Does Suffering Disprove God?

¶ Does Suffering Disprove God?

Short answer. The argument from suffering is powerful, and against one particular God it may be decisive: a God who is all-powerful, perfectly good, and the sole cause of everything that happens. But that three-part package is a specific historical construction, not the human default. Three older traditions never signed it, and each answers suffering differently: as an invader, as a divine attribute out of balance, as lawful consequence. None of that proves God exists. What it does is narrow the target.

Tier note: everything on this page is defensive. Narrowing the target of an argument is not evidence for any deity, and this page does not claim otherwise. The comparative material below is presented as three rival answers, not one ancient consensus.

¶ The argument at full strength

Take it at its strongest, not its weakest. The serious version is not that bad things happen, so there is no God. It is about distribution: suffering does not track guilt. Children die of dysentery and starvation by the thousands every day. Earthquakes do not sort the wicked from the innocent. The problem is not that pain exists; it is that pain appears morally arbitrary, which is a direct attack on the claim that a just power is running things.

Bart Ehrman has put this as forcefully as anyone alive, and his case deserves to be met rather than managed. Ehrman is a New Testament scholar at the University of North Carolina and a former pastor at Princeton Baptist Church, and in God's Problem (2008) he is explicit that this, not textual criticism, is why he left the faith. His argument has two moves. First, the Bible does not give one answer to suffering; it gives several that contradict each other. The prophets say suffering is punishment for sin. Job gives two incompatible answers, suffering as a test and suffering as beyond human comprehension. Ecclesiastes says it is simply the nature of things. The apocalyptic texts say God will intervene soon and set it right. Second, none of these accounts for the scale and the arbitrariness of what actually happens.

Note what he is attacking. He is not attacking the bare existence of a deity. He is attacking a moral structure, and specifically a conjunction of three properties.

¶ Which God the argument kills

The argument works by contradiction, and it needs all three of these at once. Omnipotence: God can do anything. Perfect goodness: God wants no gratuitous suffering. Sole causation: nothing happens that God did not do or permit.

Drop any one and the contradiction loosens. This is worth saying plainly because the package is usually treated as though it were simply what the word God means. It is not. It is the God of a particular tradition, largely the Augustinian and later Western synthesis, and it has a datable career. Most of the religious imagination of the ancient world did not hold it.

That is not a defense of the package. Ehrman's argument against it stands. It is an observation about scope.

¶ Zoroastrian: evil is an invader

In the Zoroastrian picture, Ahura Mazda is not the author of evil. The destructive spirit, Angra Mainyu, is a genuinely opposing principle, and because he freely chose his own destructive vocation, the Wise Lord is not responsible for evil's appearance in the world. On some readings the two spirits are mutually limiting and the world between them is a battlefield; on others, Ahura Mazda is not yet omnipotent but will be, when Angra Mainyu is finally defeated with human help.

Either way, omnipotence or sole causation goes. Suffering is not God's policy. It is damage from an adversary in a war that is still running, and human beings are combatants rather than test subjects.

The honest complication: the Gathas have Ahura Mazda as the source of the twin spirits, which pulls the problem back up a level, and the Zurvanite variant, which makes Ohrmazd and Ahriman twin sons of Time, reintroduces it outright. Zoroastrian dualism dissolves the problem of evil only in some of its forms, and the tradition argued about this internally for centuries. See What Is Zurvanism? and Who Is Angra Mainyu?.

¶ Kabbalah: severity is an attribute, not a defect

The Kabbalistic answer is stranger and, if you sit with it, harder. On the Tree of Life, Gevurah (strength, also Din, judgment) is a divine power in its own right: the power of limit, boundary, restraint, the power that says no. It is not a failure of love. It is the necessary counterweight to Chesed, lovingkindness, and in the Lurianic school the first act of creation is itself a contraction, God withdrawing to make room for a world. Limit comes before abundance. A world with edges requires a power that draws them.

What the tradition then says about evil is the sharp part. On the mainstream scholarly reading of the Zohar (Scholem, Tishby), the demonic realm is not an alien invader; it is Gevurah broken loose from Chesed, severity that no longer answers to mercy. Evil is a divine attribute in isolation, hypertrophied and self-consuming.

