Does the Cruelty and Evil in the World Really Refute the Idea that God Is Perfect Love? Original post by Charles Bledsoe on October 11, 2025.
Another member recently expressed her difficulty with believing that God is love in view of all of the “calamity” in the world. That provoked the following reflections and response to anyone who shares her theological cynicism.
What I would argue is the flaw in your skepticism about a God of love, what makes such a divinity problematic for you, the reason that the “calamity” in the world makes such a God unbelievable to you is that you’re thinking about God along the lines of a classic theological mistake of conventional theism, the theological mistake of attributing controlling power to God.
Of course if God possesses classic controlling power that presents a quite serious problem for believing that God is benevolent. The dysteleological argument that a compassionate God who “has the whole world in his hands” would be able to do a better job of preventing all of the bad stuff and suffering in the world does indeed sink the idea of a both loving and sovereign God. But who says that God has to have absolute sovereignty over the world?
Well, yeah, the Bible and the whole Abrahamic tradition says that. But who says that a theist has to sign on with the entirety of the Bible’s depiction of the divine, and the Western religious tradition and all of its bad theological baggage? One can, as some liberal and revisionist theists like me have done, simply drop the belief that God has controlling power, and then it can make perfect sense that God is loving and there’s still violence and cruelty in the world.
If we reconceive deity to be entirely nondominative, non-imperious, non-authoritarian love, that excludes divine omnipotence from our theology. And once we make that theological move, once we cease to envision God as an almighty autocrat in heaven, a perfect cosmic totalitarian who should prevent all natural and moral evil, the problem of theodicy vanishes. We no longer need to rationalize how it can be the case that God is benevolent and there’s still cancer and war and deadly floods in the world. That is, if we can simply accept that God isn’t in control then we have our explanation, arguably the only one that isn’t convoluted and that doesn’t still leave God on the hook for undeserved misfortune and dysteleological surds.
With a nonomnipotent God there’s really no longer anything to explain. God doesn’t allow people to get run over by drunk drivers and species to go extinct, God can’t prevent such crimes and tragedies. Those two simple words, “God can’t”, spare us the painful difficulty of struggling to understand why God lets us lose our loved ones in fatal accidents or to illness. And they remove any teleological problem with believing God’s nature to be perfect love.
Of course embracing “God can’t” is challenging for most conventional theists, steeped as they are in God’s “glorious sovereignty”. Most God-believers simply take it for granted that divinity = omnipotence. And they’re quite attached to this particular divine attribute, keen on investing God with absolute power. Not only because of religious and cultural conditioning, but because it appeals to the power and dominance valorizing streak ingrained in our psychology both by evolution and culture. We all have a bit of the dominator mentality lurking in our brains, and in many traditionally religious brains it fancies a God who is a supreme and almighty alpha male in the sky. And imagining God to have the whole world in “His” controlling hands provides solace and security, even though God’s control doesn’t really seem to make our existence terribly secure in a world replete with dangers and evils that frequently befall the innocent and the faithful.
But it can be done, it’s possible to intellectually let go of divine sovereignty and omnipotence. One can jettison that theological bathwater without also tossing out God and opting for atheism. But unfortunately it’s an alternative to atheism that most folks who have difficulty with the God of the Bible and the churches, with understanding how that God can be loving, never consider. To my mind the limited in power but perfectly loving God is a better option than either traditional faith or atheism, and I would suggest to anyone wrestling with the question of theodicy to at least expand their choices—beyond the power-based theology of your faith heritage, atheism, and agnosticism—to include it.
Well, this is a short version of my case for the teleological problem not really being a stumbling block to subscribing to a love-based theology. As always, I welcome disagreement.
(BTW, I haven’t read Dr. Ehrman’s book God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question—Why We Suffer and am curious to know if he considers the God who is limited in power option, and, if he does what’s his verdict on it?)
Schaun Wheeler
I agree that imagining a non-omnipotent God makes belief in a loving God much more coherent, and I agree that it’s a theology that people should explore more often than they do.
A complementary approach: instead of (or in addition to) changing our view of God’s power, we can change our sense of proportion about what counts as evil or suffering.
That might sound callous at first, because some things people go through are genuinely horrific. But the idea isn’t to deny or minimize anyone’s pain, but rather to ask whether our human sense of what’s “too much suffering” might be distorted by how short our perspective is.
