If God is real and loving, why is there so much horrific suffering in the world?

The Problem Isn't New, But the Evidence Is

Theologians have wrestled with theodicy (the defense of God's goodness in light of evil) for millennia. The standard answers haven't changed much: suffering builds character, free will requires the possibility of harm, evil is the absence of good, we can't understand God's plan. These explanations feel thin when you're watching a child die of cancer or reading about genocide. They sound like intellectual exercises designed to protect a belief system, not responses to actual agony.

But here's what's different now. We have data. Not philosophical arguments, but thousands of first-person accounts from people who were clinically dead, encountered what they consistently describe as infinite, unconditional love, and came back with information they shouldn't have had. The largest prospective study of cardiac arrest survivors, published in the Lancet in 2001, found that 18% reported near-death experiences during periods of flat EEG when the brain wasn't functioning. These people weren't hallucinating. They were reporting veridical perceptions: details about their resuscitation, conversations in other rooms, events they had no physical way of witnessing.

And when they describe what they encountered, the word that comes up more than any other is love. Not sentimental affection. Not conditional approval. Something so vast and foundational that it made their entire earthly life, including its worst suffering, make sense in a way they can't fully translate back into language.

One experiencer on Project Profound puts it this way: "Another aspect, which really, uh, most the most common aspect of NDEs is the feeling, the intense feeling of love. And this love floods into you. It just floods in. You don't have to ask it. It is no conditions. You don't have to sign something. You're accepted and loved for whatever you are, for whatever you've done. There's no conditions on this love."

So if that love is real, and if it's the ground of everything, why does a child get leukemia? Why does a tsunami kill 230,000 people? Why does someone spend their final years losing their mind to Alzheimer's?

What Experiencers Say They Learned

The people who've been there don't come back with tidy answers. But they do come back with a framework that's remarkably consistent across cultures, religions, and centuries. The framework goes something like this: we are not bodies that happen to be conscious. We are consciousness that has temporarily taken on a body. Physical life is not the main event. It's the classroom.

Jane Thompson, who had an NDE after a severe health crisis, describes the shift: "And now, after my NDE, I got so much love. They say you get what you're supposed to, whatever it is you need during your NDE, that's exactly what you get. And that's why they vary so much, and I needed love. The first part of my life was cold in that sense, and I had never really received that good nurturing love, and I needed that. Getting that from my NDE really changed everything because I developed more a sense of compassion and, um, an understanding for other people, and that feeling of oneness, and how we all affect each other."

Notice what she's saying. The suffering in her early life wasn't random cruelty. It created a specific need, and that need was met in a way that transformed her capacity for compassion. The experience didn't erase what happened to her. It revealed why it mattered.

This is the pattern you see again and again in NDE accounts. People review their lives, often in the presence of a being of light they identify as God or Christ or simply infinite love. They feel every emotion they caused in others. They see the ripple effects of their actions, the ways their suffering shaped them, the moments of growth that came from pain. And they come away understanding that physical life, with all its brutality and beauty, is designed for soul development in a way that a pain-free existence couldn't accomplish.

Pim van Lommel, the Dutch cardiologist who led the Lancet study, spent years following up with cardiac arrest survivors who'd had NDEs. He found that they showed lasting psychological changes: reduced fear of death, increased empathy, a sense that material success mattered less than love and connection. Their brush with clinical death didn't just comfort them. It restructured their values. They came back acting like people who'd learned something true about what matters.

The Hardest Cases

But what about the suffering that doesn't lead to growth? The child who dies at three. The person with severe intellectual disabilities who can't learn or develop in any conventional sense. The genocides, the torture, the utterly senseless cruelty that seems to serve no purpose at all.

This is where I have to admit the NDE evidence doesn't give us a complete answer. Or rather, it gives us pieces of an answer that don't fit together neatly from our current vantage point. Some experiencers report being shown that every soul chooses its life circumstances before incarnating, including the hardest ones, because those circumstances offer specific opportunities for growth (not just for the person suffering, but for everyone connected to them). Others report being told that some suffering is the result of human free will, the necessary cost of allowing souls to make real choices in a physical world with consequences.

I don't know how to reconcile those frameworks. I don't know how a three-year-old "chooses" bone cancer, or what growth is supposed to come from it. The NDE accounts suggest there's an answer, but they also suggest the answer requires a perspective we don't have access to while we're here. That's not satisfying. It's not supposed to be.