The cost is obvious and should be stated: this locates the root of evil inside the divine life rather than outside it, which many readers will find worse than the problem it solves. It also cuts against any sentimental reading. A God who is only love is, in this architecture, as unbalanced as a God who is only judgment. See What Is Gevurah in Kabbalah?.

¶ The Gita: suffering is lawful, and the divine is not nice

The Bhagavad Gita opens at the moment of maximum moral horror, with Arjuna refusing to fight a battle that will kill his own kin, and Krishna's answer is not consolation. It is that the self is deathless, that duty is real, and that action has lawful consequence across lives. When Krishna finally shows his true form in the eleventh chapter, the vision is not comforting; it is terrifying, the divine as time itself, the devourer of worlds.

Whatever else that is, it is not the God whose only attribute is niceness. Karma offers what the arbitrariness objection demands: an account on which suffering is not random. It tracks something, across a longer ledger than one life.

And here is the strongest objection to it, which this page has to carry rather than hide. Critics argue that retributive karma amounts to blaming the victim, treating present misfortune as deserved payback for unremembered past acts, and there is experimental work suggesting that priming people with karma makes them judge victims more harshly. The philosophical objections are serious too: no memory of past lives, no observable proportionality between wrongdoing and suffering, an infinite regress of explanation, and tension between karmic determinism and free will. When proportionality can only be verified by an enlightened sage, the theory has stopped being checkable. Some scholars argue karma should not be classified as a theodicy at all, but as an explanatory account of suffering rather than a moral justification of a benevolent God.

¶ They disagree, and that is the finding

Set the three side by side and resist the urge to blend them. For the Zoroastrian, suffering comes from an adversary, from outside, and the cost is strict omnipotence or sole causation. For the Kabbalist, it comes from a divine attribute out of balance, and the cost is locating evil's root inside the divine. For the Gita, it is lawful consequence of past action, and the cost is that proportionality is unobservable and the account invites victim-blaming.

Invader, attribute, consequence. Those are three different metaphysics, and a page that merged them into one ancient wisdom would be committing exactly the error Samuel Sandmel named as parallelomania in 1962: assembling superficially similar material from unrelated systems and calling the resemblance a result.

What they actually share is only a negative, and the negative is the whole point. None of them holds all three properties the argument from evil requires. So the argument, aimed at them, does not land the way it lands on the Western package.

¶ Where this is weakest

Four things cut against everything above, and leaving them out would make this page worse than useless.

Ehrman already considered the dualist answer, and rejected it. God's Problem treats the apocalyptic response, that evil forces are at work now and God will intervene, as one of the Bible's answers, and finds it wanting: it defers rather than explains, and the promised intervention did not arrive. Anyone claiming he never encountered this has not read the book. The dualist answer has to beat his rejection, not his silence.

Ehrman has publicly moved away from the Persian thesis this wing argues. He has written that he used to accept that Jewish resurrection belief and apocalyptic thought came from Zoroastrianism, as nearly every critical scholar was taught for a century, and that he is no longer confident. The reasons are good ones: we have no Zoroastrian text attesting resurrection earlier than its appearance in Jewish writing, the Avestan manuscript tradition is late and the religion was living and changing, and scholars such as Bremmer conclude the origins may lie in intra-Jewish development. This site takes the influence question seriously in the other direction, and it would be dishonest to cite him for the demolition while quietly dropping him here. Readers should know the disagreement exists and is live. See Did Zoroastrianism Influence Judaism?, which grades the evidence rather than asserting the conclusion.

Narrowing a target is not hitting one. Everything here is defensive. It removes an argument; it supplies no positive evidence for any deity whatsoever.

Cost is not refutation. Each of the three answers buys relief by giving something up, and a critic is entitled to say the price is too high.

¶ What actually follows

Not proof. This page does not argue that suffering demonstrates God, and any page that told you it did would be selling something. The argument from evil is not answered here; it is located. It is decisive against a God who is omnipotent, perfectly good, and solely responsible, and it is much weaker against cosmologies that never claimed all three.

