Many peo­ple fail to believe in God because of the “Prob­lem of evil”, say­ing: “If God is omnipo­tent and lov­ing why do evil and suf­fer­ing still exist?”

The detailed expla­na­tion of this top­ic exceeds the frame of our present paper, but as a start­ing point we can eas­i­ly see that in many cas­es the rea­son of evil and suf­fer­ing in our world are the evil deci­sions of men. In the Chris­t­ian under­stand­ing God nev­er want­ed any­thing bad for the peo­ple, he cre­at­ed a good world in which men was pro­vid­ed with voli­tion­al free­dom. God hon­ours man and his dig­ni­ty and so he even accepts the bad deci­sions of man. Man would not be real­ly free if God accept­ed only par­tial­ly the deeds of man e.g. his good deeds because they do not cause suf­fer­ing. In this way God lets evil hap­pen, he does not make it impos­si­ble, oth­er­wise man would be degrad­ed to a pup­pet. The real­i­ty is that often man does not use his free will in a good way, peo­ple do not think of the oth­ers, but of them­selves. Many suf­fer­ings could be avoid­ed if peo­ple helped each oth­er and act­ed accord­ing to the prin­ci­ple: “Love your neigh­bour as your­self.” Many dis­eases have their cause in the lack of respon­si­bil­i­ty of peo­ple, even if it is not always obvi­ous enough, peo­ple influ­ence each oth­er in many ways.

But there are oth­er events like thun­der­storms, floods, earthquakes…which are not direct­ly caused by human beings and can lead to a lot of suf­fer­ing. At this point we should be con­scious of the fact that man is endowed with intel­li­gence and many abil­i­ties which can help him to pre­vent him­self from many bad con­se­quences of such nat­ur­al phe­nom­e­na. Using our knowl­edge in a rea­son­able way and not espe­cial­ly for per­son­al prof­it could pro­tect us in many cas­es much more than it is usu­al nowa­days. One very sim­ple first step would be that peo­ple should not live in dan­ger­ous areas.

Nev­er­the­less we have to admit that this ques­tion is per­haps one of the most dif­fi­cult ques­tions in human life for many peo­ple. Also, we have to express our com­pas­sion towards those who ask this ques­tion while expe­ri­enc­ing severe suf­fer­ing. On the oth­er hand, suf­fer­ing can lead man to a deep­er under­stand­ing of his life and of the aim of his exis­tence because it chal­lenges man to think about the sense of his life. Often suf­fer­ing peo­ple become eas­i­er aware of how unim­por­tant mate­r­i­al things are than healthy ones and start to look for a bet­ter base for their lives.

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