Someone shared a quote from atheist speaker Tracie Harris. It wasn’t hostile. It wasn’t sarcastic. It was simply a challenge that I think every Christian should take seriously.

This is what she wrote:

“You either have a god who sends child rapists to rape children or you have a god who simply watches it and says, ‘When you are done I’m going to punish you.’ But if I could stop a person from raping a child, I would. That’s the difference between me and your god.”

Forget the apologetics for a moment. Forget the philosophical arguments. Forget the Bible verses we instinctively reach for.

Just sit with the question.

Imagine hearing a child crying out for help next door. You know they’re being abused, and you know you can stop it. No decent person would walk away. Most of us wouldn’t even stop to think. We’d act.

So why doesn’t God?

I don’t think Christians should rush past that question or explain it away with a cliché. In fact, I think we should be willing to admit that this is probably the strongest argument against belief in God that has ever been made.

It’s certainly stronger than arguments about dinosaurs, or contradictions in the Bible, or whether miracles violate the laws of nature.

This one reaches somewhere much deeper. It asks whether a good God can exist at all if children are abused, families are massacred, and innocent people suffer in ways that most of us can barely imagine.

And if we’re honest, the Bible itself asks exactly the same question.

The writers of the Psalms ask why God seems silent while the wicked prosper. The prophets cry out over violence that appears to go unanswered. The book of Job is one long protest against apparently undeserved suffering. Even Jesus dies with the words, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

The Bible doesn’t avoid the problem.

It lives inside it.

So where does that leave us?

I think the first thing we need to recognise is that, in her quote, Harris presents only two possibilities.

Either God causes these atrocities.

Or God simply watches them happen.

Those are certainly possibilities.

But are they the only ones?

The Answers Christians Usually Give

If you’ve spent any time around Christians, you’ve probably heard the usual responses.

The first is free will.

God created human beings with genuine freedom, and genuine freedom means we can choose love or hatred, kindness or cruelty. If God prevented every evil act before it happened, then our freedom wouldn’t really be freedom at all.

I actually think there’s merit to that idea.

The Bible consistently portrays human beings as morally responsible for their actions. It doesn’t describe us as puppets being pulled around by invisible strings. When people commit horrific acts, Scripture places the blame squarely on them, not on God.

But if I’m honest, I don’t think free will answers everything.

After all, the Bible is full of moments where God intervenes. He parts seas. He closes lions’ mouths. He blinds Saul on the road to Damascus. He rescues Peter from prison. If God can intervene sometimes without destroying human freedom, then it’s reasonable to ask why he doesn’t intervene more often.

Another common response is that suffering somehow fits into God’s greater plan.

Again, I think there’s some truth there. The Bible repeatedly tells stories of God bringing good out of evil. Joseph is sold into slavery, yet somehow saves nations from famine. The crucifixion itself is perhaps the greatest example of God bringing unimaginable good out of humanity’s worst act.

But that answer has limits too.

Standing beside the bed of an abused child is probably not the moment to explain that everything happens for a reason. Whatever Romans 8 means, it can’t mean that evil itself becomes good. The Bible never asks us to celebrate evil because God might redeem it later.

So I think Christians should be honest. The usual answers aren’t completely wrong.

But neither are they complete.

If we’re looking for one neat explanation that makes every act of suffering suddenly make sense, I don’t think Christianity gives us one.

In fact, I don’t think the Bible tries to.

The Question Beneath the Question

As I sat with Harris’s quote, I realised there was another question hiding beneath the one she was asking.

Her argument begins with something I wholeheartedly agree with. Child abuse is evil. Not unfortunate. Not merely harmful. Evil. If someone were to abuse a child, they would have committed one of the most morally reprehensible acts imaginable. I don’t think many people, whether religious or not, would disagree with that.

But that agreement immediately raises another question. Where does that certainty come from?

Think about the language we’re using. We don’t simply say that child abuse is something we dislike, or something our society has decided to outlaw. We call it evil. That is a very different kind of claim. We’re not expressing a personal preference or making a cultural observation. We’re making a judgement about reality itself.

