Suffering takes many forms. Some arise from our own choices and the exercise of free will, while others remain mysterious and beyond our understanding—like this beautiful Canada goose with a broken wing. It will never again fly south for the winter, and without the strength to migrate, it will likely perish from the cold or fall prey to another creature. Most likely, the latter.
We could have prevented the goose’s suffering by keeping it caged for its entire life, protecting it from harm, but also denying it the very freedom it was created for. In much the same way, restricting human freedom to avoid suffering can compromise our dignity and the gift of choice. Just as loving parents sometimes hold back their children from danger, we too must discern when protection serves to love, and when it stifles the spirit that was made to fly.
Would you prefer a world where no one could ever freely choose harm, even if that meant no one could freely love or create? Removing freedom means removing ALL of our freedom.
There is a trade-off between freedom and control; one affects the other.
For those who think in black and white, you praise science and math; however, creating a truly autonomous machine means you cannot also program it to be infallible, as that would eliminate the possibility of malfunction autonomy.
Similarly, then, absolute freedom means the possibility of choosing wrong. The point being, a world without moral choice is a world of biological robots. I am not sure about you, but personally, that is not the type of world I want to live in. And it is through that lens that I ‘painfully’ accept suffering.
In my view, God does not create evil. He (thankfully) permits freedom, and evil is the misuse of that freedom. It is the evil that manifests from original sin. And why then did God allow temptation to occur in the Garden of Eden? It was because we need to have evil in this world as much as we need good. Without contrast, how would you know what is good? Just as you wouldn’t know if your food needs to be salted if you have never tasted bland food.
To further support the idea that evil is necessary…
If you are an engineer, you understand the idea of stress testing. It is 100% necessary if you want to build a sound and lasting structure. Consider this: steel is strengthened through stress, a diamond is produced through the chiselling of the stone, gold needs to be purified through fire, muscles grow through resistance, and software perfection goes through repeated A/B testing.
Thus, a soul without resistance becomes saggy and weak. Just like a world, marriage, or parent-child interaction becomes fragile and pathetic without opposition. A great example would be for me to ask any woman how she would feel if her husband jumped through any hoop she placed before him to please her, because he wants no conflict, no matter how silly that task might be. This woman would not be producing a father or husband, but instead a child. This reframes suffering not as senseless, but formative. Women would lose all sense of happiness. She needs a husband to oppose and challenge her views.
And how can a loving God permit the horrors of this world…
That question assumes God’s job is to fix everything for us, and that is not His role since He loved us so much that He gave us our free will. I believe that one of the biggest reasons we see and experience the suffering that we do is that evil, in itself, is not a problem for God; it is a test or a learning platform for us, and an invitation for us to practice our humanity and grow closer to Him. We do this mainly through prayer and petition.
Christianity teaches that God can even turn malicious intent toward good. The existence of evil does not defeat God; it reveals His ability to bring meaning and transformation from it. In faith-based counselling, I see this every day — how pain, when met with reflection and prayer, becomes a doorway to healing. I accept this without needing to understand it all the time.
The Holocaust was perhaps the most undeniable and brutal example of how one man’s pride led him to violate ‘loving your neighbour as yourself’. It may seem like an extreme case, but it serves as a lesson that will be remembered by the current generation and never forgotten by all future ones. It has been said that those who witnessed Jesus’s death on the cross – the brutality of it – were instantly brought to Christian conversion – not by compassion, but because of the sheer horror of it.
In other words, the sharp contrast between good and evil in many events sharpens our moral awareness. Thus, without moral choice, morality is meaningless. A world of free choice, real freedom, will also contain real consequences. A person’s near loss of life due to poor diet choices is another example of radical changes being made after the medical event.
This is how we as parents form our children. God treats us no differently, except that He is far more merciful, forgiving, and loving than we could ever be towards our own children.
A world without freedom would contain no love, no creativity, and no moral growth. Evil is not proof against God; it is a by-product of freedom, and an opportunity for us to grow, however painfully that might be.