The other day, it occured to me that it might be really interesting to write a series of blog posts where I explained how, as a believing member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I approach various faith issues and questions. After all, I’ve wrestled with just about every reason people cite for leaving the faith, both the ones specific to the Church like polygamy, blacks and the priesthood, Book of Mormon historicity issues, etc, as well as the broader issues that make people lose their faith in God generally. I’ve heard almost all of them, genuinely wrestled with most of them, and after all of that, I am still very much a believer.
So to start this series off, I wanted to tackle what is, perhaps, the biggest reason why people lose faith in God: theodicy, or the problem of evil. Some people formulate it as “why do bad things happen to good people?” but it’s actually much deeper than that, and cuts to the very core of faith and religion generally. The way that I prefer to formulate it is: “how can evil exist if there is an all-powerful God who loves us?”
The Holistic Approach
First, I have to say that the best take I’ve ever read on this issue is found in the Book of Job. It’s kind of a difficult read, especially in the KJV, because so much is lost in translation. The best commentary on the Book of Job that I’ve read is Rereading Job: Understanding the Ancient World’s Greatest Poem by Michael Austin. I’m not sure I agree with everything in that book, but it did make me completely rethink a lot of things I thought I knew.
The TL;DR of the Book of Job is basically this: we will probably never fully know, in this life, why God permits evil to exist—and that’s kind of the point. We just have to struggle with it. And we must have compassion for those who are struggling with this, and not judge them harshly like Job’s comforters did.
If I were talking to a friend who was struggling with the problem of evil because they were going through a seriously difficult time in their life, I would not try to give them an intellectual answer, or debate philosophy, or anything like that. Instead, I would say something like “I feel you. That really sucks. I’m sorry.” And I would try to do everything I could to comfort them and make it easier.
I’ve lead a pretty charmed life. I’ve never been in combat. I’ve never buried a child. I’ve never been raped or abused. Of course, I’ve experienced pain and heartbreak, but only about as much as I need to say that I’ve had a full life. All things considered, I’ve never really experienced the kind of evil that would make me question the existence of God.
I sincerely hope that if I did experience that kind of evil, I would have the faith to struggle through it, believing that something good would come of that struggle. I hope that I would hold to that faith, even if it turned out that the good would never come until after this mortal life. But maybe I wouldn’t. Maybe I would rail against God. Maybe I would lose my faith for a season.
So I can’t really judge people who do. At the end of the day, all I can really do is “mourn with those who mourn, and comfort those who stand in need of comfort.” (Mosiah 18:9) That’s much more important than trying to give a philosophical or theological answer to this problem.
The Intellectual Approach
But a lot of people who lose faith over this issue don’t lose it over what they’re suffering, but over what they see other people suffering, or over the idea of what they might suffer. So laying aside the holistic approach, here is how I approach the problem of evil on an intellectual and/or philosophical level.
If you formulate the problem of evil as a syllogism, it looks something like this:
- Evil cannot exist if there is an all-powerful God who loves us.
- Evil exists.
- Therefore, either:
- A) there is no God, or
- B) God does not love us, or
- C) God is not all-powerful.
The traditional way most Christians attack this problem is by challenging point 2. What we perceive as evil is not actually evil, because God has a way of turning evil for good. In the fulness of time, we will see that everything in this world really works out for the best. We just need to have faith.
That argument became really difficult to make after all of the horrors and atrocities and genocides of the 20th century, especially the Nazi holocaust. For that reason, I don’t really buy it, though I do think there’s something to be said about the fact that the evil and suffering of this life are ultimately temporary, since all things in this mortal coil will ultimately pass away. More on that later.
As a believing Latter-day Saint, I think the better approach is to challenge point 1 and point 3C. Where most other Christians (especially Calvinists) assume that God is arbitrarily all-powerful, we understand that God is constrained by certain eternal laws, and that if God were to violate those eternal laws, he would “cease to be God.” (Alma 42:13, Mormon 9:19)
Personally, I reject the idea that God is the “unmoved mover,” or a being “without body, parts, or passions.” On the most basic level, I believe that God is a person, much like any of us—that when the Bible says that Moses spoke with God “face to face, as a man speaketh unto his friend” (Exodus 33:11), there’s something literal in that. Laying aside the question of whether Moses literally saw the face of God, what that verse really says is that God is the kind of person you can have a conversation with.
Furthermore, I believe that there is something literal in the phrase “Heavenly Father.” In other words, I believe that all of humanity is the literal offspring of God—that as premortal spirits, we were all born to heavenly parents before we came down here to Earth. Furthermore, I believe that God was once a mortal man like us, and that His ultimate hope for us is that we grow up and become like Him, same as any parent hopes for their children.
This is a theology that is unique to Latter-day Saints, and it gives us a very different take on the problem of evil. Because the only way for us to become like God and receive our exaltation is for all of us to come to this Earth and exercise our agency to choose good or evil. But because many of us choose evil, that brings evil into the world, and God cannot intervene to stop that, because agency is an eternal principle that God cannot violate.
But what God can do—and does do—is send His Son, Jesus Christ, to redeem us from from death and hell, and to make all things new. Jesus Christ saves us from death, because He has power over death. Because of Him, all of us will be resurrected and receive an immortal body, regardless of our choices in this life. He also saves us from sin, by His suffering and atonement in Gethsemane and on the cross. As a sinless man, He paid the ultimate price to settle the cosmic scales, not just for those who repent, but for everyone. His atonement is truly infinite.
Through His atonement, Christ also vicariously suffered all of our pains and afflictions—the evils that we experience in this life, not as a result of any sin or wrongdoing on our own part, but simply by the fact that we live in a fallen world. Because of this, He understands and can empathize with everything we go through. And through His power, all things can—and will—be made new. He is the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End.
This is how I approach the problem of evil as a believing Latter-day Saint. Evil exists because of human agency, which God had given us because He loves us and wants us to become like Him. But ultimately, because of Christ, all evil will pass away. If we accept Christ and become His disciples, our suffering will “give [us] experience, and shall be for [our] good,” because Christ has “descended below them all.” (D&C 122:7-8)
So how can evil exist if there is an all-powerful God who loves us? Because “God so loved the world that He gave His Only Begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved.” (John 3:16-17)
I hope you enjoyed reading my thoughts on that matter. Next week, I’ll tackle an issue that’s more specific to us Latter-day Saints: the question of blacks and the priesthood. My recent thoughts on the subject have made me reconsider a lot of my views, not just about my faith, but about racism, religion, and American history generally. So whether or not you’re a Latter-day Saint, I think you’ll find it interesting.