The Problem of Evil: Does Suffering Disprove God? -By Agwa Marvellous .O

Things have happened, things are happening and things are still going to happen that will make men question the existence of God.

As Christians, we all grew up with the ideology that God is all powerful, God is all knowing and God is perfectly good. If not all, but I believe the majority of Christians have that ideology about God. Now the question is, if God is all of the three I have listed above (all powerful, all knowing and perfectly good), why all these suffering? We should put here in mind that “suffering” as used here covers a lot. This leads us to the bone of contention: “Does Suffering Disprove God?”

Let me be honest with you, I have thought about this a lot, and I mean a lot. There have been moments I laid on my bed, facing the ceiling with news of tragedy in my mind, where I caught myself wondering, “God, where are you in this?” I think most people have had that moment, whether they admit it or not. So let’s talk about it honestly. Does suffering prove that God doesn’t exist? For me, that question became painfully real on September 6, 2024. Let me tell you what happened that faithful day.

It was on a Friday around “8:30 p.m.” I just closed from work that evening, so I boarded a tricycle (kekenapep) to take me home. Suddenly my phone started ringing but I was unable to get the phone from my pocket, because I was sitting at the front. Immediately I got down from the tricycle I took the phone from my pocket and checked who called; it was my mum, so I called her back. Immediately she answered the call, she was like “my pikin where you dey?, you don reach house? your elder brother go buy fuel since he never still comes back ooo, and we dey hear gunshot for the area”. So I tried calming her down, but she ended the call. When I got home I called my elder brother, the phone was ringing but there was no response. I kept trying, but to no avail. I called my mum afterward, but her phone was switched off. So around 2 a.m. which is early Saturday morning, I called my eldest sister, who told me my brother was shot and he was in ICU (Coma). Immediately I heard that I was like “God wetin dey happen?” so I started praying, singing, doing all sorts of things just to talk to God. Three hours later, which is 5 a.m. I got a call from my eldest sister and immediately I picked the call. The statement she made was that “Vwede God done leave us”, “Rukevwe done die”. Immediately I heard that, I ended the call and I was like “God…where you dey?” This tragic incident brought a lot of pain and reasons to question the existence of God. My mum was heartbroken that she almost stopped going to church. But one thing I believe is that; you going to church, and you stop going to church does not change God. He is forever the same. One painful part of this story is that my elder brother “Rukevwe” just welcomed his second child into the family, who was just a month and three days old, and my mum went to his house that Friday for a visit and that same day her first son was killed. What a terrible story.

When something like this happens, faith stops being a theory. You’re no longer debating philosophy. You’re asking, “God, why didn’t you stop this?” This question lies at the heart of what philosophers call the problem of suffering. The argument is simple. God is supposed to be all powerful, meaning he can do anything. God is supposed to be all knowing, meaning he sees everything. I recall my friend asking this question in a Sunday service “if God is all knowing, Why was it recorded in the book of Genesis that God regretted creating man, when he knew that all this evil was going to happen?” God is supposed to be perfectly good, meaning he wants the best for us. Yet suffering exists. Innocent people die for what they don’t know about. Children get cancer, families are destroyed by violence and disaster. If all of those things are true about God, how does suffering even exist? Shouldn’t he stop it? A Greek philosopher named Epicurus put it bluntly centuries ago. If God wants to stop evil but can’t, he’s weak. If he can but won’t, he’s cruel. If he’s both able and willing, then why is there evil at all? It’s a tough question. I’m not going to pretend it isn’t.

Suffering in Different Forms

Before we go further, it helps to know that suffering actually comes in two different forms. Based on my knowledge about suffering. I’m not saying it is general. The first is moral evil, which is the suffering humans cause each other; war, abuse, corruption, and murder. This is what happens when people make terrible choices. The second is natural evil, and this one is harder to explain; earthquakes, cancer, floods, a baby born with a painful condition. Nobody chose that, nobody caused it, It just happened. This matters because when people say God gave us free will, that argument works for the first category. But what about the second? No human free will caused a tsunami.

Free will is real.

A lot of the suffering in this world is on us. War, poverty, injustice, these are human problems with human causes. God gave us the freedom to build a better world and we have often chosen otherwise. That’s not on God, that’s on us.

Struggle shapes us.

Think about the strongest, most compassionate people you know. Chances are, they’ve been through something hard. Pain has a way of building depth in people that comfort never could. That doesn’t make suffering good, but it does mean it isn’t always pointless. God’s perspective is bigger than ours. I know this can sound like a cop-out, but hear me out. We judge situations based on what we can see right now. But if God exists outside of time and sees the full picture, maybe what looks like senseless tragedy to us fits into something we simply can’t see yet. That’s not blind faith. That’s humility about the limits of human understanding.

Where I struggle.

I want to be honest here too, because I think dishonest faith helps nobody. Some suffering is so extreme, so brutal, so disproportionate, that the explanations above feel thin. The Holocaust. Children dying slowly in hospitals. Communities wiped out by disasters. In those moments, “God has a plan” can feel almost offensive, and I get why people walk away from faith after certain experiences. I really do. I don’t have a clear answer for every case. I don’t think anyone does.

So Does Suffering Disprove God?

Here’s my honest take. No, it doesn’t. But it does challenge a shallow version of God. If your God is a vending machine who rewards the faithful and protects them from all harm, then yes, suffering breaks that idea completely. But that was never a serious theology to begin with. The God I believe in is not distant or indifferent. He is present in the suffering, in the people who show up to help, in the resilience of those who survive, in the quiet moments of grace inside the worst experiences. Suffering doesn’t disprove God. It just proves that faith was never meant to be easy. And honestly? A faith that has never been tested probably hasn’t been thought about deeply enough. Now here is where I stand. I believe God exists even in the sufferings. And I don’t say that naively. I say it having sat with this question seriously.

Final Thought.

The next time life hits hard and someone asks “where is God?” Maybe the better question is not whether God exists, but whether we are paying attention to how he shows up. Not always in the miracle. Sometimes in the person sitting beside you in the dark.