Imagine someone arguing that slavery wasn’t really wrong two hundred years ago because lots of people accepted it. Most of us recoil at that idea. We don’t believe slavery became evil when public opinion changed. We believe public opinion finally caught up with something that was already true. In other words, we don’t think morality was invented. We think it was discovered.

That is a remarkable claim when you stop to think about it.

This is where I think Harris’s argument becomes particularly interesting. She is making a moral argument against God, but in doing so she also assumes that objective moral evil exists. She isn’t simply saying, “I don’t like this.” She is appealing to a moral standard that she expects every rational person to recognise. She assumes that what happened to that child is wrong in the deepest possible sense.

I agree with her.

The question is how we account for that.

If the universe is ultimately nothing more than matter, energy and blind evolutionary processes, then where do objective moral obligations come from? Evolution may explain why empathy helped our species survive. Society may explain why we pass laws. But neither seems capable of explaining why some actions are objectively evil rather than simply socially unacceptable.

Now, this doesn’t prove that God exists. I don’t think the moral argument has ever been a silver bullet for Christianity. But it does reveal something important. The problem of evil cuts both ways.

Christians have to wrestle with why a good God allows evil to exist. That is a profound and difficult question. But if there is no God, we are still left asking why evil is objectively evil in the first place.

The existence of evil doesn’t simply raise questions about God.

It also raises questions about the nature of morality itself.

What If There Isn’t a Simple Answer?

At this point, I did what most of us would do.

I started reading. I wanted to know how Christian philosophers had answered Harris’s objection. Surely, after two thousand years of theological reflection, someone had cracked it. The more I read, the more surprised I became.

There isn’t one Christian answer to the problem of evil.

Some philosophers argue that genuine freedom necessarily carries the possibility of horrific evil. Others suggest that God may have morally sufficient reasons that lie beyond our understanding. Others see suffering as part of humanity’s moral and spiritual formation. Still others reject all of those explanations as inadequate, insisting that none of them can account for the horrors of child abuse, genocide or torture.

In other words, Christians don’t merely disagree with atheists about the problem of evil.

They disagree with one another.

I actually found that strangely reassuring.

Not because it made the question any easier, but because it reminded me that Christianity has never claimed to possess a neat philosophical explanation for every tragedy. The Bible certainly doesn’t. Job never learns why his children died. The Psalmists continue crying, “How long, O Lord?” Even after centuries of reflection, the question remains painfully open.

Perhaps that’s because we’re asking more of Christianity than it ever promised to give.

We often assume the faith should explain every instance of suffering. The Bible seems more concerned with something else. It invites us to protest evil, grieve it, resist it, and trust that it will not have the final word, even when we cannot explain why it happened in the first place.

That isn’t a complete answer to Harris’s question.

But perhaps admitting that is a better place to begin than pretending we have one.

A Question for Ourselves

There is one final thought that I haven’t been able to shake. Harris says, “If I could stop a person from raping a child, I would.”

I believe her.

I think most of us would.

But then another question occurred to me.

Could we?

Not in the hypothetical situation next door. I mean as a society.

Because we know more about child abuse than any civilisation in history. We understand trauma. We recognise the warning signs. We have mandatory reporting laws, child protection agencies, psychologists, police, forensic science and countless organisations devoted to protecting vulnerable children. We know the devastating consequences of institutional cover-ups. We know that believing victims matters. We know that early intervention matters.

We are not ignorant.

And yet children are still abused every single day.

Not because we lack knowledge.

Often because we lack the courage, the political will, the resources, or the collective determination to act consistently on what we already know.

That doesn’t answer the question of why God allows evil, but it does expose something about ourselves. It’s remarkably easy to ask why God isn’t doing more. It’s much harder to ask whether we are.

The Bible has an interesting habit of asking that second question. Again and again, it calls people to defend the vulnerable, expose injustice, care for the oppressed and protect children. It refuses to let us remain spectators while waiting for God to solve problems he has repeatedly called humanity to confront.

I still don’t know why God doesn’t intervene more often.

But I’m no longer convinced that the only unanswered question in this conversation belongs to God. The irony is that, while we’re waiting for God to act, he may well be asking why we haven’t.