The Oxford Professor and the Problem of Evil: Why Banishing God Doesn’t Solve the Mystery of Suffering

The Ultimate Dilemma

It is the oldest dilemma in human history, a riddle that has broken empires, shattered faiths, and echoed through the halls of philosophy for millennia. Epicurus framed it sharply more than two thousand years ago: Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then cometh evil?

For the modern secular mind, the answer to Epicurus has increasingly been to simply walk away from the table. In an age marked by mass tragedies, global instability, and deep personal alienation, the presence of a broken world is frequently cited as the definitive proof that the heavens are empty. “How can there be a personal God,” colleagues whisper to John Lennox in the quiet corridors of Oxford University, “when this world is in such a mess?”

Yet, according to Lennox—an emeritus professor of mathematics at Oxford, a seasoned Christian apologist, and a man who has spent decades defending theism against the world’s most formidable skeptics—the atheist exit strategy carries a massive, unexamined intellectual cost. In a sprawling, rigorous defense of the Christian worldview, Lennox argues that while the problem of evil is undeniably agonizing, stripping God out of the equation does not actually solve the problem. Instead, it eliminates the very vocabulary required to describe it, transforming a profound moral grievance into a meaningless biological accident.

The Blindness of the Cosmos

To understand Lennox’s critique, one must first look at the alternative worldview that dominates contemporary academia: philosophical naturalism. Its clearest, most poetic spokesperson is perhaps the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, with whom Lennox has publicly debated on multiple occasions.

Dawkins famously summarized the materialistic reality in his book River Out of Eden:

“The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at the bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is; and we dance to its music.”

It is a bleak portrait, but one that many in the modern West accept as the courageous, unvarnished truth. However, Lennox points out a fatal logical flaw that undercuts this entire framework. If the universe is merely the product of blind physical forces and genetic replication—if there is truly no inherent design, no purpose, no ultimate good, and no ultimate evil—then the very moral outrage we feel when witnessing tragedy becomes entirely incoherent.

Consider the horrors that capture our headlines: school shootings, acts of international terrorism, or historical atrocities like Auschwitz. When an atheist looks at these events and declares them “evil” or “unjust,” they are making a profound moral judgment. But under a purely materialist worldview, on what basis can such a judgment be made?

If a violent criminal or a terrorist is simply “dancing to the music of their DNA,” they can no more be blamed for their actions than a computer can be blamed for a software glitch. To call an action evil requires a standard of objective goodness from which that action has departed.

Therefore, the supreme irony of modern skepticism is that the critic must borrow a moral framework from a theistic universe in order to build a case against God. If you abolish the category of God to rid yourself of the problem of evil, you simultaneously abolish the category of evil itself. The moment you admit that objective evil exists, you reintroduce the terrifying, beautiful possibility of a moral lawgiver—with all the complex philosophical baggage that brings with it.

The Risk of Love and the Problem of Robots

If we accept that good and evil are real, we are pushed back to the original question: Why would a good and powerful Creator permit a world where such horrors occur?

Lennox tackles this question by examining the very nature of human identity. Could God have created a universe filled with sentient beings who were incapable of sin, incapable of cruelty, and incapable of destroying one another?

“Of course He could,” Lennox notes. “We make them all the time in our laboratories. We call them robots.”

But a universe populated entirely by programmed automatons would be a universe devoid of the single highest good that human beings crave: love. By definition, love cannot be coerced. It cannot be pre-programmed into a line of biological code. For love to be authentic, it must be chosen; and for choice to be real, the creature must possess the genuine capacity to say “yes” or to say “no.”

To illustrate this, Lennox appeals to a universal human experience: parenthood. When a mother and father hold their newborn child for the first time, they are acutely aware of an inherent, terrifying risk. That child will grow up with a free will. She might make choices that break her own heart, or she might grow up to look her parents in the eye and reject them completely.

Why, then, do we continue to bring children into a world fraught with such peril? We do it because we collectively recognize that, despite the immense risks, the potential for a relationship rooted in genuine love and mutual affection vastly outweighs the danger.

