If God is good and all-powerful, why is there so much evil and suffering in the world? It is one of the oldest questions people ask, and one of the most painful. The Bible does not dodge it. Job, the Psalms and the prophets all ask God "How long?" and "Why?" (Habakkuk 1:2–3).
These ten stories about doubt and the problem of evil, retold in our own words, include a philosopher's fury at an earthquake, a message scratched on a cellar wall, a convent in Rwanda, a refugee's bitter joke and a few lighter illustrations about how we know what we believe. They do not tie everything up neatly, but each ends with a takeaway for honest preaching and discussion.
Stories in this collection:
- "The Best of All Possible Worlds?": Voltaire and the Lisbon Earthquake
- "I Believe in God Even When He Is Silent"
- When a Sanctuary Became a Slaughterhouse
- "God Has Gone Fishing"
- "God, Why Don't You Do Something?"
- "Is God Punishing Us?"
- The Spinach Myth: Checking What We Believe
- Hagar's Search for God
- How Many Beans Are in the Jar?
- The Parable of the Flatlanders
"The Best of All Possible Worlds?": Voltaire and the Lisbon Earthquake
Some thinkers have tried to answer the problem of evil by arguing that, of all the worlds God could have made, this one, with its free creatures and natural laws, must be the best possible. The French writer Voltaire found that answer intolerable.
On the morning of 1 November 1755, All Saints' Day, a massive earthquake struck Lisbon. Many people were at Mass when the churches collapsed around them. Fires and a tsunami followed. Historians estimate that between 30,000 and 40,000 people died in the city alone.
Voltaire could not accept that this was simply part of a good God's perfect plan. In his Poem on the Lisbon Disaster he asked how a God who is free, just and good could allow such suffering under his rule.
A few years later he wrote a satirical novel, Candide (1759). Its hero, Candide, travels with his tutor, Dr Pangloss, who insists after every disaster that all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds. They are shipwrecked near Lisbon just as the earthquake strikes. Candide is badly injured, and Pangloss is hanged by the Inquisition. Terrified and bleeding, Candide finally asks himself: if this is the best of all possible worlds, what must the others be like?
Takeaway: Glib answers to suffering can do more harm than good. Christians do not need to pretend that evil is secretly good; the Bible calls death an enemy (1 Corinthians 15:26) that God will one day destroy.
Source: Voltaire, Poem on the Lisbon Disaster (1756) and Candide (1759); discussed in John Stott, The Cross of Christ.
"I Believe in God Even When He Is Silent"
The Holocaust was one of the darkest chapters of modern history, yet it also produced remarkable stories of courage and faith.
According to one widely told account, a Jewish family was hidden by sympathetic neighbours in the cellar of a house. They waited there, month after month, hoping for deliverance. After the war, words were found scratched on the cellar wall. In one common English version they read:
"I believe in the sun even when it does not shine. I believe in love even when it is not given. I believe in God even when he is silent."
Versions of the inscription differ, and some place it in a cellar in Cologne rather than France, so its exact origin is uncertain. But its message has been treasured by countless people facing God's silence.
Takeaway: Faith is not the absence of darkness. Sometimes it is simply refusing to stop believing that the sun is still there behind the clouds.
Source: Reported in Daniel Hans, God on the Witness Stand (Baker, 1987); origin of the inscription uncertain.
When a Sanctuary Became a Slaughterhouse
During the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, Hutu extremists slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Tutsi in about a hundred days. Many Tutsi fled to churches, believing they would find sanctuary there.
Thousands sought refuge at a Benedictine convent at Sovu in southern Rwanda, where Sister Gertrude Mukangango was mother superior. Instead of protecting them, witnesses later said, Sister Gertrude and another nun, Sister Maria Kisito, helped the militia. Between 5,000 and 7,000 people who had sought refuge there were killed. When hundreds hid in a garage on the convent grounds, witnesses testified that the nuns supplied petrol that was used to set it on fire with the people inside.
In 2001 the two nuns were tried in Belgium and convicted for their part in the killings. Sister Kisito was sentenced to twelve years and Sister Gertrude to fifteen.
