What If Suffering Just Makes Us Better?

Why does God allow evil? Here's another candidate answer: what if it just makes us stronger? Would that actually be a good enough reason?

Before I get into it, an important caveat. What follows is a response to the logical problem of evil—the classroom version, the one we've been working through this whole series. It is emphatically not meant to comfort someone in the middle of real suffering right now. If I ever said to a grieving friend, "buck up, this is good for you," that would be a cruel and cheap thing to say, and I don't want anyone to walk away from this post thinking that's my point. I'll do a whole separate post on the existential problem of evil down the road, for exactly this reason. For now, we're doing philosophy, not pastoral care.

Hell Week

I played football in high school in the early 1990s, and my school, like a lot of schools, had a preseason ritual universally known as "Hell Week." The name alone was terrifying before I'd even set foot on the field. I'd never played before. The upperclassmen looked enormous and mean. I'd heard horror stories about the physical toll. It was clearly designed to be intimidating—nobody accidentally names something "Hell Week." They could have called it "Orientation Week" and had upperclassmen mentor the new guys gently. They didn't.

Now, before you accuse me of an "okay boomer" moment here—for the record, I'm Gen X, not a boomer, and I'm not defending every specific practice that goes on during preseason training. Hazing has become a real problem in youth and college sports in this country, and it needs real oversight and limits. I'm not here to relitigate that. But I will say this: going through Hell Week taught me things. Specifically, it taught me courage and perseverance.

Here's the important distinction: it didn't inform me about courage, the way a lecture informs you about the causes of World War I. It formed me. There's a difference between being told a fact and being shaped by an experience. The old metaphor is that steel has to be tempered in fire—you can't just decide to have tempered steel; you have to actually put the metal through the heat and the hammering. I couldn't just decide one day to be courageous. I had to go through something genuinely difficult, persevere through it, and come out the other side with courage that actually belonged to me.

The Argument

The character-building response, sometimes called a "soul-making theodicy" in the philosophical literature (a term most associated with the 20th-century philosopher John Hick, who developed the idea at length in his 1966 book Evil and the God of Love), makes roughly this move: God allows a significant amount of suffering because that suffering is what produces virtues—courage, perseverance, compassion, wisdom—that couldn't be produced any other way. And since having that kind of character is a tremendous good, the suffering required to build it turns out to be worth the cost.

The obvious question this raises: why should we think high character is worth all that suffering in the first place?

Reply One: Little Evils Prep Us for Big Ones

One thought, drawing on my own experience at the United States Air Force Academy: maybe God allows smaller evils specifically to prepare us for larger ones down the road—the way basic training exists to prepare soldiers for combat, not because basic training itself is the point.

But this reply runs into an immediate problem: if high character is only valuable because it helps us survive or navigate future evils, then we're back to square one—why do those evils need to exist either? You can't justify one round of suffering by appealing to a second round of suffering it prepares you for, unless you can independently justify the second round too. This reply, on its own, just kicks the can down the road.

Reply Two: Maybe We Can't Be Happy Without It

A second, more interesting possibility: maybe there's a necessary connection between having a strong character and actually being happy, such that you simply can't get the second without the first. The philosopher Eleonore Stump has pointed out that psychologists are more or less unanimous that people who have never faced and worked through real difficulty tend to struggle more with lasting well-being, not less—easy lives don't obviously produce flourishing people.

Consider cowardice as an example: a cowardly disposition doesn't just fail to build character, it actively produces its own kind of suffering—chronic anxiety, fear, and avoidance. Or consider a different angle: maybe strong character is simply part of what it means to function well as the kind of creature we are, whether or not we notice the payoff immediately. Think about why a plant needs green leaves. A plant that somehow "chose" not to photosynthesize wouldn't necessarily feel any immediate pain from that choice, but it would still be operating in a way that's unhealthy for the kind of thing it is. Maybe strong character works similarly for us: built into what it means for a human being to function and flourish as the kind of creature we are, whether we consciously feel the connection to happiness or not.

Reply Three: Strong Character Is Just Good, Full Stop

A third possibility: maybe having a strong character is simply a good in itself, independent of any calculation about happiness.

Here's a piece of evidence I find genuinely compelling: think about the stories that move us. Nobody writes a beloved story about a person who never faced any hardship and remained a coward the whole way through—that's not a story anyone wants to read or watch. The stories we return to again and again feature people enduring real suffering and coming out the other side changed, stronger, wiser. You could object that this is just comfort we tell ourselves to get through our own current suffering—cope now, redemption later. Maybe so, but notice that even as a coping mechanism, it only works because we're still looking forward to something we genuinely believe will be worth it. The coping mechanism itself is evidence of how deeply we believe the character built through suffering has real value.

Here's a second piece of evidence, and it's the one I find most personally persuasive: ask anyone who has actually been through significant hardship and come out with real character whether they'd erase it if they could. I was a genuinely goofy, embarrassing kid, and there are entire chunks of my adolescence and college years I could, hypothetically, go back and redo more smoothly, more successfully, more coolly. But here's the question I always ask myself: would I still get to be the person I am right now if I did that? And the honest answer is no. I wouldn't want to go back and avoid all that awkwardness and difficulty if it meant giving up the person those experiences helped shape me into. I think that's a real, felt piece of evidence that the character we build through suffering is genuinely worth what it costs us—not just a story we tell ourselves after the fact.

Objection: God Could Have Just Built the Character In From the Start

Here's a natural pushback: if character is so valuable, why didn't God just create us already possessing it, fully formed, and skip the suffering that supposedly builds it?

I think the answer here has to do with the value of participation. There's something meaningfully different about character you actually forged through your own struggle and choices, versus character that was simply installed in you like a factory setting. It's good—genuinely good, and not just sentimentally so—that we have some real say in shaping who we become, rather than being handed a finished, pre-built self with no involvement of our own. A courage you fought for is a different, and arguably richer, kind of possession than a courage you woke up already having.

Objection: Not All Suffering Builds Character

This is the objection I take most seriously, and I don't think it has a full answer. Plenty of suffering plainly doesn't build character in any recognizable sense. Sometimes people simply die, with no time to grow from the experience at all. Sometimes people go through terrible things and come out the other side worse—more bitter, more broken, not less. And it's genuinely hard to see how animal suffering fits into a character-building story at all, since animals presumably aren't undergoing moral formation the way humans might be.

I think this objection is basically right, and I want to be honest about that rather than force a fit that isn't there. It doesn't show that character building is a false explanation for suffering—but it does show it can't be the whole explanation. At best, it's a genuine, partial answer: a real reason God might allow some evils, though clearly not the only reason, and not an explanation that covers every case we actually observe in the world.

That partial-but-real quality, I'd suggest, describes basically every response we've walked through in this series so far—Molinism, the Free Will Defense, and now this one. Each seems to capture something true about why God might allow at least some evil, without any single one of them closing the case completely. Maybe that's simply the honest shape the answer takes: not one tidy theodicy that explains everything, but several genuine, overlapping reasons, each covering part of the territory.