Is God Evil?

No problem has been more vexing than wrestling with why, if God exists, he allows evil, pain, and suffering. New Testament (NT) Historian, Bart Ehrman, an ex-evangelical who has written several best-sellers, is a popular Bible critic. Many are shocked, however, to discover that what led him to become an agnostic was not at all related to the historicity of the Bible. In his own words, “The big issue that drove me to agnosticism has to do not with the Bible, but with the pain and suffering in the world… I don’t know how we can say that God exists given the senseless pain and suffering in this world.” Indeed, even the conversion of the most notorious atheist philosopher to theism stopped short of him becoming a follower of Christ because of the acuteness of the problem of evil.

What makes the problem of evil so dramatic is certain background assumptions we hold about the nature and character of God. If God is all good, then he would want to stop all the evil in the world but since evil exists, he apparently must be impotent to stop it. If God is all powerful, then apparently, he must be malevolent for not stopping evil in the world which he supposedly could stop. Either way, a God viewed as all good and powerful cannot, or likely does not, exist given the kinds and amounts of evil in the world. Or so go the arguments.

Of course, theists have responded by providing rebutting or undercutting defeaters to such general arguments against God’s existence. The logical problem of evil has very few supporters these days even if the inductive problem enjoys broader support by non-theists. The latter problem seeks to show that the existence of evil, although logically consistent with the existence of God, counts against or lowers the probability of the truth of theism. But even supposing such non-theist objections have been successfully rebuffed, and the existence of “God” remains unscathed, why think it is the biblical God that exists as opposed to some other god especially when considering troubling Bible passages that, on the face of it, seem to leave God as anything but unscathed?