The Problem of Evil - Common Sense Atheism

The Global Argument Continued 89
has left us with is so vast and so horrible that we cannot really comprehend
it, especially if we are middle-class Europeans or Americans.
Nevertheless, it could have been much worse. The inhabitants of a
world in which human beings had separated themselves from God
and he had then simply left them to their own devices would regard
their world as a comparative paradise. All this evil, however, will come
to an end. At some point, for all eternity, there will be no more unmerited
suffering: this present darkness, ‘‘the age of evil’’, will eventually
be remembered as a brief flicker at the beginning of human history.
Every evil done by the wicked to the innocent will have been avenged,
and every tear will have been wiped away. If there is still suffering, it
will be merited: the suffering of those who refuse to cooperate with
God’s great rescue operation and are allowed by him to exist forever
in a state of elected ruin—those who, in a word, are in Hell.
Oneaspectofthisstoryneedstobebroughtoutmoreclearlythan
I have. (Indeed, I have done no more than hint at this aspect of the
story. These were the hints: the phrases ‘‘random, destructive natural
events’’ and ‘‘the random forces of nature’’.) If the story is true, much
of the evil in the world is due to chance. (And this statement applies
to the evils caused by human beings as well as to those caused by ‘‘the
random, destructive forces of nature’’. It could well happen that a
woman was raped and murdered only because she yielded to a sudden
impulse to pull over to the side of the road and consult a map. There
may be, quite literally, no more to say than that in response to the
question, ‘‘Why her?’’)
According to the story I have told, there is generally no explanation
of why this evil happened to that person. What there is, is an
explanation of why evils happen to people without any reason. If a
much-loved child dies of leukemia, there may well be no explanation
of why that happened—although there is an explanation of why
events of that sort happen. And the explanation is: that is part of what
being separated from God means; it means being the playthings of
chance. It means living in a world in which innocent children die
horribly, and it means something worse than that: it means living in
a world in which innocent children die horribly for no reason at all.
It means living in a world in which the wicked, through sheer luck,
often prosper. Anyone who does not want to live in such a world,
a world in which we are the playthings of chance, had better accept
God’s offer of a way out of that world. 12