How can God allow humans to do so many terrible things?
When we think about this, we have to remember that the first one to suffer with the pain in this world is God. We need only look at what he�s done to help heal all this: become man and suffer in his own flesh the consequence of sin, to his death in the Cross in order to save us.
God does everything he can, but he has made us free and he respects that freedom. God has to leave us free otherwise we couldn�t love.
If God stopped us each time we were about to do something wrong, we�d really feel (and with reason) like marionettes that he plays with. We wouldn�t be free. Being free means that, although God is expecting and hoping that we do what is good, he does not want to obligate. He has given us dominion of our own acts.
It is us who have to �say yes�. God hopes and waits for that �yes�, but that means that we can say �no� and choose a more selfish path, rejecting God and all that good that he proposes us.
God knows the risk of this rejection, which hurts him more than anything but, if we weren�t free, we couldn�t love nor be happy, as those who love are happy. Only the greatness of love is capable of explaining to us that God respects our freedom, even when we do what is wrong.
As C.S. Lewis writes, �the immutable nature of wood, which allows us to use it in our creations, also gives us the opportunity to use it to hit our neighbor over the head (�). Perhaps it might be possible to imagine a world in which God would correct the continuous abuse that is done by the free will of his creatures, so that the piece of wood would become soft grass when we start to use it as a weapon, or that the air would not transmit sound waves when we try to say lies or insults. What�s more, if we took all this to its beginning, evil thoughts wouldn�t be possible, since the cerebral mass used to think would refuse to function when we try to conceive them. All material close to the evil man would be exposed to suffer unpredictable alterations.� (C.S. Lewis, �The Problem with Pain�, Rialp, Madrid 1994, pg 40-41)
But the infinite power of God allows for even the suffering that one man causes to another to be used for good. �For those who love God, all things are for the good� (Romans, 8, 28). Nothing and nobody escapes the power of God. Those who behave in a selfish matter and do what is wrong, become involuntary instruments of the will of God, who looks for the good and happiness of his sons.
Why not suppress all the physical pain?
Once nature is the way it is, and brings with it inevitable problems and pain, we might wonder why it is the way it is, and why is it of nature that harsh situations arise that bring us pain. We look at three elements of the existing world: 1) human beings live in it (more than one) 2) those humans are free and 3) it is a material world. Well then, this material world has some natural laws, laws that are studied in the sciences. These laws are fixed, such that the elements of the creation all behave the same way. The universe is the wonderful result of the equilibrium of all its elements. This makes the fire, as good when it heats someone close to it, also the same fire that burns he who does not keep a certain distance. The same bacteria that are beneficial to one person are the ones that destroy the life of another. And so on� One might consider the laws of nature not to be fixed, and that they adapt always to the more beneficial needs of others. This would be possible if there would be only one person in our world, such that the fire would not burn when that being reaches into it, and the harmful bacteria would change nature when entering his organism, etc. But a world that changed at every situation of one being could not maintain itself in the moment in which more people, such as the case of our world, inhabited it. In the moment in which this world is inhabited by more than one, the world must be a neutral ground for all of us to live in and it must behave the same way for each every one of them. Otherwise, freedom would not be possible, since being free means to have the ability to choose among different possibilities. Would a world without suffering be possible? To suppress the suffering that is carried by the natural order of this world would suppress even life itself, since life is the harmonic �function� of an organism, that follows natural laws that are fixed: it is this fixed behavior of nature that causes physical pain. And why do humans experience physical pain? I remember a friend who, because of a medical condition, could not feel in the great majority of his body: from his neck down to his toes. His nervous system didn�t work and that was the cause of a constant danger for his life: anything could happen to him, even lose a hand, and he wouldn�t even feel it. For things to be the way they are in this world, living organisms must have some way of knowing the presence of something that is harmful to their life. This translates into our reality as �pain�. Therefore, when the fire, which always burns, becomes something bad to my being, it is good that my body is sensitive to the harm it is doing to me. It would be terrible to not have this pain: even though I don�t suffer pain, I also lose the possibility of knowing the presence of things that are bad or harmful to me. This goes for illnesses as well. Without suffering the reactions, we would never know the symptoms of a disease and might suddenly die without knowing what was happening to us at all. How does God run the world?An omnipotent God can dispose of happenings in such a way that they all happen for the better. He can order things so that everything that happens, even what is bad, happens in a way that greater goods are obtained. This is possible because not all good things are of equal significance.
All of us have experiences of sufferings that are necessary and acquire meaning as ways to obtain a greater good. A person who plays sports may go through some hunger to follow a diet that gives him good physical form. A student spends long days and nights of studying to gain knowledge and pass his classes, because he believes it is a greater benefit. The father decides an appropriate punishment for his son, so that he may learn what is good and become better. A doctor may put us through a pain that will eventually better our health.
These are clear examples: they are bad things that happen to us, but that we want because they help us obtain something good which is more important than the pain we go through. It is not clear, however, when it is God who provincially allows something bad to happen to us in order to also give us a something that is greater to us. The same happens with other things, like environmental disasters or similar tragedies.
Illnesses are a result of the way that our nature is constituted, with its random events and indeterminations. But it is no inconvenient to God. Through circumstance and situations, we may be denied some things that are not good to us, whether we know they are or not; and if we know they are bad, whether we care or not that they are bad for us. Psychologically, we might think about all that we want but are denied to have. With faith, though, we may come to realize that they are things that might be helping us develop in some way. It is in these moments when we invite God into our situation, and if we believe in His help and love, he will remain near us and help us in ways we might not see or realize, nor will we in our lives.
In this way, God allows for bad things of a certain degree to lead to good things of a higher degree. Normally, the good consequences that we are offered are not apparent, but those who believe in the providential love of God know that this is so. Faith is necessary, since the good that is obtained through the bad are not present in particularly obvious ways or at the same time as the things we suffer. We must know to wait and see things through the vision of this faith.
