Reconciling an Omnibenevolent Omnipotent God with Natural Evil

If God possesses unlimited power, He would have the ability to prevent suffering; and if He is perfectly loving, He would also have the desire to prevent it. This argument has plagued humanity for centuries. Nevertheless, there are natural evils in this world of ours, like earthquakes, plagues, and animal suffering. These are not man's sin, but they are apparently part of nature itself. This is a painful reality that can make the world cruel, and it is a profound crisis of faith. And yet how should we trust a powerful, loving God, when nature appears so unkind? This tension is tangible, and psychology proves that this contradiction brings intense suffering (Park et al., 2024). However, this does not have to end in faith. The existence of natural evil does not automatically disprove a good and powerful God. Instead, it can be understood through the necessity of a lawful world for free creatures, the idea that suffering was a necessary part of creating valuable beings like humans, and the belief in a God who suffers with His creation.

To begin with, it is the only type of world in which free, rational beings can reasonably live and act when it is a world governed by orderly, natural laws. In order for humans to learn, love, and explore the world, it must be predictable. Just as we can only plant crops if we believe in the seasons, and we can only make a shelter if we understand the laws of gravity. This predictability has its downside as well; the same rules of nature that allow a bird to fly allow every tornado to destroy the town. The same biological processes that enable our bodies to heal also make cancer possible. God does not constantly intervene in these laws because, if he did, the world would be an arbitrary and chaotic place in which science, reason, and genuine choice would be impossible. As theologian Christopher Southgate suggests, the beautiful and the terrible in nature are part of a "package deal" (Southgate, 2022, p. 8). He explains how the very same evolutionary processes of struggle and competition "lead both to so much suffering, and also to the refining of the characteristics of creatures" (Southgate, 2022, p. 7). Therefore, a world with orderly natural laws—which sometimes yield natural evil—is the precondition of a world in which free, rational life can flourish.

From the Christian perspective, this specific evolutionary history towards human beings was the only way God could create beings of such unique value. Evolution's pain and suffering were the cost required to bring us into existence. Philosopher Daniel Molto offers a defense based on this idea. According to him, for any human being to exist at all, they must essentially be a human, and the human species could not have developed without the very same evolutionary history that in fact did take place, which was replete with suffering and predation (Molto, 2024). He argues, "The existence of pain in the evolutionary story leading up to humans was necessary for the existence not just of the species, but also of each and every human" (Molto, 2024, p. 9). An omnipotent God, in this view, cannot do anything whatsoever in any way, but one who can do His will in the best way. Creating human beings—with our capacity for art, love, worship, and morality—was an objective so valuable that it was worth achieving at the considerable cost of natural evil throughout the evolutionary process. This is often called the "only way" argument. Southgate summarizes it by stating, "There is no reason to suppose that there was any way open to God by which God could have created a world with this richness of beauty, complexity, ingenuity and intricate interdependence of creatures, with a better balance between these values and the disvalues of struggle, competition and suffering" (Southgate, 2022, p. 8).  This means God may have had no better way to create a world with such amazing creatures as us. So, the value of human life was worth the cost of natural suffering.

The bible shows that God is not detached from our pain, but He joins us in it. The problem of evil often portrays God as a detached ruler, but the scripture places before us the reality of a suffering God with respect to His world. The supreme proof of this is the cross of Jesus Christ, where God in human form endured supreme pain, betrayal, and death. This proves that God is not passive about evil; He conquers it from within by suffering it Himself. Southgate cites that the "only way" response needs to be "supplemented by a sense of God’s co-suffering with creatures, an identification which reaches its climax at the Cross of Christ" (Southgate, 2022, p. 8). The Holy Scripture reveals that the Lord is not unmindful of our suffering. He goes through it with us. In Isaiah, the scripture says, “In all their distress he too was distressed” (Isaiah 63:9). Thus, the solution to the problem of suffering provided by God is not merely a philosophical one, but a personal one: He not only shares our pain but gives us hope and the promise of eventual redemption.

Conclusively, natural evil is a great mystery, but it does not exhaustively work against God. Only a world that is stable in natural laws can have free and meaningful human life, although these same laws are the cause of harm at times. It is possible that the great worth of the human life demanded the process of evolution that was painful and hard. Above all, the Christian God is not a remote power, but a sympathetic partner in suffering, who revealed His unity in the person of Jesus Christ. While the question of "why?" can never be answered completely in this world, these views afford a solid groundwork of faith, demonstrating the fact that faith in a good and mighty God is compatible with the harsh facts of the suffering world.