For example: my son is on the autism spectrum and finds school overwhelming. It drains him, causes panic attacks, and some days he comes home barely able to function. From his perspective, school is one of the hardest things he faces. As his parents, my wife and I definitely empathize with that — my neurodiversity doesn’t manifest the same way or in the same number of ways that his does, but I definitely have an intuitive understanding from my own childhood of many of the tihngs he is going through right now. All that being said: we don’t take him out of school altogether. We do what we can to ease the experience, often in the form of helping him develop tactics for addressing stressors himself, but we still insist he go, because we believe the growth and perspective he’ll gain later outweigh the distress he feels now.
Understandably, he doesn’t so much appreciate our perspective. Also understandably…it’s still the perspective we’re taking. His pain is real, but it’s not the full story. From his point of view, it’s all-consuming. From ours, it’s temporary and meaningful in the long run. If he were being bullied, we’d step in. If he were being abused, we’d remove him immediately. Some kinds of harm can scar a person for life, while others, however painful, can become part of their growth. As parents, we act based on how lasting and deep the damage might be, not just on how bad something feels in the moment.
If we imagine a God whose sense of time and existence is infinitely larger than ours, then it’s at least possible that what feels like unbearable suffering to us might be, from that perspective, something more like my son’s experience of school: real pain, but within a much larger arc that eventually makes sense. What looks to us like a moral disaster might not look that way to a being who sees the full stretch of existence — including whatever comes after death — as part of one continuous story.
In that view, God can still be both powerful and loving, not because God overrides all suffering, but because what God sees as “suffering” has a very different timescale and significance than what we see. The fact that something feels unbearable from within a short life doesn’t necessarily mean it’s unbearable in the context of “eternal” life. The moral and emotional weight of pain changes when the frame gets bigger.
That, of course, doesn’t mean we stop caring about and working to prevent suffering in the here and now. We still respond to pain with compassion. It just means that divine love might operate from a different understanding of what counts as ultimate harm. The problem of evil, then, might not be only a question of God’s power, but also of perspective.
This view of God and evil requires us to make certain assumptions:
1. Existence extends beyond mortal life. Human life as we experience it now is not the entirety of our existence; there is continuation beyond death.
2. God’s perspective encompasses that entire span of existence. God perceives and relates to beings within the full scope of their existence, not just their present, mortal experience.
3. Suffering is real but not ultimate. Pain and evil have genuine force within mortal life, but their significance may be temporary or limited when viewed from the full span of existence.
Naturally, not everyone may feel that these assumptions are justified. But for those who do, I think it’s possible to reconcile the problem of suffering with the idea of an all-loving God without needing to constrain God’s power. (Though I personally think it’s a smart idea to constrain God’s power too.)
Charles Bledsoe
Schaun Wheeler Your replies usually contain reflections that align well with mine, but I’m afraid I can’t go along at all with your theodicy here. It strikes me as being one of the classic, hackneyed theodical tacks that theologians and philosophers have taken, the tack of arguing that in a big picture seen and comprehended only by God suffering and evil aren’t the terrible blots on God’s Creation that they appear to be to us from our situated and limited perspective.
On this view suffering that seems to be meaningless and cruel may actually serve our best interests in ways we fail to apprehend and appreciate; evil isn’t ultimate and therefore isn’t ultimately the utter outrage we take it to be, isn’t such a theodical problem. But this tack of arguing for a divine perspective from which the cruelty and evil of cancer, crimes against humanity, murder and rape, and dysteleological surds is seen to be for an ultimate good; and arguing that if we only had a more God’s-eye vantage we would also see this, see that evils are limited and confined to our current human condition but to be compensated when we come to know, or experience the fulfillment of, God’s big picture in a postmortem existence or at the eschaton, this argument is utterly undone by the rape and murder of a child, an evil that cannot possibly be less evil from God’s perspective than it is from ours, and that no divine big picture or plan can make evil in a less than ultimate sense.
The impossibility of such a crime being viewed by God in a way that would mitigate its evil and console the child’s parents is the refutation of the theodicy you propose here. And the only refutation needed.
As I’ve mentioned, plenty of religious and philosophical minds have constructed arguments like yours, have taken the same theodical tack of arguing for revising our idea of evil, and attributing an exonerating transcendent perspective to the divine, and none of those arguments have held up well among other theological and philosophical thinkers. For largely the reason I’ve just given, there are simply some evils that are indeed ultimate, and can never be compensated by the fulfillment of a divine plan, or by our going to a better place when we die. So I’ll stick with my theodicy of conceiving God to be limited in power, without controlling power, and simply unable to prevent the world’s evils—and therefore not on the hook for them.
