If the world was created by all-powerful, all-knowing and all-loving God, why does he permit evil, pain and suffering in nature? Why does he allow disease, parasites, brutality, handicaps and natural disasters to persist?

The parasites and the tsunamis are the hardest part of this question, harder than human cruelty, because no one can say the victim chose it, so any answer that starts with free will and stops there has not listened. But the question has more structure than it first appears.

1. The logical version is dead, and that matters. Alvin Plantinga showed that "God exists" and "evil exists" are not contradictory, because a good God might have a sufficient reason to permit evil. Most philosophers now concede the logical problem is answered, including many atheists. What survives is the evidential problem: whether the amount and distribution of suffering makes God unlikely. That is a different and harder argument.

2. A world of free creatures must permit evil. Genuine freedom means the ability to choose against God, and God set the choice before Adam and Eve as blessing and curse, life and death (Genesis 2:16-17). A world where no one could choose wrong is a world where no one could choose good either — or love, or courage, or fidelity. Those goods are not separable from the risk.

3. Nature is described as fallen, not neutral. "Cursed is the ground because of you" (Genesis 3:17); Paul says "the creation was subjected to futility" and groans for release (Romans 8:20-22). The Bible does not claim nature is untouched by human rebellion. This is a contested move — some Christians read Genesis 3 as describing the human condition rather than the physics of earthquakes — but it is the biblical text's own framing.

4. Regularity is the price of a livable world. The same laws that let you farm, forecast, and practice medicine also produce drought, storms, and pathogens. A world with no fixed regularities would be a world where nothing could be learned or planned. The objection wants a world with the benefits of law and none of the costs, which is not a coherent request.

5. Suffering is how character is made. "Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness" (James 1:2-3). Paul traces the same chain: suffering produces endurance, endurance character, character hope (Romans 5:3-5). This "soul-making" theme is influential and contested, and it obviously does not cover every case, especially the suffering of infants.

6. Scripture names other agents. In Job, the wind and the disease come from a hostile spirit, with God permitting but not performing (Job 1:12-19). The New Testament repeatedly attributes destruction to the devil and his angels. That does not remove God's responsibility for permitting it, but it does mean the Bible's picture is not "God does everything that happens."

7. The hardest case is animal suffering, and it should be named. Predation, parasites, and mass extinction are not obviously soul-making for anyone. Some Christians appeal to a cosmic fall and to creation's redemption (Romans 8:19-22), some to a long creation with its own goods, some simply to ignorance. Honest theists admit no fully satisfying account is available. The question is whether that silence counts as evidence against God or as a limit of the observer.

8. The turn: the objection needs a view from nowhere. To say a particular suffering is gratuitous — that no possible good could justify it — you would need to know every consequence across all time, including the ones that haven't happened. No finite observer has that. The objection is a strong intuition dressed as a demonstration. It may be right; it cannot be established from where we sit.

9. God did not stay outside it. "Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows... he was pierced for our transgressions" (Isaiah 53:4-5). Whatever the reasons for evil, the Christian claim is that God entered the suffering rather than watching it from a distance, and that the story ends with tears wiped away (Revelation 21:4). That is not an explanation but a claim about the character of the one who permits it, which is what the objection is finally asking about.

No theodicy explains every instance, and any answer that claims to should be distrusted. What can be shown is that evil is not logically incompatible with God, that several of the goods we value require the risks we deplore, and that the God of the Bible is not a spectator. The rest is trust, which is what the question is really about.

Sources: Alvin Plantinga; C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain; William Lane Craig; Clay Jones, Why Does God Allow Evil?; Bart Ehrman.

Related challenges:
• Since God knows everything, He would have known how much suffering would eventually come into this world. Why didn’t He stop the process before it all got started, and save His creatures from all of the pain that would befall them?
• If God is all-powerful, all-knowing and all-loving, why does he PERMIT starvation, child molestation, rape, torture and genocide? And telling us these VICTIMS suffer because of an inherited sin committed by Adam and Eve does not suffice!
• Your all-powerful God created the devil and evil - simply to set up "the fall." He did this KNOWING that most souls would ultimately suffer eternal punishment. You call this a good God? I call it evil.