universe did. God and the universe, therefore, are distinguishable from each other.
2. God is an all powerful being (omnipotent) and is all good (omnibenevolent). And, he is also all present (omnipresent) and all knowing (omniscient)
3. That God has a plan for the beginning and the end of the universe. He had that plan even before the universe was created.


Now, it is a fact that there is suffering and evil. Many religious believer believe that:

1. Satan is the instigator, the seducer
2. Man is free, and therefore has the choice to do what is good, and to avoid what is evil
3. Man suffers from two kinds of evil: from natural disasters and from other fellow human beings.


Many religious believers also believe that God allowed evil so man can choose the good and learn from the experiences of evil. Many would argue that evil in human history is a step towards the better good. For instance, some race had to suffer from slavery in order for humankind to realize how wrong slavery was. Today, slavery is a crime. There are no slaves. Evil is necessary for humankind to learn from it like a child who learns how to balance upright after he undergoes the pain of tripping, and falling, and of getting hurt as a result. Parents punish their children so that the children may learn the value of self-discipline and moral values.

Perhaps, the problem of evil would not have arisen if the problems encountered by humans were as simple as the examples above. If there were no holocaust, no genocide, no murder, etc – none of those heinous crimes; then it would be irrelevant to ask the why there is evil if God is all powerful, who knows what is going to happen before it happens, and is so good that there is a valid reason for his allowing evil to happen.

But the problem of evil, unfortunately, had to be asked not because there is suffering and evil, but because there are some sufferings that should have been avoided. Like the holocaust. Six millions Jews systematically killed. There were other genocides. But the holocaust was the worst for the fact that it was planned systematically. The evil was just downright too much.

Now, let us imagine a scenario. Suppose you went out for a walk in the park and you saw some children playing soccer. They were around 8 years old. One boy kicked the ball so hard that the ball rolled out into the busy streets. There was a truck. It was going 60kph. A boy runs after the ball. You can see before it happens: the boy is unaware of the truck, neither is the truck driver aware of the boy. Boy steps into the street, in the path of the truck. You can see it happening. You feel in your guts that you have ample time to run after the boy and grab him to safety without having to sacrifice yourself. You know it’s the right thing to do. You chose to act and the boy was saved.

If God had devised a plan for the universe and everything in it before the universe was created, then He would have foreseen this incident of the boy and the truck thousands of years ago. You prevented it from happening because you knew it was the right thing to do. Even if you were to fail, at least you tried. But, if God is infinitely good, and we're not, why didn’t God prevent the holocaust from happening?

Philosophical Cause Of Suffering and Injustice

When you adopt a certain way of making sense of reality, you stick to it as long as you can.  There may be several notions of truth about the self and life in general. But, you have chosen to believe in a certain notion of truth. Why? Because it is your need to believe that there is only one way of making sense of yourself and the world. It is comfortable. It protects you from certain beliefs that you can't get yourself to accept. They cause great discomfort when the world won't agree with your understanding of how the world should be.

This is your understanding of what reality is, what your place is in this world, how the other should relate to you, how you relate to your joys and fears. Seriously questioning your understanding is almost as good as giving up on life. For some, they decide to end their lives.

I think that the most destructive way of thinking about yourself and the world is to place yourself as the center of Reality. In this scenario, you are the arbiter of what is true and what is false, what is good and what is wrong. I am not just talking about being selfish. I am referring to a kind of thinking that runs so deep that it is very hard to notice that you have actually promoted yourself to being the center of reality.

Take for instance the philosophy of Rene Descartes. Descartes was looking for the truth. In fact he was yearning for something that was beyond absolute doubt. During his investigation, he doubted the senses and anything that the senses tell him about the world. He doubted God’s existence and morality (eventually, he was able to restore God in his philosophy). He doubted science. There was, however, one thing that he couldn’t doubt. And that was his existence. The fact that he is thinking, he exists. The fact that he exists, he is thinking. His existence and as a thinking thing were so intertwined, like inseparable Siamese twins, that neither of them could exist without the other. What sort of thinking did he believe defined his existence? It was reason. Or the way he understood reason: whatever rational arguments or conclusions he formed, they must first and foremost satisfy and comfort his self. They must keep him protected from further confusion, doubt, discomfort. That is, whatever he undertakes to understand, ‘it’ must make sense to him. If ‘it’ cannot acquiesce to his way of understanding things, then ‘it’ will be discarded. ‘It’ will be treated as though it is irrational, worse, false.

Let us step back from this scenario, and ask these important questions:

• Is it fair to force reality to make sense to you? 
• Just because something does not make sense to you, is it fair to say that it is false or morally wrong? 
• If you always want to see your partner not as he or she is, but as what he or she is for you, is that fair? 
• Just because it is logical for you, but not logical for the other, is it fair to judge him or her as being wrong and hard headed?

