We often hear about the problem of evil: “If God exists, why is there so much suffering, cruelty, injustice, and darkness in the world?”
That is a serious question. It really troubles people and challenges their view of God—and sometimes whether He even exists.
But there is another question worth asking that forces us to see the other side of the equation:
If there is no God, why is there so much goodness? So much light?
If reality is, at bottom, only impersonal matter and energy, simply the spinning of atoms, why should there be love, beauty, sacrifice, moral obligation, consciousness, reason, human dignity, and the deep sense that life ought to mean something?
Charles Murray, a longtime public intellectual and writer, tells a story when his wife looked at their new-born daughter and said, “I love her far more than evolution requires.”
Parents know what she means. There is a gut-level affection and commitment they feel that goes far beyond the simple need for “survival.”
This kind of love reveals that a straight line of virtue exists, even in a morally dark world.
C. S. Lewis pointed this out in Mere Christianity. He said he used to argue against God because the universe seemed cruel and unjust. But then he asked himself: where did he get the idea of justice in the first place? “A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line.”
And that is the problem of good. If there is no God, why is there so much good in the world? Why do we know that some things are truly wrong? Why are we moved by courage and sacrifice when someone takes a bullet or falls on a grenade? Why does beauty matter so much? Why does love feel sacred? Why do we hunger for meaning and truth?
Christianity does not deny the darkness of life, and it has a framework for understanding it.
The problem of evil asks:
If God exists, where does all this darkness come from?
The problem of good asks:
If God does not exist, where did all this light come from?
Let’s be sure to think on both sides of the equation.