If God is good, if he loves us, and if he’s all powerful, then why do bad things happen to good people? Or, more to the point, why do bad things happen to me? This is not an ancient question. It’s actually a modern one.

Some argue that there is no real answer to the question. Others say that the question proves there is no God. Others say that the answer has something to do with free will.

In 1979 Douglas Adams published his bestselling book, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. In it, he told the story of a group of hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings who demand to learn the Ultimate Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything from the supercomputer, Deep Thought, specially built for this purpose. It takes Deep Thought 7½ million years to compute and check the answer, which turns out to be 42. Which makes the scientists very unhappy. Deep Thought explains that the problem is really that they didn’t ask the right question.

When asked to produce The Ultimate Question, the computer says that it cannot; however, it can help to design an even more powerful computer that can. The programmers then embark on a further ten-million-year program to discover that Ultimate Question.

Therefore, the answer to the question that so bothers so many—how could a good God let me suffer like this— really is 42. That’s why no one is every satisfied by the answer anyone gives. How so? Because the reality of the whole debate is like that of Douglas’ Adam’s story: no one is asking the right question. It is the question itself that is nonsense, and therefore it produces nonsensical answers. That’s why all the answers are as unsatisfying as the one that Douglas Adams proposed in his humorous novel.

The answer, the reality of God and the reality of suffering and reconciling those two things is not really so difficult. It took the modern world to come up with the wrong question and thus to muck things up so badly that everyone is now so thoroughly confused that they can’t see the obvious. The ancients were generally undisturbed by the issue, because it is in fact a non-issue. Once we ask the right question, it becomes obvious.

More tomorrow…

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