The Hard Questions Deserve Honest Answers

No one should be argued into faith over a heap of unaddressed objections, as though becoming a Christian required agreeing not to think about the obvious problems. The problems are real, and a case that dodged them would not be worth accepting. So before the final essay's invitation, let me take the five that stop people most often — not to dispatch them in a paragraph each, which would be glib, but to show that each has an honest answer, and that several of them, looked at closely, actually point back toward the God they were raised against.

If God is good, why all the suffering?

This is the great objection, and I will not be flippant about it, because for most people it is not an argument at all but a wound. Why cancer, why the child's grave, why the sheer quantity of pain?

Two things, though, are worth seeing. First, notice that the objection borrows the very thing it means to deny. To call the world's suffering an outrage — not merely unpleasant but wrong, a way things ought not to be — is to appeal to a standard of how things should be. Where did that standard come from? In a purely material universe there is no "ought," only what is: a tsunami is just physics, a murder just chemistry, neither of them wrong. The problem of evil, felt at full force, is quietly a witness that the moral law is real — and the reality of the moral law was one of our strongest signposts to God. The atheist raising the problem of evil is standing on God's floor to punch at the ceiling.

Second, Christianity does not offer a tidy theory that makes the pain go away. It offers something stranger and, for many, more durable: a God who did not stay above the suffering explaining it, but entered it. The cross means that whatever else we cannot understand, we cannot say God is a stranger to our pain. He has been betrayed, tortured, and killed. That is not a full answer to why. It is the presence of someone in the dark with you — which is what sufferers usually need more than a theory.

Isn't hell monstrous?

Hell offends us, and it should be taken seriously rather than softened into nothing. But consider what the alternative would mean. We spent an essay establishing that evil is real and that our sense of justice demands it be answered — that the world's cruelties cannot simply be shrugged off. Hell is, at bottom, the insistence that they will not be: that God takes our choices seriously enough to let them be final; that he will not force his presence on those who have spent a lifetime saying they want nothing to do with him. A God who abolished hell entirely would be a God who, in the end, did not care what we did or chose — and that is not a kinder God, only an emptier one. The door of hell, it has been said, is locked from the inside.

Hasn't science made all this obsolete?

Only if you have been told a myth about a war between science and faith that historians of science no longer believe. The founders of modern science — Kepler, Newton, Boyle, Faraday — were overwhelmingly believers who expected the universe to be orderly precisely because they thought a rational God had made it. Science studies the mechanism; it is silent, by its very method, on whether there is meaning or a Maker behind the mechanism. To say science has disproved God is like saying that once you understand the engineering of a bridge, you have proved it had no engineer. The one does not touch the other. And we have already seen that the deepest things science leans on — an orderly cosmos, a mind that can read it — sit far more comfortably in a created universe than an accidental one.

What about all the hypocrites?

This is the objection with the most obvious targets, and I will not defend the indefensible: the church has, across its history, sheltered cruelty and produced spectacular hypocrites, and that is a genuine scandal. But look at what the complaint assumes. To be outraged that Christians fail to live up to Christ's teaching is to concede that Christ's teaching is a standard worth failing to meet. Hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue; you can only accuse someone of not practising what they preach if the preaching was good. The failures of Christians are not evidence that the gospel is false. They are evidence that it is true about one thing above all — that the human heart is fractured, even the religious one — which is exactly what it told us. The gospel is not the claim that Christians are good. It is the claim that they are not, and need rescue as much as anyone.

Isn't it arrogant to say there's only one way?

It sounds arrogant, until you notice that the objection assumes its own exclusive truth — that "all roads lead to God" is itself a sweeping claim about ultimate reality, and one that, as we saw, contradicts what most roads actually teach. Every worldview is exclusive; the tolerant-sounding one simply hides its exclusions better. The real question is not whether a claim is narrow but whether it is true. And there is a particular humility in the Christian version that is easy to miss: it does not say we were good enough to find the one way. It says we could not climb, so the one way came down to us. That is the opposite of the self-congratulation the objection imagines. A rescue is not arrogant for being the only rope thrown to a drowning man.

None of these answers is meant to be the last word; whole books are written on each. But notice the pattern that keeps repeating: the very objections raised against faith tend to stand on ground that only faith can supply — real evil, real justice, a real standard, real humility. The barriers are more honestly climbed than we are led to believe. Which means the last question is no longer whether the case is reasonable. It is what you are going to do about it.