Being All-powerful and All-knowing, He has power, and had always power, to create any kind of world He chose. Being a God of Love, He would not choose to create a world in which hate and pain should have a place.
But there is evil in the world. There has been always evil in the world. Why did a good and loving God allow evil to enter the world? Being All-Powerful and All-knowing, He could have excluded evil. Being good, He would hate evil. Being a God of Love He would wish to exclude evil. Why, then, did He permit evil to enter?
The world is full of sorrow, of pain, of hatred and crime, and strife and war. All life is a perpetual deadly struggle for existence. The law of nature is the law of prey.
If God is a tender, loving, All-knowing, and All-powerful Heavenly Father, why did He build a world on cruel lines? Why does He permit evil and pain to continue? Why does He not give the world peace, and health, and happiness, and virtue?
In the New Testament Christ compares God, as Heavenly Father to Man, to an earthly father, representing God as more benevolent and tender: "How much more your Father which is in heaven?"
We may, then, on the authority of the Founder of Christianity, compare the Christian Heavenly Father with the human father. And in doing so we shall find that Christ was not justified in claiming that God is a better father to Man than Man is to his own children. We shall find that the poetical and pleasing theory of a Heavenly Father, and God of Love is a delusion.
"Who among you, if his child asks bread, will give him a stone?" None amongst us. But in the great famines, as in India and Russia, God allows millions to die of starvation. These His children pray to Him for bread. He leaves them to die. Is it not so?
God made the sunshine, sweet children, gracious women; green hills, blue seas; music, laughter, love, humour; the palm tree, the hawthorn buds, the "sweet-briar wind"; the nightingale and the rose.
But God made the earthquake, the volcano, the cyclone; the shark, the viper, the tiger, the octopus, the poison berry; and the deadly loathsome germs of cholera, consumption, typhoid, smallpox, and the black death. God has permitted famine, pestilence, and war. He has permitted martyrdom, witch-burning, slavery, massacre, torture, and human sacrifice. He has for millions of years looked down upon the ignorance, the misery, the crimes of men. He has been at once the author and the audience of the pitiful, unspeakable, long-drawn and far-stretched tragedy of earthly life. Is it not so?
For thousands of years—perhaps for millions of years—the generations of men prayed to God for help, for comfort, for guidance. God was deaf, and dumb, and blind.