The world is full of pain, sorrows, and troubles. We have famines, diseases, disasters, and wars everywhere around the world. Most people during their lives have to deal with the hardships of working, temporary or chronic illness, loss due to unpredictable and unavoidable disasters, social unfairness, conflicts between people, and/or serious criminal acts. For many people, these are important reasons why they don’t believe in God.
     What is good in this idea? If there is no God and no judgment as described in the Bible, it will make no difference to anyone’s life. However, if Christianity is true, this idea may be used as a defense of an atheist for his or her judgment. Accusing God with the world he created looks like a sound argument to defy the warnings of the Bible. If the world is not perfect, there is no God or there is a God who is not good and omnipotent. If God is not good and omnipotent, he has no right to punish people who can’t meet his standard or who hate him during their lifetimes. This idea makes many people who don’t believe in God feel safe.
     Actually, it should not make them feel safe. Let’s assume that there is really a judgment of your whole life at the end of the days. Let’s also assume that you are one of the greatest thinkers in the world and you come up with the most powerful accusations against God. You have already, before the big day, prepared enough reasons for why God should not punish you for your disbelief. However, God may still punish you regardless of what you say. He may isolate you so you can’t appeal to all mankind as the jury who will vote for you. He may terminate your self-consciousness so you will no longer exist. If he is your creator, the existential status of your life is in his hands, and you have little ability to control it. Do you know God well enough and have a good enough relation with him? Are you sure that he won’t do this to you?
     Maybe in this situation God will explain to you a few things instead of simply terminating your self-consciousness. According to the Bible, God will likely tell you that the Christian philosophy regarding good and evil is an explanation of the problem of pain. Whether you like it or not, it is an explanation. Originally what God created was good. However, God gave people free will, and with that free will, people chose to disobey God. That’s why bad things happen in this world.
     Let’s take a look at some examples. All over the world, some babies die before they have learned how to talk. In some cases, there is not enough food for them. In some cases, brutal soldiers kill them for fun. It’s one of the most terrible events in the universe. These babies have no chance to experience their lives and to accomplish their dreams. Christianity doesn’t provide any answer for their fate. Why should they suffer the troubles other people made before they can recognize anything? On the contrary, however, people have made scientific and technological progress for thousands of years, and many babies born today will have the convenience of advanced devices and share the wealth of a modern society during their lifetimes. Numerous people have done a great deal of good things for them before they can recognize anything. We are not saying that this comparison makes our tragic examples any less terrible. We are simply suggesting that this kind of world is the world we live in. Our free will opens the doors to good and evil. Similar things happen on both sides.
     Life’s fundamental ambiguity is illustrated in many ways. Here is another example. There are many different races and countries in the world. Because of this situation, we have barriers, discrimination, disputes, wars, and massacres. If all people were of the same ethnicity and united as one nation, there would be no such trouble. But the variety among human population is good, most of the time. The world has so many different countries with different talents, skills, traditions, and cultures. Such a great variety of heritage is a treasure for all mankind. One major factor in the development of world civilization is international collaboration. Many people enjoy traveling around the world to experience various foods, natural scenes, lifestyles, and cultural events. Our global village is fantastic. However, when things go wrong the consequences are disastrous and events like world wars happen.
     Can you imagine a world without any pain? There would be plenty of food available so there would be no famine. Nobody would get sick. When someone touches a fire, the fire would be extinguished automatically to prevent hurting that person. If a plane would be crushed during its next flight, there would be a notice from an angel and this flight would be canceled. When someone has a bad idea, his or her head would become dizzy and he or she wouldn’t carry out the plan. It seems that this situation isn’t good enough. Why would someone have a bad idea in a perfect world? If you want, you may exhaust this line of thought until you are completely satisfied. This imaginary world is too strange for us. Some would think a world like this boring. Some would think a world like this better than the one we have. However, the reality is that pain exists in our world. The only two possible situations are that pain does not exist at all, or pain exists to a certain degree. We have to live in a world of the second type, regardless of whether we like it or not.
