Why didn’t God create a better world?
The Bible doesn’t shy away from the problem of suffering.
Many religions and forms of spirituality deal with suffering in different ways. Some say we deserve it; some say it’s an illusion; some say we have the power to end our own suffering; and some don’t have much to say about it. The Bible’s treatment of suffering would not be best described in any of those ways, but the question of suffering is everywhere.
At its root, the Bible’s explanation for suffering is sin. God created a very good world without human suffering, but once Adam and Eve fell into sin, that opened the door for evil and suffering to come into the world. But why? Why did God allow that to happen at all? Or if God allowed it for the sake of giving them a free will choice, why does God allow so much suffering in this world?
We can maybe understand why some suffering occurs. For example, pain is very unpleasant and can cause suffering, but it’s also the body’s mechanism for letting us know when it’s being damaged. If we didn’t have pain, we could burn our hands on a hot stove or walk on broken glass and not even know it. Death is the means by which God prevents us from living forever in a state of sin. People cause each other suffering because God gives us the free-will decisions to do so, although we might wonder why God doesn’t prevent some of the most heinous acts of evil, such as the Holocaust or the Great Leap Forward or sexual abuse? Couldn’t God have created a world with less suffering? I don’t think anyone would say so. So then, why didn’t he?
To German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz, there can be no other answer than: God did create the best possible world. On the surface, that sounds absurd. Could we seriously not imagine a better world than this one? Maybe a world with more happiness? A world with less suffering? A world with a better ratio of happiness to suffering?
Perhaps a world where the Holocaust and Great Leap Forward never happened, or where the sex trafficking trade wasn’t a thing? Couldn’t God have allowed Hitler, already an anti-Semitic racist, to be killed in World War I, and thus have prevented the Holocaust? Leibniz would probably say something like: Maybe if Hitler had not risen up, someone else would have done something worse. Maybe, in a world with as many free creatures as God wanted to create, this is the least possible amount of suffering there could be.
I find that hard to believe, though. God can and does interfere in human actions without taking away human free will. The Bible talks about many times where he did just that. He set his people free from slavery in Egypt. He prevented the brutal Assyrian army from destroying Jerusalem. He helped David defeat a giant. Surely God could have prevented the Holocaust and made sure no one else did anything worse.
So this is probably not the best possible world. But that’s not the whole story, of course, because there is another world that God also has in mind. That world is not yet here, but when it comes it’s eternal, while this one is temporary. And if what happens in this world goes toward making that world the best possible world, then maybe that helps explain why this world is not a better world. This world may not be designed to guarantee the maximum amount of happiness to everyone in it. Instead, this world is to prepare us for the next, and the reason this world sticks around for as long as it does is because God “is patient toward [us], not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.” And God promises all the benefits of that world to those who trust him in this one.
This is a hard answer to accept sometimes. Why doesn’t God make our world better now? How could the suffering in this life possibly be necessary or helpful in any way? Here’s where I stop and say, “I don’t know.” It’s probably not helpful to speculate on why any one individual instance of suffering might have happened. We may not ever see whatever good God may eventually bring out of it. It could be hundreds of years later on the other side of the world, or it might not even be realized until the next world. In the meantime, Miroslav Volf, in his book The End of Memory, suggests that sometimes episodes of suffering are so terrible that it’s okay and perhaps even best to write them off as useless and meaningless events in our lives. We should not torment ourselves trying to find meaning in suffering, either ours or others’. We can’t possibly comprehend what God is doing.
For me, I think it’s at least possible that the world had to be the way it is in order to maximize the benefits in the next world for the most people. It’s even possible that maybe any world where there was no evil would only have five or ten people in it — maybe beyond that, some free creatures would eventually choose to sin. So if God wanted to save a billion people, the only solution was a world with evil. Even if that inevitably meant billions of other people rejecting God, why should the billion people be deprived of existence and eternal life because some others would reject it? Then again, maybe that’s not it. Maybe there’s some other reason. But maybe is as good as I think we’ll get, and if God knows everything, he knows that’s all we need.
