Why Suffering in the World?

The theory is, if there is evil, there may be a God - but we have to give up on His Omni-benevolence.

God is like an artist - His Canvas - all of space and all of time. What's He making? He's making something beautiful. Beautiful art always involves a play between dark and light, light and shadow.

 God therefore permits evil. He does not cause evil because evil is a lack of something (like a toothache is a lack of health in the tooth).

But He permits evil so as to bring about a greater good - so as to produce in a way that we cannot see clearly, a more beautiful canvas, a more beautiful sculpture or a beautiful novel or a beautiful painting.

At the end of time, we will see all of Creation like a great book but in the course of this life, we maybe see one paragraph - one tiny part of the whole story. That's why the world so often, as we experience it, doesn't make sense.

Like Job who complains he doesn't deserve this suffering. God takes him on a tour of the cosmos and asks him over and over "Job, where were you when I created this?"

via Fr Robert Baron and SueWidemark (http://healthread.net/)