Writing about the case in The New York Times Magazine that September, a journalist asked how two women who had taken religious vows could betray their faith so terribly. The pictures of the nuns, with their gentle faces and religious habits, seemed to the writer not a picture of innocence but a study in how well evil can disguise itself. The article raised questions the court could not settle: how mass violence suddenly erupts, whether ordinary people are capable of murdering their neighbours, and where evil comes from. The trial, it concluded, could establish what had happened. In the writer's words, "Justice is built to establish the facts of evil. It cannot explain them."
Takeaway: Evil is not only "out there" in monsters. It can disguise itself in religious robes. The Bible's honesty about the human heart (Jeremiah 17:9) calls us to humility and vigilance.
Source: The New York Times Magazine, 9 September 2001; reports of the 2001 Brussels trial.
"God Has Gone Fishing"
In 2001 Roger Herft, then the Anglican Bishop of Newcastle in New South Wales, met a refugee from Croatia. The man had fled his war-torn homeland and settled in Australia some years earlier.
Since then his marriage had broken down and he had lost custody of his children. Worse still, twenty-four members of his family, including his 84-year-old grandfather and a four-month-old niece, had been killed in the fighting back home.
He looked at the bishop and asked where God was when it really mattered. Then he answered his own question. God, he said, had grown fed up with us, put up a sign saying "Gone Fishing" and left us to live in this mess.
Takeaway: Some people's doubts are not intellectual puzzles but open wounds. Before we offer answers, we need to listen, and to lament with them.
Source: Reported in the Lake Macquarie News, 19 December 2001.
"God, Why Don't You Do Something?"
A traditional story.
One cold evening a young woman was walking home from work when she saw a little girl begging on a street corner. The child's clothes were thin and dirty, her hair was matted and her cheeks were red from the cold.
The woman dropped a few coins into the girl's bowl, gave her a smile and walked on. But the further she went, the guiltier she felt. How could she go home to a warm house, a full pantry and a wardrobe of clothes while that little girl shivered on the street?
Her guilt turned into anger, and her anger turned into a prayer. "God," she protested, "how can you let things like this happen? Why don't you do something to help that girl?"
To her surprise, she sensed God answer. "I did do something," he said. "I made you."
Takeaway: When we ask why God does not act, sometimes the answer is that he has already sent us. We are often the means by which he answers the prayers of others.
Source: Traditional story; author unknown.
"Is God Punishing Us?"
In December 1985 the American network NBC ran a week-long series on its evening news about faith and suffering.
The trailers showed a child praying the Lord's Prayer and then asking God about that year's disasters: the earthquake in Mexico City, the Japan Airlines crash that killed 520 people, the spread of AIDS and the famine in Africa. Each advertisement ended with the same question: "Is God punishing us?"
Takeaway: Jesus rejected the idea that every disaster is a punishment for the victims' sins (Luke 13:1–5). Suffering is a call to repentance and compassion, not a scoreboard of who deserves what.
Source: Reported in Daniel Hans, God on the Witness Stand (Baker, 1987).
The Spinach Myth: Checking What We Believe
For generations children were told to eat their spinach so they could grow strong like Popeye, the cartoon sailor who downs a can of it whenever he needs super strength. The idea that spinach is unusually rich in iron became one of the best-known "facts" of nutrition.
In fact, spinach contains no more iron than many other vegetables. For years a popular explanation went around: a German scientist in the nineteenth century had supposedly put a decimal point in the wrong place, making spinach seem ten times richer in iron than it really is. The story was repeated in books, lectures and popular science columns, and many sermons used it as a warning about how errors spread.
Then the British criminologist Mike Sutton investigated. He could find no evidence that the famous decimal-point error ever happened. Early mistaken iron measurements had been corrected in the nineteenth century, and Popeye himself, in a 1932 strip, credited spinach's vitamin A, not its iron, for his strength. The myth about how the myth began was itself a myth.
Takeaway: Falsehoods spread easily, even among careful people. Faith is not afraid of asking how we know what we believe. Like the Bereans, we should "examine the Scriptures" to see whether what we hear is true (Acts 17:11).
