When Bad Things Happen to Good People

Sometimes things happen randomly to people. A mad gunman may shoot someone who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. A spark may start a fire that the wind happens to blow toward one set of houses and not another. A couple, in making love, conceives a child whose strengths, weaknesses, and even crippling malformations depend on the random genetic variations of the sperm that fertilizes the egg.

The last Russian czar’s son, born with hemophilia, may have so distracted his unlucky parents that they were unable to manage their empire and lost it to the Soviets. Thus, a random genetic fluke may have altered world history. Someone who walks away from a terrible traffic accident may believe that God caused the miracle, but other people die in freak accidents. A random wind change steers a hurricane toward a town instead of out to sea. So many tragedies contain an element of randomness that it’s hard to discern a pattern, much less a reason, in them that might represent God’s will.

If God created the Heavens and the Earth, removing chaos from light and dark, land and sea, and