Initial Thoughts on the Question of God.
By Paul Nyssen
I have listened to many arguments against the existence of God. The ones that linger tend to come from figures such as Stephen Fry and Neil deGrasse Tyson, perhaps because both present themselves, rightly, as educated men. Their argument, in essence, runs like this: if God is both good and almighty, why do Africans die of starvation, children die of cancer, and destructive storms erupt across the world? The conclusion is simple—God does not exist.
What strikes me first about this argument is the implication that no one thought of it before. As though, in two thousand years of Christianity, it escaped the attention of theologians, philosophers, and ordinary believers alike. Either they were all remarkably stupid, or grossly dishonest. Yet, as far as I know, this problem has been confronted repeatedly throughout history. It has never gone unnoticed.
Traditionally, theologians responded by suggesting that evil is not a thing in itself, but an “absence of good.” That formulation is not entirely wrong. But anyone who has visited a concentration camp knows that evil does not feel like an absence. It feels like a presence. Evil lingers. It occupies space. It leaves residue.
If evil has actual existence, then the question shifts. Why would an almighty God allow evil to remain active in the world, particularly when, according to Biblical narrative, it has already been defeated?
The first time I found the idea of an all-good and all-powerful God confusing was as a child, reciting the Our Father. My parents were devout Catholics; I served Mass daily, in Latin. One line struck me as deeply strange: “…and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” Lead us not into temptation? Deliver us from evil? Why would God lead us into temptation at all—and why would He fail to deliver us from evil if He could do so effortlessly?
As a child, I filed this away as one of those questions you are not meant to ask. A mystery. Or perhaps just a meaningless sentence repeated by undeserving scumbags on their knees before the Almighty. It sat unresolved for decades.
Much later, through an interest in Japanese sword fighting, I encountered Zen. I read Musashi’s Book of Five Rings, and it was the final section—The Book of the Void—that caught my attention. Musashi describes the Void as nothingness, beyond human knowledge, and suggests that by knowing what exists we can know that which does not. That idea clicked immediately with the paradox I had sensed in the Our father.
Where I disagreed with Musashi—respectfully, given his stature—was when he wrote that there is no evil in the Void. That felt wrong. Instinctively wrong. I began to look further.
I found clarity in the writings of D. T. Suzuki, who, comparing Dōgen with Meister Eckhart, described nothingness as the coincidence of straightforward affirmation and ceaseless negation. Suddenly, things aligned. The paradox of God’s power and inaction, the persistence of evil, the reality of suffering.
Affirmation and negation coexist in the Void. They have actual existence, but they are, in a sense, solid-state. They are. They do not choose. They do not possess free will. They manifest in the physical world through us—because we are not solid-state beings. We are fluid. We choose.
Africans die of starvation because we allow them to starve. Children die of cancer because negation is an integral part of the universe itself—but also because of human choices. Many of those children could be saved if even a fraction of the trillions spent on weapons were redirected toward medical research and feeding the hungry.
This is where responsibility shifts. The question is not why God allows evil, but why we do. We are the conduit through which affirmation and negation enter the world. Every action is a choice about which we permit to pass through us.
In one discussion I had with Muslims, we agreed on something deceptively simple: all we are asked to do in life is choose between good and evil. Nothing else. It sounds easy. It is not. We fail constantly—because we are neither God nor Satan, and as humans we can be neither.
The most honest answer I have heard from a scientist came from the astrophysicist Brian Cox, when he was asked whether he believed in God. He did not argue. He did not mock. He simply said, “I don’t know.”
That answer, to my mind, is worth more than certainty.