You did not come to this question from a philosophy seminar. You came to it from a waiting room. From a graveside. From the long quiet after a doctor stopped talking. And underneath the question, if you say it out loud, is not really a request for an argument. It is a child's question to a parent. Where were you?
Here is the honest answer, stated plainly. A good and all powerful God can allow suffering if he has a sufficient reason, and the reason apologist Alycia Wood keeps coming back to is love. Real love cannot be forced, so it has to be free, and the same freedom that lets us love is the freedom that lets us wound. That does not shrink the pain. And leaving God for atheism, Wood says, does not answer the question. It just leaves you alone with it.
Before any of the reasoning, one promise. A good answer to suffering will not make your suffering stop hurting. If it does that, it is the wrong answer. Hold me to that as you read.
If God could stop suffering, why doesn’t he?
Let the objection stand at its full height, because it has earned the right to. If God is all good, he would want to end suffering. If he is all powerful, he could. He has not. So either he cannot, or he will not, or he is not there. For a lot of people that is the wall, and they walk away from God right at this spot.
Wood does not flinch from it. But she notices a hidden move inside the conclusion. It assumes that a good and powerful God could have no good reason to allow any pain at all. Pull that assumption out, and the wall has a door in it. A good God could permit pain he hates if he is holding it inside a purpose larger than what we can see from where we are standing.
She is not the only Jude 3 voice who lands here. Pastor Cameron Triggs, working through the same problem, draws a line that does a lot of quiet work.
There are things that we may not know, but that makes evil inscrutable, not gratuitous. (Pastor Cameron Triggs)
Read that twice. Inscrutable means we cannot trace the reason. Gratuitous means there is no reason. Those are not the same claim. The atheist argument needs the second one to be true. But all any of us can actually see is the first. Not being able to find the reason is a very different thing from there being none.
Why did God make a world where love could turn into cruelty?
Wood's reason is relationship. God did not want a world of people who obey because they cannot do anything else. He wanted people who actually love him, and love that is forced is not love at all.
She tells it with a picture. Imagine a man who says he chose his wife only because she was the one woman in town. Now imagine he says instead that he saw her, came to know her, and chose her over every other option. Only the second is love, because only the second was free.
If all He does is intervene every single time, then I really don’t have free will. (Alycia Wood)
Dr. Van Gayton, in his own Jude 3 conversation on the free will defense, puts the same truth in one sentence.
In order for real relationships to exist, those relationships must be voluntary. (Dr. Van Gayton)
And the cost is built right in. Gayton says it bluntly: if God made us and we had to worship Him, then we are no more than robots. A world where no one can refuse God is a world where no one can truly love him. That freedom is the engine of every good thing we call love. It is also the thing a person can turn, by choice, into cruelty. You cannot keep the first and delete the second.
Can any good come out of suffering without making the suffering good?
This is where a lot of well meaning Christians overreach. They rush to tell you the lesson, the silver lining, the reason it was all worth it. That is not what the strongest version of the argument says, and it is worth being careful here.
Triggs frames it as the greater good defense, but with a guardrail most people forget.
Some moral goods are impossible apart from responding to particular evils. (Pastor Cameron Triggs)
Courage exists because danger does. Compassion exists because suffering does. Forgiveness exists because betrayal does. That does not bless the evil. It says God is able to bring real good out of it without ever calling it good. Triggs is careful to name what evil actually is.
Evil is parasitic. It takes away, detracts. It degenerates from that which is already created. (Pastor Cameron Triggs)
Evil is not a thing God made. It is a corruption of good things he made, the way rot is not its own substance but the breakdown of something that was once whole. So the question is never whether God authored the rot. It is whether he can grow something living out of the ground it left behind.
Should a good answer make me feel okay about evil?
Here Wood says something you do not often hear from someone whose job is to defend the faith. She does not want to hand you an answer that makes the suffering stop mattering.
There’s no answer to the problem of pain or suffering or evil that anybody can give you that should ever make you feel okay with it. (Alycia Wood)
Sit with how unusual that is. The goal is not to argue you into numbness. Wood is direct about why the ache itself is good and human.
