At AYM, one of the things we're passionate about is helping students to explore Christianity. We believe that asking tough questions is part of navigating life and faith for every student, so we do a lot of work to collect and share resources that educate youth on relevant topics. We partner with subject matter experts like Dr. Sean McDowell to unpack topics and questions posed by Christians and non-Christians alike. We're excited to announce that we'll be periodically sharing some of these resources on our AYM blog!

In today's blog post, we'd like to explore the following question: If God is good, why would he allow suffering and evil in this world? This is one of the biggest problems people have with the Christian faith. Injustice, inequality, or even just tragic natural disasters that happen in our world make us wonder: "why couldn't God have created a universe devoid of pain and suffering?" People wonder if God is really all powerful if he seems incapable of creating a perfect world... or people wonder if God is really "good" if he is able to create that world but deliberately chose not to.

This may seem like a difficult question to answer, but in this video, Dr. Sean Mcdowell, Professor in the Christian Apologetics program at Talbot School of Theology, Biola University, breaks down this question:

Dr. Mcdowell helps us understand a few things:

1. If God wanted to create beings capable of love, they must also be capable of free will. If beings are created with free will, they must, by definition, have the ability to make their own choices, and therefore must allow beings to commit evil if they so choose. As Dr. Mcdowell himself succintly puts it:

   "Even God cannot create a world in which there are truly free beings who can love him and love others and force them to do good."

2. Sometimes, God allows evil and suffering to happen to shape or grow us, but also to get us to think about eternity. Further, as C.S. Lewis puts it "God whispers in our pleasures... but shouts in our pains." It is often through pain that God "wakes us up" to the reality of our mortality and moves us to do something about it.

3. The Christian God is unique in that He not only recognizes our pain/suffering, He steps into this world and experiences suffering both WITH us and FOR us. The amazing message of Christianity is that 2000 years ago, Jesus, the Son of God, suffered and died the most brutal death known to man, so God not only knows and understands pain, He went through that pain so that the sins of the world would be taken away.

Check out Dr. Sean Mcdowell's full talk on the problem of evil/suffering here. We also encourage you to check out our AYM Resources tab, where we’ve compiled resources to help provide answers to some of Christianity's toughest questions.