Source: Karl Kruszelnicki, Great Moments in Science (ABC, 2001); Mike Sutton's research on the spinach decimal-point story.
Hagar's Search for God
In one strip of the comic Hägar the Horrible, the Viking Hägar kneels to pray. He tells God that it is not easy to believe in him. Nobody ever sees him. Why does he never show himself? How can anyone even know he exists?
As he speaks, one sign after another appears around him. A flower springs into bloom. A volcano erupts in the distance. An eclipse turns the sky black. A shooting star streaks across the heavens. A tidal wave crashes over him. Lightning flashes, a bush bursts into flame, and a stone rolls away from the mouth of a tomb.
Finally Hägar drags himself out of the mud, dripping wet and sitting in darkness. He gives up, he grumbles. Every time he brings up the subject, all he gets is interruptions.
Takeaway: Sometimes the evidence for God is all around us, but we are too busy demanding a sign to notice it. "The heavens declare the glory of God" (Psalm 19:1).
Source: Hägar the Horrible comic strip, created by Dik Browne.
How Many Beans Are in the Jar?
The Christian writer Tim Stafford described a pastor he knew, Stephen Bilynskyj, who held a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Notre Dame and used an unusual object lesson in his confirmation classes.
He would bring a large jar full of beans and ask the young people to guess how many beans it held, writing down every guess. Then he asked them to name their favourite songs, and wrote those down alongside the guesses.
Next he revealed the actual number of beans and congratulated whoever had come closest. Then he turned to the list of songs and asked which one was closest to being right. The students always protested that there was no right answer. Favourite songs are a matter of personal taste.
Finally he asked his real question. When you decide what to believe about God, is that more like guessing the number of beans or more like choosing your favourite song? Almost every time, he said, the students answered that faith is like choosing a favourite song. Bilynskyj disagreed. He would still confirm them, but he did his best to persuade them that faith is about what is actually true.
Takeaway: Christian faith makes claims about reality, not just about personal preference. Paul staked everything on whether the resurrection really happened (1 Corinthians 15:14).
Source: Tim Stafford, Christianity Today, 14 September 1992.
The Parable of the Flatlanders
In 1884 the English schoolmaster Edwin Abbott Abbott published a short book called Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. It imagines creatures who live in a world of only two dimensions, like shapes drawn on a sheet of paper. They have length and width but no height. They can move across their world and along it, but never above or below it, and they cannot even imagine what "up" might mean.
The idea is a helpful picture of the limits of our knowledge of God. Imagine pushing three fingers through the Flatlanders' world. All they would see is three separate circles. They would have no idea that these belonged to one hand.
Or imagine leaning over until your face was half a centimetre above their world. You would be closer to them than two Flatlanders standing side by side, yet they would have no way of knowing you were there.
Or imagine dipping the two ends of a horseshoe into their world. They would see two separate shapes some distance apart and assume they were unrelated objects. They could never guess they were part of one thing, let alone what a horseshoe is for.
We are in a similar position before God. We live in a world of three dimensions, while God is not limited to our dimensions at all. Things that are natural and obvious to him, such as being one God in three persons, or being close to every one of us while remaining unseen, may look as puzzling to us as a hand or a horseshoe would look to a Flatlander.
Takeaway: If God is greater than the world he made, we should expect some things about him, such as the Trinity or his closeness to us, to seem mysterious. Mystery is not the same as contradiction.
Source: Edwin A. Abbott, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884).
Final thoughts
An earthquake, a cellar wall, a convent, a refugee, a begging child, a television trailer, a can of spinach, a cartoon Viking, a jar of beans and a world without height. None of these stories solves the problem of evil, and we should be wary of anyone who claims to. But together they invite honest faith: faith that laments, asks hard questions and still trusts.
"Though he slay me, yet will I hope in him" (Job 13:15). Which of these stories might help someone you know who is struggling with doubt?
More stories you may like:
These stories are retold in our own words for teaching and reflection. Sources are credited under each story.