According to the Christian narrative, God took that exact same existential risk. In creating humanity “in His own image,” He endowed us with a genuine moral agency. We were given the capacity to love, to create, and to live in fellowship with the Divine. But that very same capacity meant we were equally capable of turning away, of fracturing the cosmic order, and of introducing a deep Brokenness into the fabric of reality.

The Paradox of Divine Intervention

When confronted with this brokenness, our immediate, surface-level response is to ask why God does not simply step in and put a stop to it. Why doesn’t He “zap” evil out of existence?

The answer is deeply uncomfortable because it challenges our self-perception. In our modern moral imaginations, we like to compartmentalize evil. Evil is always out there—it is the school shooter, the corrupt politician, the ruthless dictator, or the serial killer. We rarely like to admit that the boundary line between good and evil runs directly through the center of every human heart.

Theologically speaking, if God were to issue a decree tomorrow that all evil be immediately and completely eradicated from the face of the earth, the consequences would be catastrophic for humanity. If God eliminated all evil instantaneously, the entire human story would come to an abrupt end, because none of us would survive the purging. We are all contributors, in ways large and small, to the brokenness of the world.

Furthermore, history reveals a deep psychological paradox in how humanity views divine intervention—a phenomenon that commentators describe as a “heads I win, tails you lose” dilemma.

When God does not intervene to stop a tragedy, critics label Him a moral monster for His silence and inaction. Yet, whenever history records instances where God did directly intervene to judge human evil—such as the biblical narratives of the global flood or the conquest of the Canaanites—the very same critics label Him a moral monster for His violence and severity. If He steps in, He is tyrannical; if He stays His hand, He is indifferent.

This paradox suggests that our frustration with God is often not a matter of pure logic, but a lack of understanding regarding His long-term historical strategy.

A Suffered God and the Promise of Justice

What, then, is that strategy? If God does not immediately destroy evil, and if atheism leaves us in a cold, indifferent universe where our moral outrages are nothing more than biological illusions, where do we find a foothold?

Lennox points away from abstract philosophical equations and toward the definitive historical event of the Christian faith: the Incarnation.

The ultimate distinction between Christianity and all other religious or philosophical systems is that the Christian God does not remain a distant, detached spectator to human misery. He does not sit on a pristine heavenly throne issuing platitudes to a suffering creation. Instead, He enters into it.

When we look at the central image of the Christian faith—the cross—we are looking at a God who chose to experience physical agony, psychological abandonment, betrayal, and death. It is an image that answers our deepest existential cries not with an intellectual argument, but with His own presence. If Jesus of Nazareth is indeed God incarnate, then the cross tells us that God has voluntarily become part of the human suffering equation.

Moreover, the Christian worldview insists that the story does not end in the shadow of the cross. Lennox argues that as a scientist, he finds compelling historical evidence for the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. And if death is not the final chapter, it opens up a vast horizon of possibilities that naturalism completely forecloses.

It means that our deeply ingrained conscience—the moral compass that tells us Auschwitz was an abomination and that justice matters—is not a cruel evolutionary joke. It means that this world is moving toward a day of final, perfectly fair judgment.

To a contemporary society obsessed with total autonomy, the idea of a final divine judgment can sound archaic or threatening. But for the victims of history—for those who have suffered unspeakable horrors and died in obscurity without ever seeing a courtroom—the promise of a final, cosmic justice is the only true source of hope. It guarantees that the universe is not fundamentally indifferent, that wrongs will be made right, and that history is moving toward a glorious redemption.

By banishing God, the skeptic may feel a fleeting sense of intellectual liberation from the problem of pain. But in doing so, they inadvertently banish hope itself, leaving humanity trapped in a closed box of blind physical forces, dancing helplessly to the music of their DNA. The Christian alternative does not eliminate the mystery of suffering, but it offers something far more valuable: a way through the darkness, anchored by a God who bleeds alongside us, and a promise that the light will eventually have the final word.

Does this perspective on the necessity of a moral framework resonate with your own view of justice, or do you see a way to maintain objective morality within a purely materialist universe?