At first, mostly no. Later, yes. An argument about why God permits evil does little for someone in the first raw days of loss, and offering one then can wound. The same arguments matter a great deal once grief turns into a question and the mind keeps circling back to why. Beneath both stages sits the deepest thing the Christian faith offers a suffering person: a promise that God will one day make every wrong right.
That answer depends on a distinction the question tends to hide. Do arguments help? sounds like one question. It is really two: help with what, and help when? Separate those, and much of the confusion about apologetics and suffering clears up.
What claim are the arguments actually answering?
Start with the objection itself. Lisa Fields names it as one of the main reasons people walk away from Christianity. Something traumatic happens, and the question becomes personal: “if God loves me, why did he let this happen?” She is blunt about the result: “people can’t reconcile a good God with evil.”
Put formally, the objection says two things cannot both be true. Either God is good and powerful, or evil exists, but not both. The familiar Christian replies aim at that claim. The free will response says that if God made creatures who can truly choose, the possibility of evil comes with that freedom. The greater good response says God can bring good out of evil, so the presence of evil does not prove he is absent or indifferent. A third view, process theology, takes a different route. It says God does not know our choices before we make them and so is not responsible for evil. Fields points out that this view changes God himself, and she says plainly, “we don’t affirm process theology here.”
Notice what these arguments are built to do. They answer a claim about logic: that God and evil cannot coexist. They were never designed to make a funeral bearable. Judging the free will defense by whether it comforts a widow is like judging a map by whether it keeps you warm. It might be a good map. Warmth was never its job.
Why does a sound argument fail in a crisis?
Fields locates the problem precisely: “when you’re in a crisis moment, this argument is way more so emotional than it is logical.” Offer the free will argument to someone whose loved one just died, and her verdict is short: “nobody wants to hear that.”
The argument has not suddenly become false. The grieving person simply has not asked for a premise. In the first wave of loss, why is usually a cry of protest and pain. An argument answers a proposition, and answering a cry with a syllogism mistakes what kind of thing was said.
So Fields draws the practical line: “that’s not the time for you to be logical and philosophical. That’s the time for you to hug. That’s the time for you to cry.” She calls this the ministry of presence, and she adds silence to it. You may not be able to identify with the pain, but you can sit with the person, cry with them, and admit that you do not understand it either.
She roots this in Paul. Writing to the Corinthians, Paul says God “comforteth us in all our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort them which are in any trouble, by the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted of God” (2 Corinthians 1:4). The context matters. Paul writes out of his own affliction, not from a distance. What gets passed along is comfort that was received. Romans 12:15 gives the shorter form: “weep with them that weep.” Neither verse forbids thinking. Both put presence first.
Presence is also no substitute for practical help. Where abuse is part of the story, safety comes first, and the National Domestic Violence Hotline is 1-800-799-7233. Grief that will not lift is a good reason to see a trained counselor, and doing so is no failure of faith.
If presence comes first, why bother with the arguments?
Fields does not stop at presence. In her words, “grief is in stages,” and the stages call for different responses. At some point the emotional crisis gives way to the intellectual question, and then the instruction changes: “Meet them on the logical level with it when they’re at the logical place.”
That has a consequence most people miss. You cannot meet someone at the logical place if you have never been there yourself. Fields puts it this way: “it is important that you’ve wrestled with it logically so when they get to that point, you could deal with that on that perspective.” The work is done in calm seasons so it is available in hard ones. You keep the arguments ready for the months after the funeral, when the question returns in a quieter and colder form.
The strongest case against this is the ordinary believer’s caution, and Michael Roses states it honestly. Hearing a run of philosophical discussions on evil, he found the material “a little heavy.” His worry is that a hard idea might shake his faith until he doubts God, and he names what drives it: “I am a control freak to a degree. And so I try to assist God.”
The position deserves its full strength. If hard ideas can unsettle believers who never went to seminary, and if someone’s faith in the basics is secure, why borrow trouble? Roses affirms that Jesus died for his sins and rose again, and he would rather point a debating atheist to someone better suited while simply telling what God has done in his life. That is a reasonable division of labor. Not every Christian has to be a debater. He also admits the cost: when a question feels overwhelming, he sets it aside because “I don’t wanna wrestle through it.”
What premise sits underneath the fear?
Here the question reaches its sharpest point. The cautious position rests on an assumption it rarely states: that faith survives by avoiding the wrong idea. If that were true, avoidance would be wise, and every hard question would be a gamble.