Schaun Wheeler
Charles Bledsoe Well, we can’t align all the time. [smiley face]
I understand why you’d reject “greater good” arguments – they often effectually try to make evil good, which in most cases is morally grotesque. But that’s not what I’m suggesting. My view doesn’t depend on saying that horrific events are secretly redemptive or justified in some grand plan. It doesn’t require that we – or God – ever look back and say, “oh, that was worth it” or even “oh, I see why that needed to happen.” My argument doesn’t require that suffering have a point.
The claim is simpler and narrower: that the reach of evil may be shorter than it appears to us now. What feels, from within time, like an absolute and all-consuming destruction may not remain so forever. Evil can still be utterly evil, and suffering still fully tragic, without being ultimate in scope or permanence.
If our existence continues beyond death, and if God’s relationship to us encompasses that larger span, then even the deepest injuries of this life – while never made “good” – need not define the total reality of a person or of creation. The difference isn’t between “evil is good” and “evil is bad,” but between “evil is final” and “evil is not final.”
So I’m not arguing that atrocities are balanced by hidden purposes. I’m arguing for a metaphysics in which evil remains evil but loses its reach. That’s a smaller and, I think, more defensible claim than the one you’re rejecting.
For what it’s worth…I find it’s hard to reason about the meaning or limits of suffering without first asking what God’s purpose is in having us live embodied, temporal lives at all – assuming there is a God and there is a purpose. Any theodicy, it seems to me, only makes sense against the backdrop of some set of assumptions about what God is trying to accomplish through enabling human life in the first place.
Charles Bledsoe
Schaun Wheeler I get that that’s what you’re arguing, but I would still counterargue that the “reach” of the evil of the rape and murder of a child is ultimate, and that it loses none of its reach when viewed from God’s all-comprehending and all-wise perspective. That was the core and thrust of my argument in my previous reply, even if I did unfairly lump your theodicy in with God’s plan theodicies. But I did specifically address your appeal to an afterlife and God’s-eye perspective theodicies, and offered the same rebuttal, that some evils arguably have unlimited reach, to used your manner of speaking. I stand by that perspective.
Michael Waddell
Here is an excerpt from God’s Problem where Ehrman discusses something like this, through the lens of Harold Kushner’s popular book.
Other people, of course, have dealt with suffering by insisting that we change our views of God. This is what Rabbi Harold Kushner urges in his best-selling book When Bad Things Happen to Good People…. It is, in fact, a wise book written by a wise man that can speak to people who are experiencing personal tragedy….
For Kushner, God is not the one who causes our personal tragedies. Nor does he even “permit” them when he could otherwise prevent them. There are simply some things that God cannot do. He can’t intervene to keep us from suffering. But what he can do is equally important. He can give us the strength to deal with our suffering when we experience it. God is a loving Father who is there for his people, not to guarantee miraculously that they never have hardship, but to give them the peace and strength they need to face the hardship.
I now find this a powerful view, and it is understandable that so many people have been affected by it. If I still believed in God, it is probably the view I would eventually want to take. But for a biblical scholar like me, I have to admit that it still seems problematic. Most of the Bible’s authors are completely unequivocal about the power of God. It is not limited. God knows all things and can do all things. That’s why he is God. To say that he can’t cure cancer, or eliminate birth defects, or control hurricanes, or prevent nuclear holocaust is to say that he’s not really God—at least not the God of the Bible and of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Believing in a God who stands beside me in my suffering, but who cannot actually do much about it, makes God a lot like my mother or my kindly next-door neighbor, but it doesn’t make him a lot like GOD.
Personally, I’m okay with a god who exhibits his true power through “my mother or my kindly next-door neighbor,” rather than by controlling hurricanes and earthquakes, and I don’t mind that few if any Biblical authors saw God in this way. For me, it is a limited, earthly power (like your power or mine) that intervenes and moves objects and controls events, and it is a limited, earthly mind that wants God to have this sort of power. Divine power is in meaning, in compassion, in understanding, in changing the entire world by seeing things in a different way or having compassion, even if not one atom actually changes. To see this as true power is the direction my faith points me toward.
Derik Reed
Michael Waddell Not because of a faith crisis, but because I needed to redefine God for my personal growth, I dropped the view of God as a “loving father” and replaced the image with my maternal grandmother. I did this unconsciously, and had that view for a couple years before I realized I’d done so. She was always my vision of unconditional love and acceptance, of holding me accountable, of supporting my growth and becoming the best me I could be. I hadn’t thought of that for awhile, until I read this post describing maternal God rather than a patristic god. Thanks for the reminder.
