The Megaphone Argument: Why Won't God Just Leave Us Alone?

Let's suppose, for the sake of argument, that everything we've covered so far in this series is right — that God allows evil for our own good, whether it's soul-building, or the free will it takes to make real love possible, or any of the other reasons we've explored. Fine. But here's a sharper question nobody's asked yet: what if we don't want that? Why can't God just let us enjoy the handful of things we already like, and keep all the evil to Himself? Let's consider it.

The Problem Gets Worse Before It Gets Better

Think about how this objection lands. If your parents forced you to take piano lessons because "it's good for you," but you just wanted to play football, that's at least understandable — your parents have limited resources, limited time, limited ability to give you everything you might want. They have to make trade-offs.

But God, if He exists, has no such limits. He's not working with pre-existing material under resource constraints; classical theism holds that God creates ex nihilo — out of nothing. So it's not as though giving us a trouble-free paradise would cost Him anything or inconvenience Him in any way. If He can create anything at all, why not simply create the parts we want and skip everything else? Why not offer us a choice: either accept the whole package of evil-for-our-own-good, or opt out and get to keep just the good stuff, evil-free?

This is actually a harder version of the Problem of Evil than it first appears, because it's not asking "why does evil serve some purpose" — it's asking "why doesn't God just let me have the purpose-serving good stuff without the evil, if He's unlimited and could technically arrange that?"

What Would "Just the Good Stuff" Actually Look Like?

Here's where I like to slow down and actually take the thought experiment seriously. When I used to teach this in the classroom, I'd ask my students: if you could wish for one thing and get it, guaranteed, what would it be? Obviously I can't poll everyone watching this, but feel free to answer in the comments.

My students' answers tended to cluster into a few categories:

• Stuff — a killer surfboard, a drop-top '64 Impala.
• Job success — being the greatest philosopher who ever lived.
• Fame — I'll admit, some part of me has wanted that too.
• Romantic success — an amazing partner (I've got one, but not everyone feels that way).

Here's the problem with all of these: whatever you want right now will very likely change. Suppose I actually get that '64 Impala — thrilled for a while, but eventually I'd want something different. Suppose I get to be a philosopher for forty years — eventually I'd want to try something new. Even my marriage illustrates this. Early on, just sitting with my wife for hours made me completely content. Now, central as our marriage is to my happiness, it isn't sufficient on its own; I want other things too.

There's a classic Twilight Zone episode, "A Nice Place to Visit" (1960), that captures this: a small-time crook dies and wakes up getting everything he ever wants — money, women, winning every bet — only to discover, in the final twist, he's not in heaven. He's in hell, and endless, effortless satisfaction of every desire turns out to be its own special torment.

Don't take my word for it — ask anyone who's actually gotten "everything." Tom Brady, in 2005, at the peak of an incredible run — multiple Super Bowl rings, a supermodel wife, obscene money, global fame — said in a now-famous interview something like, "This can't be it. There's gotta be more." If that much worldly success wasn't enough to satisfy one of the most successful people on the planet, what makes any of us think we'll be the one who finally hits the jackpot that satisfies?

The Argument From Temporary Happiness

1. The things of this world can, at best, provide temporary, limited happiness.
2. We most deeply desire inexhaustible happiness.
3. So, the things of this world cannot provide what we most deeply desire.

And it's not just that worldly goods eventually stop satisfying us — they can also be taken away entirely at any moment. I taught philosophy at the same school for eleven years, loved it, loved my life. Then my position was cut, and I went from feeling like I was on top of the world to spending two years piecing together a living. You can't be securely happy in something that could be ripped away from you at any time.

And then there's the ultimate version of this: death. Even if you never lose your job, your health, or anything else you love, one day you die, and that's the total loss of everything. I'll be honest with you — I deal with heavy anxiety, and there have been times I've genuinely felt like I just wanted life to be over so I didn't have to keep feeling the weight of it. But here's the important distinction: that's not a desire to actually die. It's a desperate, misdirected desire to finally be happy, expressing itself as a wish for the pain to stop by any means available.

What Could Actually Satisfy Us?

