Becky Sargent/The Falcon

"God is sovereign. He knows what he is doing."

"Everything happens for a reason. It's part of a bigger plan."

"Just have faith."

The more we try to explain the problem of evil, the more it sounds like we are crediting it to God. These are all answers from well-meaning, faithful Christian people who are trying to explain a seemingly immense problem. But, in the face of the suffering wrought by evil, these responses can seem insensitive.

And yet, the problem of evil cannot be ignored; the common denominator in the human experience is suffering. And the burden of explanation usually falls on Christians: "How can this God that you say is all-powerful and all-loving allow so much evil and suffering to happen to those he claims to love so much?" Bad things happen to good people, and their suffering requires more than silence; we cannot avoid the problem of evil.

The problem of evil is only a little younger than the dust from which humankind came, and the desire to explain it is only a bit younger. While God gifted humans with intellect, curiosity, reason and thought, they can lead us astray when not submitted to him.

The origin of the fall is not, as is the common belief, pride, but the desire to know good and evil. We don't have to go searching far to find the devastation that came from eating from the tree of knowledge: we were intended for life but instead got information. So, though the desire to understand and then explain evil is understandable, it is unbiblical.

Megan Risley is a junior majoring in theology

The book of Job is about a man who is blameless, upright and faithful to God. At the onset of his seemingly senseless suffering, Job's friends offer advice and explanations for how and why such evil is happening to Job.

One friend says that Job "must have sinned." Another tells Job to "just pray harder." Still another criticizes him for "not listening to God." Even Job's wife demands that he abandon his faith and turn from the Lord.

After the peanut gallery has finally run out of tips and tools, we think we're finally going to get "The Answer" (camera pans to God). God instead rebukes Job's friends, commending Job for not renouncing or cursing him. But then God asks Job, "Were you there when I made all this?"

God neither explains nor addresses Job's suffering, but he does bless the latter part of life more than the first.

If Job, who is righteous, does not get an answer to the "why" question, should we really expect to receive one? Should our attempts really be to give one in the face of suffering? The problem of evil can be "solved" logically in the familiar explanation of free will: if we are not free, we cannot love; but with freedom to do good comes the ability to do and choose evil.

Emotionally, this is not a problem that deserves a mere logical brush-off. The problem of suffering is insurmountable; logic and reason are insufficient in the face of tears and pain.

The Bible was canonized to include expressions of grief, sorrow and loss. Lamentations expresses the view that God is the cause of this suffering and destruction, the being brought to the ground, the walking in darkness instead of light, the affliction and wandering, the terror and death. The writer even claims that the "Lord is like an enemy (Lamentations 2:5)," perhaps the ultimate expression of human pain.

Yet Lamentations ends with a desire for closeness with the Lord, a desire for God to reign forever, and the hope that God has not forsaken nor abandoned them. Perhaps such writings were included in the Bible as documentation of human experience, demonstrations of suffering as God's own people, and what appropriate responses might be to this suffering and the apparent silence of God.

Could an answer to the "why" question really even bring much balm to the injuries incurred from the contact with evil? Given that there is evil in the world, and that Christ's ministry included its victims in their many forms, shouldn't we be compelled to follow this model?

Our response to the problem of suffering should first be compassion, not necessarily explanation. Christians, through the model of Christ, are called to compassion; it is my hope that we as Christians can live this out, for as my former pastor said years ago, "You may be the only Bible someone ever reads."