In his new book, Good Questions, popular Unity Magazine® columnist Rev. Dr. Thomas Shepherd tackles difficult questions about personal tragedy, God, evil, religion, the Bible, prayer, healing, forgiveness, death and more.

The following excerpt highlights a question frequently asked of Unity leaders.

Dear Tom: How can people like you so confidently believe that God is Absolute Good when so much suffering and evil exist in the world? Would a good God allow children to die from horrible diseases; where was God when the Nazis gassed six million Jews?
—K.M., New Mexico

Dear K.M.: You've asked the toughest and most frequently recurring question in religious thought: How to explain “evil” if God is 1) all powerful and 2) all good? Historically, the argument has looked like this: If God cannot prevent bad things from happening, then God is not all powerful. And if God will not prevent evil, God is not all good.

The problem is known as theodicy, and theologians have traditionally offered three types of solutions to the two horns of this dilemma:

None of these explanations are very satisfactory, especially for a parent who has just lost a child or any innocent bystander who has suffered the collateral damage which goes with living in a physical universe. Rabbi Harold Kushner's best-selling book When Bad Things Happen to Good People makes the following comment, which is the key to the problem:

All the responses to tragedy which we have considered have at least one thing in common. They all assume that God is the cause of our suffering, and they try to understand why God would want us to suffer. ... We were left either hating ourselves for deserving such a fate or hating God for sending it to us when we did not deserve it. There may be another approach. Maybe God does not cause our suffering.1

The confusion begins with a misunderstanding of God's nature. Instead of pulling strings like a puppeteer, perhaps God is not separate from the cosmos. What if God's power in fact animates the very atoms of the universe, yet even the smallest molecule has a measure of free will? Suppose God wants all sentient beings to be happy, healthy and wise and has provided a cosmos in which individualized expressions of Divine Intelligence—you and I—must discover and apply the physical and spiritual principles necessary to produce such happiness, health and wisdom.

If people center themselves on the Truth of God's absolute goodness, even in the face of apparent “evil” and unspeakable suffering; if they rely upon God while walking the valley of the shadow—for that is what evil and suffering are in eternity, mere shadows—then no calamity can overwhelm their sense of okay-ness about life, for they know God has issued a guarantee that everything will work out for the good. This does not mean I should glibly dismiss suffering as an “error in consciousness,” or feel superior to people who are in pain, or feel guilty when I face a health challenge or some personal tragedy. For reasons known only to God, that's the kind of universe where humanity was born. What other arrangement allows the freedom necessary for spiritual growth?
 

1 Harold Kushner, Why Bad Things Happen to Good People (New York: Anchor Books, 2004), 34.

Thomas Shepherd, D.Min., teaches systematic and metaphysical theology, church history and theological ethics at Unity Institute®, the spiritual education “arm” of Unity. In addition to his column in Unity Magazine, Shepherd is author of the new book Good Questions, and host of the Unity.FM program Let's Talk About It.