4. Only an eternal, infinitely good, immortality-granting being could provide inexhaustible happiness.
5. Only God is an eternal, infinitely good, immortality-granting being.
6. So, only God can provide what we most deeply desire.

Follow the logic: if temporary goods eventually bore us or get taken away, we need something genuinely unlimited — something where the more you experience it, the better it gets. There's a wonderful image for this at the very end of C.S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia (The Last Battle, 1956), where Lewis describes true Narnia as a book where "every chapter is better than the one before." That's the shape of the happiness we're after — not a static reward, but something endlessly deepening. And because worldly things are lost precisely because they're temporary and we're mortal, whatever could satisfy us permanently would also have to be eternal, and make us capable of being eternal too.

This is, of course, God. Augustine put it memorably in the opening of his Confessions (c. 397–400 AD): "You have made us for Yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in You" — often shorthanded as "we have a God-shaped hole in our hearts nothing else will fit."

A quick technical note: you might object that "only God is eternal, infinitely good, immortality-granting" assumes God exists, begging the question. But remember: we're responding to the Logical Problem of Evil, which itself grants God's existence for the sake of argument, to show a contradiction with evil. The Megaphone Response steps in after that assumption is already on the table, showing there's no contradiction after all. It would only beg the question if offered as an independent proof of God's existence from scratch — which it isn't.

The Deception of Worldly Goods

Here's a pattern I bet you recognize: that nagging feeling of "I just need to get that one thing, and then I'll finally be happy." You get the thing, you're happy for a while, and then it just becomes one more object you own, and the craving migrates to something new. You could spend your whole life chasing that mirage from one object to the next.

I know this pattern intimately because I'm a recovering alcoholic — seventeen years sober now. Toward the end of my drinking, I'd get to the point where I'd drink heavily and never even feel drunk anymore. It was just binge after binge, never enough, but I kept coming back anyway, chasing a satisfaction that kept receding.

What Breaks the Cycle?

Here's the honest, personal answer: I've found that I'm most turned away from the things of this world and most turned toward God precisely in the middle of bad things happening — in the grip of an anxiety attack, when close friends have died, when I lost my job. In those moments, I see clearly that the things I'd been clinging to were never actually secure to begin with, and that pushes me to look toward the one thing that doesn't change.

7. We are easily deceived into futilely pursuing happiness through the things of this world.
8. Evil shocks us into disillusionment with the good things of this world and forces us to pursue something different.
9. So, possibly, one reason God allows evil is that we need it to refocus on what will truly satisfy our deepest desire for happiness.

C.S. Lewis and the Megaphone

This response takes its name from C.S. Lewis (1898–1963), the Oxford and Cambridge literary scholar and Christian apologist, in his book The Problem of Pain (1940). Lewis writes:

"God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world."

The image is exactly what it sounds like: pleasant experiences are a whisper, easy to miss or take for granted; our conscience speaks a bit louder; but pain is a shout loud enough to interrupt even a world that's gone deaf to everything quieter. On this view, pain isn't gratuitous cruelty — it's God's most effective tool for waking us up out of our comfortable, false attachments to things that were never going to satisfy us anyway.

The Objection: "It's My Choice"

Here's the natural pushback: even if all of that is true, shouldn't it still be my decision whether I want that wake-up call? If I'd rather stay comfortably deceived and never suffer, isn't it my right to choose that?

Here's my response, using an analogy. Imagine a friend with a highly addictive personality tells you she wants to try crystal meth for the first time and asks you to pay back the twenty dollars you owe her so she can get it. You've worked with meth addicts and know exactly what this drug does. You have disturbing photos on your phone of what meth addiction looks like years down the road. If you ask, "Do you want to see this first?" she'll obviously say no. But would you just hand her the money anyway, respecting her stated preference not to be shown anything?

I don't think most of us would. Sometimes unwanted information is important enough to give anyway, precisely because it's vital to a person's actual well-being, even when they'd have declined it if asked in advance. The Megaphone Response says something similar about God: even if we wouldn't consent to the wake-up call of suffering if asked beforehand, it may be important enough that God gives it to us anyway.

I genuinely hope this video wasn't an unwanted wake-up call for anyone watching. But if it was — I hope, like the meth analogy, it was worth it.