By Juliana Vasquez | Staff Writer
“If there is an all-powerful, all-good and all-benevolent God, then why is there suffering and evil in the world?”
One of my classes recently attempted to tackle the question above, a question that Christians, agnostics and atheists have grappled with for millennia.
During the Enlightenment period, philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz argued that this is the best of all possible worlds, the best that God could have created, balancing good and evil, which is now referred to as Leibnizian Optimism. Common mantras optimists have are that “this is how it’s supposed to be,” or they believe that if something bad happens, it’s ultimately for the greater good.
The optimism theory is highly criticized because it’s inconsiderate towards human suffering. If your dog passed away, an optimist would likely try to comfort you by saying, “It’s OK, God has a plan for us all, this is how it’s supposed to be.” Although it’s a well-meaning response, it certainly wouldn’t make someone who just lost their pet feel better to be told that their pet was supposed to die because of some greater plan in the Heavens. It’s dismissive of pain and could feel like a slap in the face.
C.S. Lewis argued that free will is what inevitably permits evil and suffering to exist in our world. The basis of the argument is that because God loves us, He wants us to have free will; however, this also allows us to have the option to commit sin and enable evil. Because He loves us, though, He would rather we live in a world with evil than rid us of our freedom.
The free will theory claims that bad things happen because people make poor decisions. This theory also has the potential to be dismissive of human suffering. Let’s go back to the dog example. An advocate for the free will theory would likely try to comfort you by saying, “I’m so sorry your dog died, we live in an evil world, people suck.” That’s not a very comforting response; it makes one feel helpless and pessimistic.
It’s time for us to stop trying to explain why there’s evil and suffering in the world, why good people die, why bad people win and why God doesn’t fix the world we live in with a snap of his fingers. No matter how we attempt to rationalize away the evil in the world, no answer will ever be good enough and no answer fully acknowledges the suffering of humanity.
The world will only continue to spin, and both good and bad things will continue to happen. Instead of wasting our time attempting to solve the great question of why there’s evil and suffering in the world, we should take a step away from our logical mindsets and step into a mindset of empathy.
Sometimes it’s OK not to have a set answer as to why bad things happen. Instead of focusing on answering the question humans have grappled with for millennia, we should focus on empathy towards each other’s circumstances. We should cling to the hope that there’s some sort of reasoning behind the “why’s” of our world, and maybe we don’t need to know that reasoning. When we try to rationalize the world away, we lose sight of what’s right in front of us. So focus on hope, believe that there’s a reason and be compassionate towards each other.
