All good people are appalled by the sufferings of the innocent.

When an innocent person is struck by a painful disease or tortured or murdered, we naturally

feel sadness and helplessness and often rage.

Many people have claimed that such suffering is a proof that God does not exist.

Their argument goes like this.

God is all good and all powerful.

Such a God would not permit unnecessary suffering, yet we constantly observe unjust suffering.

Therefore, at least one of the premises about God must be false.

Either God is not all good or he is not all powerful or he just doesn't exist.

What's wrong with this argument?

First, let's examine what we mean when we say that God would not permit unjust suffering.

There are two categories of suffering.

Suffering caused by human beings, which we call moral evils, and suffering caused by nature,

for instance, earthquakes or cancer.

Free will explains how God could be good and allow moral evil.

Because God is given people free will, they are free to behave against God's will.

The fact that they do evil does not prove that God is not good.

In addition, if there were no God, there would be no absolute standard of good.

Every judgment presupposes a standard, and that's true of our moral judgments too.

What is our standard for judging evil to be evil?

The most we could say about evil, if there were no God, was that we in our subjective tastes

didn't like it when people did certain things to other people.

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