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Is God Dead?
The existence of evil and suffering in the world is a complex and far-reaching reality. Consequently, understanding God’s role in the existence of evil is critically important in helping us ultimately to answer the question: is God dead? For we can safely conclude that if God is dead, or if He never existed in the first place, then the problem of evil and suffering goes away in the sense that it has no Causal Agent for us to place blame upon–evil just is. It is not that the evil and the suffering itself go away, but the logical problem of why a loving God would allow it to go away. But it really is not that easy. We have now been arguing for well over a year that not only does God indeed exist and is alive, but in recent weeks, we have argued that He has a morally sufficient reason for allowing evil (both moral and natural) and suffering to exist in the world that He created. However, even though we have presented a brief Free Will Defense as an integral part of that argument, there is what seems to be inexplicable evil and suffering in the world all the same. Moreover, human or angelic free will alone does not fully explain God’s relation to that suffering.
There are, in fact, other possible reasons that God is morally justified in allowing evil and suffering to exist. Christian philosopher Elenore Stump sums up the Christian stance quite well. Stump writes, “There is no a priori reason for thinking that there should be just one morally sufficient reason for God’s allowing the whole panoply of sentient suffering or that a solution to the problem of suffering must be based on only one kind of benefit defeating suffering. And so, it need not be the case that justification for God’s al lowing suffering of mentally fully functional human adults applies to all other cases of suffering as well.” I agree with Stump here. There are, no doubt, a multitude of morally sufficient reasons why God allows evil and suffering to exist, with no blanket answer that sufficiently satisfies the question for all cases of evil.