Charles Bledsoe
Michael Waddell I’m with you here 100% Michael, and not with Dr. Ehrman. He’s quite brilliant, but his restriction of how we might envision and define God to the depiction of divinity in the Bible and traditional theology, where God is almighty and omnipotent and might be held accountable for causing or not preventing the world’s evils, is to my mind a weak argument against solving the teleological and theodical problems by limiting God’s power, by denying God theodically problematic controlling and coercive power.
Charles Bledsoe
Derik Reed Sounds like she makes a model for conceiving divinity that’s vastly superior to the ancient Near Eastern authoritarian rulers who were the model for the biblical God, for ole Yahweh.
Robert Draper
Did the limited, perfectly loving God that you envision come into being along with the rest of the universe or exist beforehand? Could there also be a limited, non-loving, “Satanic” being out there in opposition?
Charles Bledsoe
Robert Draper I won’t take you too deep into the weeds of my Whiteheadian cosmology and theology, I’ll just say that (1) It posits a universe that’s a metaphysically ultimate, beginningless and age-infinite creative process, not one that came into being; our current cosmos is just one production of this process, an epoch in the infinite history of the universe, and the big bang merely an event that initiated our epoch. (2) It conceives God to be equiprimordial (to borrow a neologism from John Macquarrie) with the creative universe, the primordial and aseitous individualization of its creativity, not something that pre-existed the universe; nor, contra emergent theism, an emergent property of it, a product of cosmic evolution, a something that once was not and then in the course of cosmic evolution came to be; God is conceived to be an instance of the universe’s creative process, interrelated with the rest of it, relationally growing and evolving in experience, but everlasting and unoriginated. (3) Systematically speaking (that is, speaking from the metaphysical point of view of Whitehead’s system) the existence of God is necessary, but not the existence of a Satanic counterpart. There’s simply no need to posit the metaphysical necessity of the existence of a Satanic entity to account for the dysteleology, for the chaos and evil and suffering that are a part of existence. Whiteheadian metaphysics doesn’t actually, absolutely rule out the possibility of a Satanic entity, but renders such an entity nonessential and gratuitous.
Michael Waddell
Charles actually address something like that in his post Does Believing in God Necessarily Mean that One Must Believe in the Reality of a Devil? I Say Not At All, What Say You?
Charles Bledsoe
Michael Waddell Thanks Michael! It didn’t occur to me to mention that.
Steve Hunsaker
Charles Bledsoe – Thank you for all your posts. I sure appreciate them. You help me to know that I am not alone.
Harold Kushner’s book, “The Book of Job, When Bad Things Happened to a Good Person” also helped me see that I was not alone. On my account, he posits a beautiful response and interpretation of Job’s story, much like you have done. I highly recommend reading it. I would enjoy discussing it as one of BSA’s book clubs.
In summary, Harold declares that Job knows that he is good and Job knows that God is good. So, the only way they both can be true, is if God is limited. And he proposes God is self-limiting.
He then describes the two beasts, the Leviathan and the Behemoth. The Leviathan is the agent of chaos. The Behemoth is the Primal Life Force. We need them both, as they both have two sides, a good side and a bad side.
The point is this…God tells Job that there is nothing God can do about these two beasts. Both must exist. God is telling Job that God is not omnipotent – at least in the way we define it or label God as such.
Parenthetically, we can also see that perhaps the author of Genesis 3:9 is suggesting that God is not omniscient.
In my opinion, the problem of evil and suffering has been and will continue to be an age-old problem. But for me, Harold helped me solve it. It is not a problem for me anymore. It aligns with my view of the world…and if God exists, with God.
I will end with a quote from the book, that I have embraced and whole-heartedly believe, because I have experienced the same in my life.
“I find my own answer to Job’s question, both personal response and a theological answer, in Job’s last seven words. Like Job, I have met God. I have met him in the sunshine but more often inside of the shadows, not in the elegant perfection of the world but in the resilience of the human soul, the ability of people to find even a pain-filled life, even a grossly unfair life, worth living. I have met God and the readiness of the people to reach out to the afflicted, to salve their wounds, not with their doctrines but with their hugs and their tears.
Having heard God say to Job, it will not be a perfect world, but it will be a world marked by great natural beauty, inspiring human creativity, and astonishing human resilience, and – I will be with you in all of those times, I like Job respond:
I repudiate my past accusations, my doubts, even my anger. I have experienced the reality of God. I know that I’m not alone, and, vulnerable mortal that I am, I am comforted.”
