The following is an edited extract from The Road Back to God by Joe Barnard (Christian Focus Publications, 2025).
Everyone knows the problem of evil. Any cynical teenager can formulate some version of the question, 'How can a transcendent source of wisdom, power, and goodness exist if there is so much pain and suffering?' For many, the most cogent proof of the nonexistence of 'god' is a picture of a starving child in Africa. There is something about the cultural software of the Western mind that finds it nearly impossible to believe that suffering can be a part of a wise and good, albeit mysterious, design.
Beyond the black dot
Yet, if we are honest, our thinking on the topic of good and evil is exceedingly narrow minded. There is a famous experiment in which psychologists show people a white piece of paper with a black dot on it and then ask the question, 'What do you see?' In almost every instance, people reply, 'A black dot.' The experiment demonstrates the bizarre human tendency to fixate on select details while ignoring a much larger context.
This tendency is evident when most people contemplate the so-called 'problem of evil'. Are there dimensions of evil that ought to trouble the human conscience? Undoubtedly. Still, if we are willing to survey the full landscape of our experience, we must admit that evil is, at most, a splotch against a bigger backdrop.