Which leaves a genuinely open historical question, and it happens to be the one this project exists to ask. If the ancient world offered several accounts of suffering, and the West ended up with the one most vulnerable to the objection that has emptied its churches, then how did that happen, and when, and who decided? That is not a question about whether God exists. It is a question about the provenance of an idea, and it is answerable with evidence.

¶ Common questions

¶ Does suffering prove God does not exist?

It proves something narrower. The argument from evil works by contradiction and needs three claims at once: that God is all-powerful, that God is perfectly good, and that nothing happens without God's doing or permission. Against that combination it is a serious and arguably decisive argument. Against traditions that deny any one of the three, such as Zoroastrian dualism, it does not have the same force. Narrowing the target is not the same as answering the argument, and no argument in either direction establishes that a God exists.

¶ Why did Bart Ehrman lose his faith?

By his own account, over suffering rather than over textual criticism. In God's Problem (2008) he argues that the Bible offers multiple conflicting answers to why we suffer, that the prophets, Job, Ecclesiastes and the apocalyptic texts do not agree with each other, and that none of them accounts for the scale and arbitrariness of real-world suffering. He now describes himself as both an agnostic and an atheist, distinguishing knowledge from belief: he does not claim to know whether any God exists, and he does not believe in one.

¶ What is the Zoroastrian answer to the problem of evil?

That God is not the author of evil. In the Zoroastrian picture the destructive spirit Angra Mainyu freely chose his own maleficent path, so Ahura Mazda is not responsible for evil entering the world, and on some readings the two spirits are mutually limiting powers with the world as their battlefield. Suffering is damage from an adversary rather than divine policy. The complication is that the Gathas present the twin spirits as originating with Ahura Mazda, and the Zurvanite variant makes Ohrmazd and Ahriman twin sons of Time, both of which push the problem back up a level.

¶ Does karma explain suffering?

It offers an account on which suffering is lawful rather than random, tracking past action across lives. Critics argue this amounts to blaming the victim, treating present misfortune as deserved payback for acts the sufferer cannot remember, and experimental work suggests that thinking about karma leads people to judge victims more harshly. Further objections include the absence of any observable proportionality between wrongdoing and suffering, an infinite regress of explanation, and the tension between karmic determinism and free will. Some scholars argue karma is better classified as an explanatory account of suffering than as a theodicy proper.

¶ Is Gevurah the same as evil?

No. Gevurah, severity or judgment, is a divine attribute: the power of limit and boundary, the counterweight to Chesed, lovingkindness. On the mainstream scholarly reading of the Zohar, evil arises only when severity breaks loose from mercy and becomes self-consuming, the sitra achra or other side. Severity inside the balance is what makes a world with edges possible. The implication runs both ways: a God who is only love is as unbalanced, in this architecture, as a God who is only judgment.

¶ Does this page argue that God exists?

No, and that distinction matters. Every argument here is defensive. Showing that the problem of evil targets one specific conception of God does not provide any positive reason to think a God exists; it only removes one reason for thinking none does. A reader who finds this convincing should end up less certain that suffering settles the question, not more certain of any particular answer to it.

¶ Sources

Bart D. Ehrman, God's Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question, Why We Suffer (2008); B. Ehrman, “Was Resurrection a Zoroastrian Idea?” and “On Being an Agnostic Atheist,” ehrmanblog.org; Mary Boyce, A History of Zoroastrianism; Mircea Eliade, A History of Religious Ideas, vol. 1; G. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (1941) and Kabbalah (1974); I. Tishby, The Wisdom of the Zohar (1989); Bhagavad Gita, esp. ch. 2 and 11; Mikel Burley, “Retributive Karma and the Problem of Blaming the Victim,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion; Jan Bremmer, The Rise and Fall of the Afterlife (2002); Samuel Sandmel, “Parallelomania,” JBL 81 (1962).

The volume behind this page: doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21879071

¶ Related

More from the sourced library:

• Did Zoroastrianism Influence Judaism?
• What Is Gevurah in Kabbalah?
• What Is Zurvanism?
• Who Is Angra Mainyu?
• Is Hell Eternal?