The Existential Problem of Evil: How Could God Let This Happen to Me?

This is the episode I never wanted to write.

Eight months ago, I was working through this playlist trying to give the Problem of Evil a fair hearing from every angle. I was just about to write a video on what I call the Existential Problem of Evil: not "how could God allow evil in the abstract," but "how could God let this happen to me?" Before I could finish writing it, I had a massive panic attack. Since then I've been fighting intense anxiety and depression, bad enough that I was hospitalized at one point.

If you've never experienced this, it might sound trivial from the outside: "he gets scared sometimes? He feels sad?" If you have experienced it, you know it can be absolute hell. I hadn't done anything to deserve it. I found myself furious at God, and at times doubting whether He was even there. Ironically, I found myself asking the exact question I was about to teach: how could God allow this to happen to me?

Up until that point, the Problem of Evil had been a hypothetical I could set down and walk away from. But when something produces intense, long-term suffering in your own life, you're stuck inside it. There's no escape hatch. Things that seemed philosophically clear suddenly go opaque.

Two Different Questions

I think people wrestling with intense suffering are really asking two separate questions, and they need very different answers:

1. The Theoretical Atheism Question: "Does God not exist?"
2. The Practical Atheism Question: "Why should I turn toward God instead of away from Him?"

This episode takes up the first. We'll tackle practical atheism next time.

Does God Not Exist?

This question was excruciating to sit with. It sent me into anxiety attacks more than once: Am I going to lose my faith? What will I tell my children? Do I have to give up my intellectual integrity to keep believing?

Here's the Existential PoE itself:

1. If God existed, He wouldn't allow [the evil happening to me] to exist.
2. [The evil happening to me] exists.
3. So, God must not exist.

There were stretches where my depression was shocking enough that it genuinely seemed impossible God could allow it. This isn't just feeling sad. Imagine that sinking feeling you get when something has clearly gone wrong, except it sinks much lower and doesn't pass in minutes. It stays for days. There's no pep-talking your way out. You're stuck in the pit of despair with no visible way out.

Philosophically, though, this is really just a personal instance of the Evidential Problem of Evil, and we already have a solid response to it: Skeptical Theism. God is an infinite intellect and perfectly good; an infinite intellect could locate redemptive purposes finite minds can't fathom; a perfectly good being would use them; so there are sufficient redemptive purposes for every evil, even ones we can't currently see the point of.

Convincing Isn't the Same as Satisfying

Here's where I have to be honest: that answer felt genuinely satisfying to me as philosophy — until I was actually in the middle of my own prolonged suffering, and something in me revolted against it. That confused me. Did I no longer find the argument convincing? Did that mean I no longer believed in God?

After a lot of soul-searching and counseling, I can say: no. I didn't find Skeptical Theism unconvincing, I found it repellant in the moment, and those are different things. I was furious at God. I didn't want a good reason for my suffering; I wanted the suffering gone. Admitting there might be a purpose felt like giving up on escape.

The key thing to notice: that reaction is not a philosophical problem, it's an emotional one. Throwing more arguments at an emotional wound doesn't heal it — it usually makes things worse. Skeptical Theism remains, I believe, an intellectually sufficient answer. But intellectually sufficient and emotionally satisfying are not the same thing.

What Actually Helped

Rely on God, mid-suffering. I had to walk with God through it rather than away from it. Only by doing that repeatedly could I actually see, not just believe, that He's faithful to bring me out. I'd known that intellectually before; now I have the experiential knowledge of it (the same distinction from the Manichaean Defense video). That's exactly why Skeptical Theism wasn't emotionally satisfying at first: I hadn't lived it yet.

Be honest with God about your anger. Repressing it just curdles into deeper depression. Stop performing a faith you don't actually feel.

Find a safe person or counselor. God puts these people in your path for a reason.

Chase "what can I learn," not "why." I've said God allows evil for some good purpose. I never said we get to know it. In Job, nobody, not even Job, is ever told why he suffered; Job gets an audience with God and still doesn't get that answer. Some purposes I identified quickly (becoming stronger, depending on God more); some I only understood looking backward; some I may not understand until eternity. Chasing the undiscoverable will make the suffering worse.

Gratitude. Deliberately focusing on what you're grateful for, and thanking God for it, is the only real path to joy in the middle of suffering.

Fear of Abandonment

A second source of doubt was less philosophical, more psychological: a recurring, often triggerless fear that God wasn't really there. I'd go looking for reasons to doubt Him, hoping an intellectual answer would finally settle it, but you can't pre-empt every doubt.

One day I prayed for God to reveal what was going on. The next day, unprompted, my counselor told me he'd been praying and felt God wanted him to tell me my doubt was emotional, not intellectual. The day after that I got on the phone with the philosopher J.P. Moreland, who has dealt publicly with severe anxiety, and — again unprompted — he told me the same thing, correctly guessing the source. I've since learned there's a documented pattern among men of my generation (and our fathers, shaped by the aftermath of World War II) who were literally or emotionally abandoned by their fathers, leaving a subconscious fear of abandonment by God the Father, surfacing as doubt about His existence.

This is a psychological wound, not a philosophical one. A tighter syllogism doesn't touch it. What helps is learning, experientially, to trust God, leaning on Hebrews 13:5: "I will never leave you nor forsake you." You might object that trusting He won't abandon you presupposes He exists, but this isn't a proof you're building, it's a pattern of trust you're training into. Romans 1:18–21 suggests we already carry a natural knowledge of God at some deep level; the work is consciously assenting to what we already know.

The Problem of Cartesian Certainty

Here's what hit me hardest. Given all the evidence, we should believe, disbelieve, or withhold judgment, whichever the evidence actually supports. By most counts there are some thirty-nine arguments historically offered for God's existence, several quite durable, against really only two on the other side: the Problem of Evil, and the Argument from Science (that we don't need God to explain things, which, even if true, only supports agnosticism, not atheism). On balance, I think the cumulative case for God is strong.

But strong isn't airtight. Could all thirty-nine arguments be flawed somewhere? Could every response we've given in this series be subtly wrong? That sliver of possible doubt is what nearly broke me.

This isn't a new problem. René Descartes (1596–1650) tried, in his Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), to prove God's existence with the same certainty as 2+2=4, by doubting everything doubtable first. The trouble is, once you've doubted everything, there's almost nowhere left to stand. His project failed on its own terms.

What does that mean for us? I don't think it means we can't rationally believe. Total Cartesian certainty is a myth for nearly everything we believe, not just God — how do you know reality isn't an illusion, or that other people have minds at all? That kind of certainty isn't available for almost any belief we hold. We're finite beings with a finite capacity to know, and we have to make peace with that. The real question was never "is this 100% certain" but "is this certain enoughto rationally believe." Given the cumulative case, I think the answer is yes.

Why Doesn't God Just Show Up?

One more piece, worth a fuller video later: why doesn't God make Himself unmistakably obvious, especially in our worst suffering? Think about a child who gets comforted every single time he throws a tantrum. He never develops the resources to regulate himself; he ends up stunted. I don't think this means God isn't present. I believe He often shows up in quiet ways, and occasionally in more dramatic ones. But I think He doesn't bail us out on demand for the same reason a good parent doesn't rush in at every tantrum: for our genuine growth, not because He doesn't love us.