Why does God allow all the evil in the world? (Isaiah 45:7)
Why all the pain and suffering? None of the great thinkers of the ages have come up with the answers to these questions. C.S. Lewis, after going through his own apostasy from Christianity, may have come the closest — becoming one of Christianity’s most avid advocates.
As Lewis considered the Christ, he concluded that
only two views of this man are possible. Either he was a raving lunatic of an unusually abominable type, or else He was, and is, precisely what He said. There is no middle way. If the records make the first hypothesis unacceptable, you must submit to the second. And if you do that, all else that is claimed by Christians becomes credible — that this Man, having been killed, was yet alive, and that His death, in some manner incomprehensible to human thought, has effected a real change. . . in our favour.1
After gaining his deep appreciation for Christianity, in regard to evil, pain, and the suffering that come with life, Lewis poignantly states that if you “Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free wills involve, . . .you find that you have excluded life itself.”1
Albert Schweitzer — considered by some to be the greatest humanitarian and one of the greatest thinkers of the last century
