One of the most common objections to God turns out to be one of the best proofs for His existence. The person complaining about suffering has an expectation that the world should be a certain way: without pain, abuse, violence, disease, war, and death. In other words, it should be a good world, a world with justice, fairness, equality, health, and joy. Or to put it another way, it should be a world ruled by a good God, who ensures that suffering does not occur. When it is not that way, the objector concludes that there is no one at the wheel, and the car of our world is careening out of control as a driverless vehicle would.

But our objector has just revealed that he expects or wishes the world to be a morally good place: a place of fairness, kindness, and equity. But wait: why should the world be that way, if God does not exist? If the world is simply the result of random explosions and conglomerations of matter, why should anyone expect it to be good, or complain if it is not? C. S. Lewis put it this way, “My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?”

After all, molecules don’t care about justice. The universe doesn’t have compassion on your pain. A dead, sterile cosmos has neither love nor hate, good nor evil, beauty nor ugliness. It just is. So if there’s no God, then there’s nothing evil about suffering. Suffering is just a name we put on some molecules affecting others in ways we deem unpleasant. But it’s no more significant than an asteroid hitting our Moon.

Once we object to all the evil in the world, we are admitting that we believe some Law of Good and Evil exists that is being broken in our world. But where does that Law come from? If our ‘sense’ of good and evil is a meaningless, random, subjective impression, then it is no argument against God. It’s like saying, “There can’t be a God, because I feel yucky this morning.”

But if evil is real and meaningful (and worth objecting to), then so is good. In which case Morality, or Moral Law, is real. And if Moral Law is real, it appears there must be a Lawgiver who put that standard into every human heart.

So if you really believe evil exists, it appears you believe God exists, too.

If you’re a consistent atheist, you don’t get to borrow the idea of good and evil from Christianity in order to critique Christianity. If you’re a true naturalist-materialist, then horror at suffering is inconsistent. It’s all random, remember?

The objector is impaled upon the horns of a dilemma, that Lewis experienced while an atheist: “Thus, in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist – in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless – I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality – namely my idea of justice – was full of sense. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never have known it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.”