God, terrorism, and the question of evil

A prominent church leader recently made headlines by admitting that the terrorist attacks in Paris in November caused him to doubt God:

I was out and as I was walking I was praying and saying: “God why—why is this happening? Where are you in all this?” and then engaging and talking to God. Yes, I doubt.

Christians often doubt, but the problem with the leader’s comments is not so much the airing of doubts, but rather in not following them up with coherent reasons as to why he, or any other Christian out there, should not go the whole hog and reject God altogether.

It has to be said that there is a peculiar West-o-centric feel to his comments. In the weeks preceding the attacks in Paris, there were multiple terrorist atrocities in Beirut, Sinai, and Nigeria. Did they make him doubt? But why confine ourselves to atrocities? There are around 150,000 deaths every day on Earth, and so the question is not so much how we process death on the streets of Paris, but how we process death anywhere.

I want to deal first with the idea that “no God” can give us answers, before going on to the question of why God allows evil. To do the first part, I want you to come with me on a journey. I’m walking along and I come to a fork in the road. I look down and see someone killed by terrorists in Paris. “Why did this person have to die?” I wonder. I am filled with moral outrage and a longing for justice. There’s a God and He let this happen? Why didn’t He stop it? And why doesn’t He do something about the rest of the evil in the world?

The two roads ahead have signs. The first says “There is no God,” and the second says, “Emmanuel: God with us.” I start to walk down the first and for a while it feels like a good place to be. I get to retain my sense of moral outrage, not only with the perpetrators, but also with God, or perhaps the idea of God. But as I continue, I begin to get the uncomfortable feeling that removing God hasn’t actually answered my questions at all.

Why did people die in Paris? Was it an inherent part of a Universe based on chance, or built into a Universe governed by fate? Those are my two choices on this road, right? And whichever it is, it is nevertheless one of blind, pitiless indifference, as Richard Dawkins once put it. Either way, there’s nothing that I or anyone else could do to stop such things, is there? They just happen!

I carry on and some more disquieting questions arise: Why am I grieving? If I myself am a product of the Universe of Randomness or Fate, where did I get my sense of sorrow from? Furthermore, if there’s nothing but annihilation at the end of the road, why do I feel like I need an explanation? This Universe won’t ever explain to me why these people died. How could it? Do impersonal machines care about their cogs?

What is more, it dawns on me that even though I have a longing for justice and mercy, neither will be served. They can’t. The perpetrators and victims suffered the same fate, didn’t they? Good luck seeking justice out of that! As for mercy, this Universe doesn’t have mercy built into it as a feature.

Then there’s the moral outrage. Where did I get that? On this road, my book starts and finishes with “In the beginning there was nothing”; “In the end there is nothing.” So I have this sense of moral outrage, but the Universe could not care less!

It isn’t just that the Godless road fails to answer my questions; worse than that, it can’t even explain why I have the questions in the first place. I am back to square one, but the original question still remains: “How does a God who is good and omnipotent appear to be impotent or apathetic when it comes to dealing with evil?”

We can be very loose in our definitions, but here is a place that we can’t afford to be. What do we mean by evil? The Paris atrocities? Murders? Genocide? Of course, but since we are asking God why He doesn’t deal with evil, we need to ask the following: If He does judge evil, whose moral standard will He use—His or ours?” And if the answer to that is “His,” then won’t it include a far longer list of evils than we would care to come up with, including our own. And we still want Him to deal with evil?

The skeptic objects: “But this just puts us all in the same category as terrorists, doesn’t it?” The Biblical answer is both “No” and “Yes.” No, of course all sins are not of the same magnitude. There is a hierarchy of sins and in that sense no, we are not all in the same boat. But on the other hand, the Apostle Paul says that the problem of humanity is not that some have sinned, but rather that “All have sinned and come short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). We all—terrorists and everyone else—are condemned for our sin (John 3:18).

Yet the question remains why God doesn’t act to prevent evil things from happening in the first place. As Epicurus put it:

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then He is not omnipotent. Is He able, but not willing? Then He is malevolent. Is He both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is He neither able nor willing? Then why call Him God?

Clever, for sure, yet loaded with a flawed presupposition. This is the idea that to deal with evil, God must do so in the way we think he ought. And if he doesn’t, we’re going to tell him he doesn’t exist. But the problem is that all of the ways we could come up with for God to deal with evil would actually end up destroying not just evil, but humanity as well.

By our own reckoning, before any act of evil takes place—say terrorism—there might be three options for stopping it: God could prevent the person from doing it either by natural or miraculous means; He could destroy them either before or after the deed; or He could “reprogram” them so that they never again have such thoughts.

But with each of these “solutions” there is an insurmountable difficulty. With the first, the person’s heart remains unchanged and so evil remains. With the second, not just the terrorist must be destroyed, but everyone else, too, since we are all guilty before God. And with the third, we lose our humanity and become like beasts.

So does God do nothing? On the contrary, He very much does something, though it is foolishness to the natural man. Through the death and resurrection of Jesus, not only is the problem of evil dealt with, but it is done in such a way as to overcome the three problems mentioned above. It deals with the heart problem by drawing men to God through the Cross and changing their hearts. It deals with the problem of destroying all guilty humanity by offering hope of salvation to all. And it deals with the reprogramming problem by enabling us, through God’s grace, to choose the good and forsake evil.

But what about Paris? Well, of course we don’t have the answer to the “why Paris at that particular time,” but we do have Jesus’ answer to something very similar, which is his comments to those who came to tell Him of the “Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices,” and “the eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell” (Luke 13: 1-5).

Essentially, He refuses to answer the questions “why at Siloam,” “why at that time,” “why this people,” and instead tells His hearers to take it as a warning to repent. No doubt He would give us the same answer today. To the natural man, His answer sounds harsh and cold, yet once we realize Who said it—the One who took nails, thorns and death willingly upon Himself in order to save those who repent—it is clear that the words are in no way harsh or cold.

The implication of His words are that such atrocities should serve as a warning to us all. We are like a rebellious teenager who despises his father and mother, and blames them when he crashes his car when drunk. We rebel against God, and then turn around to castigate Him for not dealing with evil. Yet God does promise to deal with evil. All evil that is, including yours and mine, and those who took the lives of Parisians. With the unrepentant, He will judge their evil after their deaths. But with the repentant, He has already dealt with it through the Cross, and He now offers full forgiveness, adoption into his family, and the promise of a pain-free, suffering-free, and evil-free life in the New Heavens and Earth.

Rob Slane lives with his wife and six home-educated children in Salisbury, England. He is the author of The God Reality: A Critique of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, contributes to the Canadian magazine Reformed Perspective, and blogs on cultural issues from a Biblical perspective at www.theblogmire.com.