What the accounts do consistently report is this: when people are in the presence of that infinite love, they understand. Not intellectually. Not as an explanation they can bring back and articulate. But as a felt knowing that every piece of suffering, no matter how horrific, fits into a larger pattern of meaning that makes sense from outside the constraints of linear time and individual identity. Another experiencer describes the intensity of that understanding: "the world or something. I mean, you know, and and when I went through that, it was so intense I had to ask God to ease up on it because I couldn't take it. And as soon as I said that, it subsided."

The knowing was so overwhelming it had to be dialed back. That suggests the answer exists, but it's not something our current consciousness can hold.

The Free Will Problem (and Why It's Not Enough)

The standard theological response is that God allows suffering because free will requires the possibility of harm. If we're going to be free agents capable of love, we have to also be capable of cruelty. A world without the possibility of evil would be a world of puppets, not persons.

That works for moral evil (murder, abuse, injustice). It doesn't work for natural evil (earthquakes, disease, the parasitic wasp that lays its eggs inside a living caterpillar so its larvae can eat their way out). You can't blame human free will for childhood leukemia.

Some theologians argue that natural evil entered the world through the Fall, that creation itself is corrupted by human sin. Others suggest that a physical universe with consistent natural laws (gravity, cellular mutation, tectonic plates) necessarily includes the possibility of harm, and that those laws are required for embodied existence. Both explanations feel like they're trying to protect God's reputation rather than grappling with the actual texture of suffering.

Here's what the NDE evidence suggests instead: the physical world, with all its dangers and pain, isn't a flawed version of reality. It's a specific kind of reality designed for a specific purpose. Consciousness experiencing itself through limitation, forgetting, vulnerability, and mortality learns things it can't learn any other way. The suffering isn't incidental. It's load-bearing.

That doesn't mean God causes suffering. It means God created a system in which suffering is possible (and in some cases inevitable) because that system serves a purpose we can't fully grasp from inside it. The analogy I keep coming back to is a video game. If you're playing a difficult game, you don't assume the designer hates you when you encounter a hard level. You understand that challenge is the point. The difficulty is what makes progress meaningful.

The analogy breaks down, of course, because we didn't consent to play this particular game (or did we, before we incarnated, in a way we can't remember?). And because the stakes in a video game are trivial, while the stakes here involve real agony. But the structural point holds: a system designed for growth requires resistance. A life without suffering wouldn't be a better version of this life. It would be a different kind of existence entirely, one that couldn't accomplish what this existence is for.

The Compassion Question

Here's where I get stuck, though. If suffering is necessary for soul growth, does that mean we shouldn't try to reduce it? If a child's cancer serves some cosmic purpose, should we not treat it? The logic seems to lead toward a kind of fatalism that feels morally repugnant.

But the experiencers don't come back fatalistic. They come back more committed to reducing suffering, not less. They describe a life review process in which they felt the impact of every act of kindness and every moment of cruelty. The love they encountered didn't tell them suffering was fine because it served a purpose. It showed them that alleviating suffering, standing with people in pain, choosing compassion over indifference, those actions matter immensely. The growth comes not from the suffering itself, but from how we respond to it. Both our own suffering and the suffering of others.

So the framework isn't: suffering is good, leave it alone. It's: suffering is part of the design, and our response to it is part of what we're here to learn. The person with cancer is learning something. The oncologist treating them is learning something. The family member sitting with them is learning something. The stranger who donates to cancer research is learning something. The whole web of relationships and choices that suffering creates, that's the curriculum.

This also connects to why so many experiencers report that the most important moments in their life review weren't the big achievements or dramatic events. They were the small kindnesses. The time they stopped to help someone. The moment they chose patience over anger. The suffering we encounter (our own and others') creates the conditions for those choices. Without it, we'd have no opportunity to practice love in the face of difficulty, which seems to be the entire point of being here. For more on how these small acts of compassion ripple outward in ways we can't see, see What About Hell?

I can't write about God and suffering without addressing the elephant in the room: the doctrine of eternal conscious torment. If God is infinite love, how does infinite punishment for finite sins make any sense?

The NDE accounts are remarkably consistent on this point. Hell, as a place of eternal punishment imposed by God, doesn't show up. What does show up is a life review process that can be intensely painful, in which people feel the consequences of their actions and sometimes experience a kind of self-imposed separation from the light because they can't face what they've done. Some experiencers describe darker realms, places where souls who've caused great harm seem to congregate. But these aren't described as permanent. They're described as states of consciousness, self-created through one's choices and beliefs, that souls can eventually move beyond.

