Why Does Evil Exists in a God-Created, Good World

Early in March 2022, I found myself at my father’s grave late at night. I had just received a phone call that someone in my immediate family had been taken to jail. This came on the tail of one of my sisters having a heart attack, another close family member being incarcerated and in solitary confinement on suicide watch, news that my husband had a diagnosis of chronic irreversible kidney disease, several deaths of friends and family from COVID-19, overdose, and murder. My life and the lives around mine were in chaos, and the man who stepped in to take care of us, to protect us, and to give us wise counsel and comfort in times like these laid six feet below mine under freshly turned-over soil. It had been two months since I last saw his face. 

I remember leaving my house for the graveyard in a panic. I needed to talk to my dad and get his advice because now my family was looking to me to fill his shoes. When I arrived, I got out of my car and  I began to dig down with my hands into the cold ground that felt like death itself. It wasn’t that I wanted to get down to his casket, I just wanted to get closer. He was right there, at my feet. I just wanted to feel his presence, even though I knew he wasn’t there.

After a few brief minutes of completely losing it, I sat in defeat, tears streaming down my face and I called out to God, “Where are you?”. I was desperate for a sign from the almighty, a sighting of an angel, a breeze, anything. But it was deathly silent. The only thing with me was the air in my lungs turning to small puffs of vapor in the cold air, illumined by my car headlights. I angrily repeated the phrase a few more times into the empty darkness and still nothing. 

It’s such a strange phenomenon to feel the absence of a presence that had been there every second of my life up to that point. And I wasn’t just feeling the absence of my father but also the presence of God who was a constant comfort from the time I was a very small child. He didn’t show up for me. I didn’t feel a sense of comfort or presence, hear a voice, or see a sign of any kind; just a sense of being utterly alone, unseen, and a lack of control. Things did not make sense, everything felt disordered.

What resulted from this night was years of deep depression. I think a piece of my brain shut off that night. From that point on I could only perceive logically. The part of my brain that could think imaginatively was not accessible. This made seminary, particularly my New Testament class that challenged us to look at the historic person of Jesus, more challenging. The absence of the presence of God in my life was a felt reality. Yet I persisted because there was a seed in my heart that wanted to hold on and grow. Something that wanted to seek, find, and understand again. 

Theodicy is the philosophical attempt to explain why evil exists in a God-created, good world. I would argue that evil is the absence of the presence of God. It is the undoing of order in the universe because things are being done without the Creator, who brings everything into order. This is a complex question but one that has been hotly debated for centuries. Perhaps even since the beginning of humanity.   

Dr. Rustin Brian stated in his article The Reality of Nothing: Evil and Theodicy through the Lens of a Horror Film in Fire Brand Magazine, “Evil has no real volition or goal other than chaos, disintegration, and mutation over and against the fundamental order, wholeness, and peace (shalom) of God’s good creation.” I feel that night in the cemetery, was just that, chaos. I truly felt the absence of God and it felt like utter despair, confusion, desperation, and chaos. However, feeling that God is absent does not disprove his existence and goodness. 

Contemporary theology often starts with the argument that God must not exist because of the rampant evil and suffering that takes place. It’s easy to come to this conclusion when observing the suffering in our world. But one would have to understand goodness in order to know that evil is evil. For instance, let’s pretend that someone has lived in a cave their whole life and they observed that it was dark. They wouldn’t have a concept of what darkness was unless they had knowledge of what light and warmth were. Likewise, we cannot recognize pain, suffering, and evil as abnormal unless we have some knowledge of what goodness and peace are.

 I can attest that when going through severe trauma and grief it is easy to fall into the belief that God is not real if suffering exists. It honestly just seems to make the most sense when your brain is trying to deal with pain. I have a loved one who was raped by her stepfather from the time she was five until she was old enough to move out. She would lock herself in a cabinet and pray that God would protect her from him, and yet he would find her time and time again. She is now a self-proclaimed witch because she cannot square how God did not answer her. I’ll be honest, it is hard for me to conceptualize or philosophize this and this sort of thing happens regularly. I would argue that what happened to her was because her parents allowed chaos to reign in their house rather than God. God’s absence in the stepfather’s mind and heart led him to do unspeakable things to an innocent child but it does not disprove that God is real and good. 

To suggest that evil is the absence of the presence of God is to acknowledge that the earth is a separate substance from the Creator. God created something other than himself to interact with and that thing, used its freed will to pull away from its parent. When men decided to take the fruit of the tree, which represented God’s knowledge and wisdom, for themselves they were saying that they wanted the things of God for themselves but without God himself. They essentially divorced themselves from the presence of God with this act. The effect was what they asked for when they took the fruit: a life without the direct presence of the eternal.  YHWH has continually revealed himself to humanity and offered his presence as a way to heal the breach. Jesus came as a way to permanently stand in the breach for our sake; to patch the chasm that appeared when humanity divorced itself. However, humans can still choose to live a life without the presence of God. We can still choose to have a life of disorder and chaos. 

I recently read a devotion called What’s Up with the Scars on Jesus’ Resurrected Body? by Jodie Michele, the author of Disabling Leadership and a woman with cerebral palsy. She was stunned by the fact that Jesus’ body wasn’t perfect, as we think of perfection, in heaven. His scars are still present. As a person with cerebral palsy, she has been told her whole life that when she reaches heaven she will no longer have her disability. She refutes this by saying, “Contrary to popular belief, many of us Christians with disabilities don’t long to be healed. We see value in the different ways our disabilities allow us to interact with God, the world, and ourselves.” Perhaps, we tend to see evil or suffering when there isn’t. I think our minds are trained to see certain diversities in bodies as a bad thing. It’s the absence of God in our thinking. If we can perceive with our mind’s eye that Jodie’s cerebral palsy is not a weakness but an ability to see and interact with God in ways that the average person cannot, her disability becomes a superpower. In short, I think when we consider things without the eyes of God and his heart for all of humanity, which comes from being in His presence, our thoughts can become chaotic and disordered as well. 

This is an incredibly complex theology that I am ill-equipped to try to make sense of. I am certain that goodness exists, that God exists, and that is why things are so acutely painful when things do not go the way God intended them to. We understand what darkness is because we’ve felt the warmth of a fire on our faces. I felt so lost in the cemetery because I had known order, the love of a father, and the love of a heavenly father.