If God is all-loving and all-powerful, why do evil and suffering exist? If a perfectly loving God created man directly, as asserted in Genesis, how does one reconcile this assertion with the overwhelming scientific evidence for man's gradual creation through the cruelly indifferent process of evolution? How does one reconcile the existence of hell with the assertions that God is all-loving and omnipotent?
Why God Allows Evil and Suffering begins with the premise that the principal purpose of man's existence is to experience love with God and one another. It then identifies and examines the prerequisites of love (faith, free will, selflessness, and two others) in order to explain why God's pursuit of this objective necessitated that he create the very conditions that allow for the possibility of evil and suffering.
In order to provide prospective readers with a sense of the kinds of arguments that appear in
Why God Allows Evil and Suffering, a summary of the argument reconciling the existence of hell with the assertion that God is all-loving is provided below. A summary of the argument reconciling evolution with direct creation is provided in the "From the Author" section below. These are just two of many difficult theological questions centering on evil and suffering that are addressed in this book. With a focus on the prerequisites of love,
Why God Allows Evil and Suffering follows the biblical narrative of creation, fall, and redemption to answer every major facet of the problem of evil and suffering in a manner that fully aligns with orthodox Christian theology.
Summary of Argument Reconciling the Existence of Hell with the Existence of a Perfectly Loving God Many people have wrongfully concluded that the existence of hell contradicts the assertions that God is both all-loving and all-powerful. This mistake arises from the failure to understand that love cannot occur without certain prerequisites first being met. One of these prerequisites is that each individual in a relationship must place faith in one another. Since the experience of timeless love with God is the purpose of man's creation, and since heaven consists of the actualization of this experience of eternal love between man and God, individuals cannot enter into an eternal love-based union with God unless they place faith in him.
Faith, by its very nature, cannot be developed in the face of certainty. Following death, man acquires certain knowledge of both God's existence and God's all-loving nature. Those who are faithless at the moment when they acquire this knowledge therefore no longer have the capacity to develop faith, and hence no longer have the capacity to experience love with God.
Evil can be defined as any form of decision-making that undermines love. Since faithlessness undermines love, faithlessness is itself a form of evil. Because man is made with an eternal soul for the purpose of engaging in a timeless loving relationship with the eternal God, those who die in a state of faithlessness therefore become timeless beings of evil when they acquire certain knowledge of God's existence and omnibenevolence. Since God is perfectly loving, it is not unloving for God to banish timeless unloving beings to eternal separation from him. For this reason, hell is not logically inconsistent with the existence of an all-loving and all-powerful God.
