Why is there evil, suffering, pain, illness, and death in the world?

A classic question in theology asks how can a loving, yet omnipotent God permit evil and suffering in the world? The argument goes as follows: a God that allows suffering to continue is either a) not all-powerful (not omnipotent) and is thus unable to prevent the suffering; b) not loving because this God has the power to prevent suffering but is unwilling to do so; and/or c) not omniscient (not all-knowing) because God only is aware of the suffering after it has already occurred and it’s too late to prevent it.  This problem of evil and God’s inability or unwillingness to do anything about it is known in theology as “theodicy.” Two of the most common (and I think unsatisfactory) answers to this question are that God’s ways are “mysterious” or that God has an overarching plan that we can not know.

I find it fascinating that you never hear the question of why suffering exists from a physicist or a biologist.  Why?  To the evolutionary biologist or the cosmologist (that is the study of the origins of the universe, not the science of makeup - cosmetology!), pain, suffering, and even evil are absolute requirements for life as we know it to exist. Evolution only works because of a freedom implied in the natural world: a freedom of genetic mutation, a freedom of natural selection, and a freedom even of randomness. This freedom led to the existence of conscious humans, but by necessity the same freedom also causes cancer, disease, and natural catastrophes.

Too often in history the human predicament (which includes our anxiety over our mortality, the suffering we experience in life, and the problem of evil) has been seen as a result of our disobeying certain rules or laws or it follows from a disbelief in a particular doctrine. But I believe the problem of evil is only a problem when we view God as a supernatural Zeus-like being.  If we instead understand God as the power of being itself (or Paul Tillich's "ground of being"), then this problem disappears. We can begin to see God as creative and living in that everything that is is grounded in God. 

The question then is not how can God permit evil? God is not permitting anything other than the creative state of being, which by its nature includes freedom. Freedom is what leads to sin and consequently evil.

God as the ground of being, rather than a supernatural being who intervenes occasionally in the universe, allows for a God that supports all existence as its creative ground but does not make a choice as to which unfortunate events to intervene to change. The nature of existence (as grounded in God) is such that humankind is free. To be free, we must have the ability to do evil, to turn away from God (the true ground of who we are). Thus, the possibility (and reality) of sin is built into the very fabric of life.

To argue whether God could not have found a better mechanism for life and existence fails because it falls into the fallacy of seeing God as a supernatural being designing the universe as a watchmaker might (opening God up to the criticism of being an incompetent watchmaker) or playing with the universe in an ongoing chess game according to some divine plan (opening God up to the criticism of being a cruel chess master) rather than understanding God as the creative structure of existence itself. Thus, the problem of evil is ultimately one of perspective: from a micro view we may see the sufferings that happen in the world, but from a macro view we can understand that this suffering is part of the very fabric of the nature of existence itself.