Attachment: the cause of Insecurity and Selfishness

David Hume, a British philosopher of the 18^th century, argues that as much as we want to believe that we have a self, there is no empirical evidence. All that we have are mental impressions that are banded together by memory. Because of the constant conjunction of these mental impressions, a mental habit of connecting these impressions, coupled with the belief that every effect has a cause, has led to the belief that there is something that is thinking these mental impressions. We give it a name: the self. But the self, by itself, is not an impression.

Grammar may also have contributed to the belief in the existence of the self. Take, for example, “Peter is running”. This is the simple 'subject – predicate' form, which has it that the predicate refers to the subject. The predicate, in this case, is the action, and the subject is the acting agent. But, what about 'It is raining'? The predicate is 'raining' and the subject is the 'it'. What is this 'it” that rains? Grammar imposes its structure on reality.

Some may argue that there is a true self that lies behind the mental impressions; or that there is a true self that is different from the empirical self that consists of mental impressions (memory). The feeling that there has to be something does not guarantee that there in fact is a some thing.

In other words, we want so much to believe that something of us, the soul, will live forever, after resigning ourselves to the fact that something of us, the body, will die and turn into ashes. We crave for immortality.

It is this belief in the indestructibility of the self (or, the soul if you wish to call it) and the experience of pain and suffering, that makes us insecure. Centered on this insecurity, we plan our lives for the purpose of surviving.

Wanting so much to believe that we can and must live forever makes it very difficult for us to appreciate the value of compassion and love, and our responsibility towards the well being of the others. We cannot love the others because we are comfortable with our being insecure. We act aggressively towards those who rile up our comfort zone.

Until we let go of the illusion of the 'true' self, we will stay selfish and live in fear.

Insignificant Suffering vs. Significant Suffering (preview)

Life is Suffering
One of Buddhism’s Four Noble Truths states that life is suffering. This does not mean that you have to resign yourself to it. The proper attitude is one of acceptance. Resignation and acceptance are two totally different attitude. Resignation implies that you believe that no matter what you do, your actions lead to suffering. And, since your actions lead to suffering, you commit an erroneous belief that life is bereft of significant meaning. Without meaning, life then is not worth living. More erroneous is the accompanying belief that life is not worth living because nothing makes sense without you there to participate in total pleasure. Such is the resignation attitude: Suffering negates you. Life is suffering because you can’t accept that life can be enjoyable without you being there.

On the other hand, acceptance of life as suffering enables you to embrace both suffering and joy of living. By accepting it, you adopt an objective and realistic stand on the status of life. This affords you to inquire into two kinds of suffering. I will differentiate them into two categories: the insignificant and the significant kinds of suffering. First of all they are both necessary. Experiencing the insignificant one is necessary in that experience allows you to differentiate the significant from the insignificant. It also allows you to realize that, without first experiencing the insignificant, you would not be able to appreciate the significant kind of suffering, which is a kind of joy.

Insignificant Suffering
Because every human being is self centered, he naturally desires to satisfy himself. Once he satisfies himself, he yearns for the same experience in the future as he had in the past. He expects to make the future a replicate of the past. But, reality has another plan in mind. It frustrates every human being who expects reality to do his bidding. As a result of not getting what he wants, he suffers. Yet, he strives on, changing his plans by replacing the failed means with another. Consequently, he suffers, and suffers needlessly. Changing the means changes nothing for as long as the end of desire, which is himself, remains unchanged.

And this is what he must realize if he is to transcend his ego. Holding on to the belief in the ego imprisons him in the cage of unnecessary forms of suffering - a possible life sentence.

Significant Suffering
Life is suffering. If you are stuck in it with your belief in the ego intact, you will suffer unnecessarily. However, by transcending the ego boundaries, life is lived to the fullest and with significant meaning despite suffering that comes along with human living. How is this so?

Stuck in the prison of self centeredness, he is selfish. He behaves selfishly: he yearns for attention. He feels selfishly: he is ever conscious of how he feels, not of how the others feel. He thinks selfishly: that is, he cooks up an intellectually closed system that humans and nonhumans have to conform to.

In a social relation, he treats the other human being as a means to his satisfaction. However, by transcending the ego, he reaches beyond towards the other as a human being, a being with intrinsic value. Then, he learns the true meaning of love. He becomes passionate, sensitive to, and caring for, the well being of the other. When the other suffers, he suffers. When the other dies, he grieves. He grieves not for his loss, but grieves because he realizes the absolute intrinsic value that is the other. He extols the other to his rightful place in the universe. He grieves, he suffers. And, he suffers necessarily, significantly. As the Christians would say, there is ‘joy in suffering’.