Fields answers from experience. A college New Testament class taught by professors who did not affirm Scripture’s authority forced these questions on her, and as she recalls it, “It made me cry. It made me frustrated. I didn’t wanna deal with it, but it tested my faith.” Her conclusion is that “every time you’re pushed, your faith is strengthened.” The alternative is worse than discomfort: “if you have a faith that’s full of fear, you’re not really progressing, you’re held captive and you’re in a sense regressing.”
Then she gives the line that removes the hidden premise: “God is keeping us not our knowledge.” If that is true, examining a hard question is not a wager on your own cleverness. Faith does not hang on winning each exchange. That frees a person to think, and it keeps the arguments in their proper place as tools of understanding rather than the foundation a believer stands on.
Fields adds a sensible limit. The examining should happen “in a safe place and read the right things.” Facing questions is different from feeding on whatever is loudest. And the cautious believer’s own observation cuts toward engagement in the end. Not everyone has a theologian in their circle, Roses notes, while people face real evil whether or not they feel ready: “Whether you got on your gloves or not, you are in the ring.”
What about suffering that seems to serve no purpose?
The most serious objection is about whether the arguments work at all.
The greater good response often carries the most weight for ordinary believers, and Roses says it is the one he agrees with most. People describe harm that seemed senseless at the time and only later saw God open a door through it. Roses points to funerals where people who would never otherwise enter a church heard the gospel.
That is real evidence that God can bring good out of evil. But look at how it arrives: in hindsight, and often from the outside. The greater good response is persuasive mainly in retrospect. A sentence that rings true years later can sound cruel at the graveside. The timing problem shows up again, now inside the argument itself.
Fields also names the harder case. Some evils show no benefit anyone can see, and she points to children being shot. Here the logic needs care. The fact that good sometimes comes from suffering supports the claim that God can redeem evil. It does not follow that we can identify the good in every case, or that we should tell a grieving parent what it is. The reverse also holds. Failing to see a reason does not prove that no reason exists. That point weakens the objection’s claim of strict impossibility. It does nothing to make the loss feel reasonable, and it should never be offered as if it did.
There is a moral edge here as well. When people are killed unjustly, Roses observes, others are left having to prove that the dead mattered and that their deaths were wrong. That is a moral judgment, more than a report of pain. An answer that only explains suffering, without addressing that it was wrong, answers the smaller question.
Why can’t a God who is still learning answer this?
Process theology strikes many believers as a God who is learning alongside us, trying things out and waiting to see whether they work. Roses rejects that picture, and his reaction has a logical point inside it. Process theology clears God of responsibility by limiting what God knows. The same move removes his ability to promise how things will end. A God who adapts to choices he cannot foresee cannot guarantee that justice will win. Shrink God to escape the problem of evil, and the final answer to evil shrinks with him.
What kind of answer is a promise?
In Death Has Died, Andy Mineo raps about news coverage of a mass shooting that killed children. He admits that words fall short when you try to comfort the grieving. Then he turns to hope: one day God will crack the sky, bottle up every tear, bring justice for every crime, and end funerals, abuse and death itself. After reading those lines, Lisa Fields says, “And I think that is the solution.”
This answer works differently from free will or the greater good. It leaves aside why a particular evil happened and answers whether evil gets the last word. Revelation 21:4 states the hope: “And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.” Revelation is apocalyptic writing, rich in symbolic images, but this image points to something it plainly promises: an end to death and grief themselves.
A promise also meets the moral demand raised earlier. It refuses to treat the dead as a means to someone else’s lesson. It says their deaths were wrong and will be set right, which fits a sufferer’s sense of things better than any explanation could.
The hardest challenge to this answer is obvious. A promise about the future offers no present proof, and a skeptic can fairly call it wishful thinking. The honest reply is that the promise is only as strong as the evidence that the one who made it has power over death. Jude 3 teaches that Jesus rose bodily from the dead in space and time and that the resurrection is the hinge on which the faith turns. That claim is exactly where the case for the promise has to be made, and it rests on historical evidence this discussion of suffering does not itself lay out. So the promise does not make thinking unnecessary. It sends thinking to its most important job: examining whether the resurrection happened.
That is why Fields closes with Peter’s instruction to be ready to give “a reason of the hope that is in you” (1 Peter 3:15). The phrase joins the two halves of the answer. Hope is what you bring when you sit beside someone with a fresh wound. Reasons are what you give for that hope when they are finally ready to ask whether it is true.