What If The Universe Is Bad?

How to sit with someone in their pain

Image: Johnny and Louise, Naked, 1993 Mike Leigh/Thin Man Films

Want to hear the bleakest worldview of all time?

Here it is:

“See, the thing is Brian, that God is a hateful God. Must be. Because if God is good, then why is there evil in the world? Why is there pain and hate and greed and war? It doesn’t make sense. But if God is a nasty bastard then you can say ‘why is there good in the world? Why is there love and hope and joy?’ Well, let’s face it, good exists to be effed up by evil. The very existence of God enables evil to flourish. Therefore, God is bad.”

—Johnny, from the film Naked, 1993

The question “why do bad things happen to good people?” is the most serious theological problem. It’s a devastating observation: the God that millions turn to in their darkest moments often seems antagonistic, indifferent, or unavailable. When the status quo is intolerable and you’ve begged and pleaded, how could a being of benevolence and light allow the unthinkable to happen?

In the last week alone I have spoken with several people who endure lives of quiet absurdity. Some with chronic pain, some abandoned by family precisely when they most needed them, some with deep trauma but without the resources to address it properly. Sometimes I feel like those visitors to maximum security prisons where you can only talk through a thick pane of glass. You can try to be with them but they’re living a reality you can’t fully enter. Though dismayed, I’m unsurprised when they tell me they are struggling to believe that God — or any benevolent force — is even real, let alone good.

What should you say to these people? That God works in mysterious ways? Perhaps true but hollow in moments of actual pain. That if they learn to put out more “good energy” it will come back to them? I don’t mean to sound flip, but I do mean to highlight the profound difficulty of helping someone who has landed in an emotional and spiritual black hole.

Job knew something about this. Of the many fascinating aspects of the Biblical account — the paragon of inexplicable suffering — is the careful way in which his three friends initially interact with him.

Then they sat on the ground with him for seven days and seven nights. No one said a word to him, because they saw how great his suffering was.

There is great wisdom in this. When even well-intended words sting because nothing said can hold what’s being felt, the very best move is to quietly demonstrate solidarity — to show up. If the one who is suffering wants to speak, respond as best you can. If they don’t, resist the urge to fill the silence. You can’t take their pain from them but you can, through presence alone, help them to endure their own.

When Job finally spoke, it was in rage. He cursed the day of his birth, wished he had never been conceived, and demanded an explanation from a God who seemed not to be listening. The rest of the book is a four-way philosophical exploration of suffering — each of his friends offering theories about why this happened, with Job insisting doggedly that he had done nothing to deserve it. And the text agrees with him. Which brings us back to our central question.

Both Johnny and Job believed in God but had serious misgivings as to His nature and intentions. Before his encounter with suffering, Job was meticulously religious and deeply content. His pain was a monkey wrench hurled into the fine machinery of his spirituality. And though no backstory is given for Johnny, I suspect there’s more than one helping of misery lurking in his past.

Many people simply abandon God in the face of suffering — it’s the path of least resistance. But I’d argue that’s actually a non sequitur. Suffering doesn’t disprove God’s existence; it raises questions about His character. What Johnny and Job do is bolder and, to my thinking, more logically consistent: they keep God in the picture and indict Him. Yes, there is a God — and He might be a bastard. That’s a harder position to hold than atheism, and possibly a more honest one.

Where I think Johnny goes wrong in his stairwell symposium is in assuming that God could actually be bad. Here’s why that doesn’t hold: God, as conceived in classical monotheism, is an infinite being present in, yet transcending, time and space — a being with no lack, no needs, no wants. Badness, cruelty, indifference — these are functions of lack. They are strictly human conditions, born of need and frustration and pain. We foist them onto God when we’re suffering and lack the perspective to process why. A being with nothing to gain from human suffering cannot, by definition, be malevolent.

What follows then is that if these assumptions are correct, then there simply is no such thing as “bad” and all that transpires, from kittens to cancer, has an ultimately beneficial purpose. This knowledge has one critical benefit. While it cannot diminish in the moment physical or emotional pain, it can mitigate how deeply it reaches by providing an unseen “why.”

In the same way that it was deduced that the Higgs Boson and the planet Neptune “must be there” even though we lacked the tools to observe them directly, so too must there be a goodness at the bottom of it all. And until we can see it, we can both mourn the very real pain that abounds, sit quietly with those who are enduring it, and know that as the Talmud suggests “all that descends from on high is for the good.”

In the end, I don’t know that anyone in genuine darkness is reached by an argument. What I find, walking with people through the hardest moments of their lives, is that the question “is the universe bad?” loses some of its force when someone chooses to sit with you inside it. Not to fix it. Not to explain it. Just to stay.

That choice — to show up, to sit with someone, to refuse to leave them alone with their pain — is itself an answer of sorts. Not a logical one. A human one.

Q: Who walked with you when you couldn’t walk alone?

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