Those things are supposed to hurt us. Those things are supposed to make us cry. (Alycia Wood)
An answer that let you walk past a starving child unmoved would be a worse answer, not a better one. The pain is not a failure of your faith. It is your humanity working correctly. A faith that needed you to stop hurting in order to keep believing would be a faith too small to hold the cross.
Where is God when the suffering is actually happening?
Not on the sidelines. Wood does not claim God is passive. She argues he restrains far more evil than we will ever see. The world we complain about is also a world he has been holding back. We notice the disasters that break through. We almost never count the ones that never reached us, the harm that was held off, the mercy we mistook for an ordinary Tuesday.
But the deepest Christian answer is not that God watches from a safe distance. It is that he climbed down into it. Dr. Leo Percer, asked why the problem of evil is the hardest one he faces, admits it is hard because it is real life, not a puzzle. And then he points to what God actually did about it.
God faced evil. I mean, he did not just ignore it. He did not treat it as a philosophical conundrum. He addressed it, and he endured it. (Dr. Leo Percer)
That is the difference between Christianity and a debate. The God of the Bible did not send down a memo explaining suffering. He took on flesh and bled. And Percer says the empty tomb changes the timeline of every grief.
The promise of the resurrection, the Sunday morning when Jesus gets out of the tomb, is the promise that evil is short term, not long term. (Dr. Leo Percer)
What if I understand the answer and it still does not help?
Then you have found the edge of what arguments can do, and you are in good company. Dr. Robert Smith Jr. has buried enough people to know that explanation is not what carries anyone through the valley.
Tragedy is not redeemed by explanation, but by transformation. (Dr. Robert Smith Jr.)
The thing that actually holds a person up at the worst moment is not a finished theory. It is a Person. Smith says it in a line worth memorizing for the hard day.
If I know who, I do not have to know why. (Dr. Robert Smith Jr.)
That is not a dodge. It is the order of operations for grief. The why may never come. The Who already has. And Smith argues the church has prepared us poorly for this by selling the wrong product. We do not need a prosperity theology, he says. We need an adversity theology, the kind that does not promise an easy life but promises a present God inside a hard one.
Is the atheist answer to suffering any better?
Suppose the pain is too much and you leave. Now what? The universe of the committed atheist has no feelings about your loss at all. A tsunami does not grieve the people it kills. So on that view, why would you even expect the world to be otherwise?
Atheism offers a life without God, but it seems to me that it’s a life that none of us truly want. (Alycia Wood)
You still have to explain why the suffering feels wrong, why your gut insists it should not be this way. That sense of wrongness is hard to ground if the universe is just matter doing what matter does. Leaving does not dissolve the question. It only swaps the answer for a colder one, and Wood is not convinced the cold one comforts anyone in the waiting room at 2 a.m.
So the case is not that Christianity makes suffering easy. It does not. The case is that of all the places to stand in the dark, this is the only one where the God you are crying to has the scars to prove he has been here too.
Quick answers
Why does God allow suffering if he is good? Wood argues he can allow it because real love requires freedom, and that freedom can be turned toward harm. A good God may permit pain he hates for a sufficient reason we cannot always see.
Does suffering ever have a purpose? Cameron Triggs argues some real goods, like courage and compassion, are only possible in response to evil. That does not make the evil good. It means God can bring good out of it.
Where is God when I am suffering? Dr. Leo Percer points to the cross and the empty tomb. God did not explain evil from a distance. He endured it himself, and the resurrection means evil is short term, not the final word.
What if the answer does not make me feel better? Dr. Robert Smith Jr. says tragedy is healed by transformation, not explanation. If you know the Who, you can survive not knowing the why.
Should a good answer make me feel okay about evil? No. Wood is clear that pain is meant to hurt. An answer that numbs you to suffering is the wrong answer.
Is atheism a better answer to suffering? Wood says no. Leaving does not remove the question. It only changes the answer to a colder one, and you still have to explain why suffering feels wrong at all.
If you are in the kind of pain that makes you wonder whether life is worth staying for, please do not carry that alone. In the United States you can call or text 988 any time to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. Tell someone who loves you. You are worth the call.
This piece draws on apologist Alycia Wood’s Jude 3 Project session on engaging atheism, with added voices from Pastor Cameron Triggs, Dr. Van Gayton, Dr. Leo Percer, and Dr. Robert Smith Jr. Listen to the full conversation to hear Wood work through it in her own words.