The love people encounter isn't contingent on belief or behavior. It's unconditional. That doesn't mean actions don't have consequences. The life review is often described as more confronting than any external judgment could be. But the purpose isn't punishment. It's understanding. The goal is growth, not retribution.

This suggests that the suffering we experience here isn't preparation for potential infinite suffering later. It's part of a finite process of learning and development that continues after death. The stakes are real, but they're not eternal damnation. They're: did you learn what you came here to learn? Did you grow? Did you choose love when it was hard?

The Objections I Can't Fully Answer

The strongest objection to all of this is simple: it's too convenient. Of course people who've had a brush with death come back with comforting stories about how suffering has meaning. That's what the human mind does. It creates narrative coherence out of chaos. It finds patterns where there are none. The alternative, that suffering is random and meaningless, is too unbearable to accept, so we construct elaborate frameworks to make it tolerable.

I take this objection seriously because I used to hold it. The problem is the veridical evidence. These aren't just comforting stories. They're accounts that include accurate information people had no physical way of knowing. The woman who correctly described the plaid shoelaces on the shoes placed on a hospital ledge outside her operating room window. The man born blind who accurately described the colors and patterns in the operating room during his cardiac arrest. The child who met a sister she didn't know she had, a sister who died before she was born, and described details her parents had never shared.

You can dismiss one or two of these as coincidence or fraud. You can't dismiss thousands of them, collected independently across cultures and decades, without proposing a mechanism by which clinically dead brains are somehow still processing sensory information in ways that violate everything we know about neuroscience. The simpler explanation, the one that doesn't require contorting the data to fit a materialist framework, is that consciousness continues when the brain stops, and that what people are experiencing during NDEs is real.

If it's real, then the information they bring back about suffering and purpose deserves serious consideration. Not blind acceptance. But consideration.

The other objection I struggle with is the one I mentioned earlier: what about the suffering that doesn't lead to visible growth? The person who dies in infancy. The Holocaust victim. The person with dementia who loses their sense of self entirely. If the point is soul development, what's developing there?

The NDE accounts suggest that development happens on a level we can't perceive, that souls continue to grow and learn even when their physical circumstances seem to preclude it, and that the ripple effects of their existence (the way their suffering impacts others" class="text-blue-600 dark:text-blue-400 hover:underline">will someone be there to meet me, or could I die completely alone are part of the design. But I don't know that. I'm reporting what experiencers say they learned, not claiming I can see it myself. This is the gap between the evidence (which is strong) and the implications (which require a leap).

The Shift That Matters

Here's what I do know. A 24-year-old experiencer who died from undetected heart disease describes the long-term impact this way: "NDE that things kind of became okay. Like, I don't know. And it's not even like it like me remembering my NDE, it didn't bring any solutions or answers or anything. To be a 12-year-old trying to understand an NDE, it's just like a trip. You know, now I'm 24 years old and I've had a lot of therapy and I've thought a lot about it and I can speak so clearly about it now, but it took a lot of years for me to even be able to explain the impact that that had on me. I feel like because of the love and the"

The sentence cuts off, but the point is clear. The experience didn't give her answers. It gave her something that made the absence of answers tolerable. That's not nothing.

The question "why does God allow suffering?" assumes suffering is the problem that needs explaining. But if the NDE evidence is pointing toward something true, then suffering isn't the anomaly. It's the point. Not because God is cruel or indifferent, but because this physical existence, with all its pain and limitation, is a specific kind of classroom that teaches things an existence without suffering couldn't teach.

That doesn't make the suffering okay. It doesn't mean we should accept it or stop fighting against it. It means the fight matters. The compassion matters. The choice to love in the face of pain matters. Because that's what we're here to learn.

The love that experiencers describe encountering isn't the kind that prevents harm. It's the kind that meets us in the harm, shows us why it mattered, and helps us understand what we're becoming through it. If you're looking for a God who'll intervene to stop every tragedy, the NDE evidence won't give you that. But if you're looking for evidence that suffering isn't meaningless, that love is real and foundational, and that this life is part of something larger that makes sense from a perspective we don't currently have access to, then the accounts of people who've been clinically dead and come back are worth your attention.

I don't have a tidy answer. Neither do the experiencers. What they have is a felt certainty that the love they encountered was real, and that in its presence, the suffering made sense in a way they can't fully translate. That's not proof. But it's not nothing either. For more on how this love manifests in the dying process, especially in cases involving children, see [why would a loving God allow a child to suffer and die](/questions.