     The philosophy of Christianity claims that God has absolute sovereignty over what he created. We have troubles in this world because God allows them. The Bible conveys a message that God knows, sees, and cares about everything that happens. Here we hope that nobody concludes that God is evil because the sorrows and miseries do exist in this world. Let’s conduct further investigations and analyses of these things.
     It makes a point that God allows suffering in this world in a limited way. Nuclear weapons are capable of killing millions of people. However, they were invented when World War II had nearly come to an end. If the major countries involved in World War I or II had had weapons of mass destruction in the beginning of those wars, our civilization could have been ruined. AIDS is arguably the most terrible epidemic in history. It’s capable of destroying our immune system, so traditional medication and immunization methods are ineffective to stop the disease. When the immune system of a person is weakened, all kinds of microorganisms can harm his or her body. The torture the victim of AIDS must endure is cruel. However, it began to spread into the world when our molecular biology, virology, immunology, biological chemistry, and many other areas of scientific knowledge were good enough to challenge it. Now we are working on defeating AIDS every day with state-of-the-art technologies. If this disease had appeared earlier, the death rate could have been much higher and we would have had much less hope.
     It makes another point that the suffering in this world is distributed according to statistical rules. When accidents hurt people, several days are needed to recover. There are also disasters attacking a whole community and taking away many lives. Statistics, like all other kinds of scientific knowledge, ruthlessly dominate the world. If there are bad things in our world, we should expect the principles of statistics to come into play. It is not reasonable to deliberately pick extreme examples in the world (which should exist according to statistical rules) to accuse God. There are conflicts in our world. A person may fight against another person. A group of people may fight against another group of people. A country may fight against another country. A group of countries may fight against another group of countries. The influence of sin can be at any level. It makes people jealous to be worse off than others. It makes people proud to be better off than others. The weaknesses of human nature are everywhere. The above examples show that troubles in the world are not out of control. They are still regulated in some way. Combining these two points, we roughly see that we live in a well-organized world, influenced by evil forces up to a point, just as Christian philosophy describes.
     The Bible says Jesus Christ died on the cross for people. The reason the son of God came to the world is to suffer to the point of death. Jesus suffering implies that suffering is an important ingredient of our universe as a whole. We should not expect a world free from hardships, but we could try to find the meaning from them.
     We suggest the following picture of the whole creation. God designed a world allowing a certain degree of misery. He had already taken everything into consideration and made a decision of what kinds of bad things could happen, how terrible they could be, and when they would take place. He gives people lives to experience them, ability and tenacity to face them or cope with them, and wisdom to find the meaning from them. He also gives people speech to criticize him if they want, but that possibility didn’t change his decision about what kind of the world would be in the beginning. God is in charge of the world he created.
     Young people die in wars. Babies are born with AIDS. How can one explain these terrible facts? How is God in charge of them? When a soldier or a civilian becomes involved in a war, he or she is facing the destructive tools created by the power of a nation. A nation, which may act as a merciless machine, definitely has the ability to crush an individual. When a nation attacks another nation, it throws its destructive power upon common people. In most cases, the disastrous consequences of conflicts between nations are not distributed evenly. Some individuals take a greater portion of them. People suffer harm differently according to statistical laws, which are similar to the other natural laws rigorously governing our world. Some people suffer harm less and survive, but some suffer harm more than their limits of survivability and die. When a deadly infectious disease is spread in the world, it kills some people, thereby conforming to biological principles and statistical laws. It may infect a baby from its mother if the nature of the disease acts so. Our world is governed by the rules of nature. These rules support our lives every day and also sometimes threaten our lives. They are seldom violated, even in deadly situations. This is our world, created by a good God who allows this kind of things to happen in it. It’s an explanation provided by Christianity. If you don’t like this explanation, you may choose to believe there is an evil God. However, this belief, as well as the belief that there is no God, gives you no hope for the future.
     In conclusion, the problem of pain is a feature of our world, and it is not safe to not believe in God or even to blame God for this reason. If you accept the explanation of Christianity, you may see that a world full of pain, sorrows, and troubles does not disprove the existence of God.

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