Is God Fair?

Rick Mattson tackles a tough subject that you or your friends may struggle with. We’d encourage you to read all the way through, and to feel free to engage with Rick via the comments.

Ben hails from a Hindu background. One evening he pressed me several times, very politely, on the question of God’s fairness. His objection was that it seems incredibly unfair for God to require people to possess “the one correct belief system,” when there are so many belief systems out there from which to choose.

This exchange took place on a Zoom call with a group of skeptical students. I was there to respond to their questions, most of which revolved, one way or another, around the topic of fairness. I remember we hit the three-hour mark without letting up – a ridiculously long Zoom session. That’s probably because the topic of fairness is virtually unlimited in scope and complexity. It’s one of the first filters (along with justice) on campus these days for evaluating any issue around topics such as race or economics or power. We’re constantly asking, “Is this (policy/perspective/action) fair?”

And thus it’s very natural to ask whether God – the ultimate causal force and authority figure in the universe – is fair in his dealings with humanity. Ben was zeroing in on a certain aspect of what he believed to be God’s lack of fairness: requiring human beings to hold to a particular “correct” belief system in order to be saved. This might be called the lottery objection to Christianity. You gamble on a certain set of religious doctrines and hope desperately you come up a winner. Choose well and you go to heaven. But if you happen to pick the wrong set of beliefs, perhaps through no fault of your own, God sends you to hell. Ben dug in: “What about the person who’s in another religion and has no opportunity or desire to convert to Christianity? Does God accept that person? Isn’t it a mere accident of birth what family, country, and religion they were born into? How is that their fault? The Christian God is not fair.”

From truth to fairness

In the past, students asked of Christianity, “Is it true? Can it be demonstrated scientifically?” But in the current climate of distrust toward truth claims, the question of fairness is on the rise. Truth is politically slanted and therefore unreliable, it is said, but fairness resonates with the soul. Fairness treats people equally, an obligation demanded even more of God since God possesses ultimate agency in determining who gets blessed and who doesn’t – and, as Ben pointed out, who gets saved and who doesn’t.

Even the older generations are catching on. A senior friend of mine mentioned to me recently that his brother was praising God because the brother’s daughter (my friend’s niece) had been spared in a horrible traffic accident in which other lives had been lost. My friend was obviously glad for his niece’s well-being, but he was angered at the suggestion that God favored the niece while allowing others to die. He confronted his brother in no uncertain terms: “A truly caring and fair God would have saved everyone involved!”

The same logic seems to support Ben’s contention that God fails to treat people equally. A truly caring and fair God would save everyone . . . regardless of their beliefs, background, family or religion.

Other common objections related to fairness include, Why does God allow various people to be born into unequal social/economic conditions? Why did God save his own people – the Israelites – while destroying the Egyptians and Canaanites? On this matter, a minority student told me of a letter she’d written to the deity: “God, why are my people always oppressed? Does your justice actually restore . . . or does it destroy? You can’t have it both ways.”

Moreover, it’s not fair, it is said, for God to allow men to rule over women, masters to rule slaves, and sexual and non-conforming gender minorities to suffer discrimination. It’s not fair that God heals some and not others, saves some and not others, blesses some while others remain in poverty. One of the world’s worst social ills, racial inequality, has existed for centuries right in front of God’s nose, yet he remains unmoved by it; indeed, he appears to bless it, as the student just mentioned observed.

Christians, in my view, should let themselves feel the cumulative weight of all the fairness objections as we seek to have an effective witness on campus. True empathy on our part builds trust and creates solidarity with nonChristian friends. We can say to a friend, “Yes, I understand how this issue (in society or in the Bible) feels unfair to you. I, too, have questioned God’s fairness at times. Let’s talk about it . . . “

Now a conversation can take place where all the issues can be explored. Once inside that conversation, how can we respond thoughtfully to the fairness objection?  

I’d like to suggest three approaches I’ve used many times in discussions with students and faculty in my travels around the country as an evangelist/apologist for InterVarsity.

First response to the fairness objection

God’s ways are higher than ours. The prophet Isaiah wrote, “‘As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts’” (Isaiah 55:9, NIV).

I refer to this simply as the “Limited Perspective” explanation. We can’t see what God can see. It’s analogous to a character in a book who sees only his own little world and cannot know the ramifications of all the events of the story. The author of the book, however, is omniscient. She sees everything. Philosopher C. Stephen Evans comments, “There is every reason to believe that God is privy to a vast amount of knowledge about the relations between good and evil of which we are ignorant . . . If God exists, it is virtually certain that many of his reasons are inscrutable to us.” [1]

So when violent crime or disease strike, for example, and a loving and powerful God seems not to intervene, the Limited Perspective explanation reminds us that God’s ways are higher than ours, and we’re simply not in epistemic position to know the why. Many years ago, my dad passed away from cancer at the relatively young age of 58, despite the prayers of friends and relatives that poured into heaven on his behalf. My mom, more skeptic than believer at the time, sat me down at a restaurant a few weeks later and asked a direct question: “Rick, your dad spent his whole life serving other people. Why did God allow him to die?” My reply was that God’s ways are higher than ours, and that we can trust him to do the right thing, even if we don’t understand what’s going on. (I probably said this, those decades ago, with the all tenderness and empathy of a bowling ball. One would hope that in such delicate conversations a measure of grace would be mixed in with truth!)

Despite human limitations on knowing the ways of God, philosophers nevertheless speculate on God’s reasons for allowing evil in the world. Often, “greater goods” or “soul-building” goals are mentioned. That is, the Lord carries out a developmental model for humanity, and it’s only through adversity and suffering that people grow. In the NT, James 1 and Romans 5 teach that testing and trials in our lives produce in us the qualities of perseverance, character, maturity and hope.  

Yet, to many persons, suffering seems a steep price to pay for character development. A common objection from critics is that an all-powerful, loving God should be able to achieve “greater goods” in a way that doesn’t involve evil or suffering. Why put people through hell just to achieve a slice of heaven? Why not just bless them straight-up? Isn’t it God’s job to eliminate hardship rather than to allow it . . . or create it?  

A truly loving and fair God would also disclose himself more broadly to people, according to philosophers such as J.L. Schellenberg. Schellenberg’s argument is that God, if he exists at all, is too hidden, too difficult to find, to be taken seriously. Many unbelievers are open to knowing God but lack sufficient evidence to believe. They don’t actively resist God; yet, God (for them) is nowhere to be found. This “nonresistant nonbelief,” as it’s called, is better explained by atheism than theism. And so God is essentially eliminated by the existence of “open” nonbelievers. [2]

Theistic thinkers have responded by insisting we have good grounds for believing in God, as shown, for example, by various cosmological, teleological and moral arguments. And, that God’s grace plays a critical role in planting the seed of faith in the hearts of unbelievers. For our purposes, the point is that while the fairness objection is often aimed at God’s character, it is frequently extended to his very existence as well. How often I have heard on campus, “I could never believe in a God who does that (or allows that or commands that, etc.)!”

Thus, I don’t like God (and his unfairness) becomes I don’t believe in God.  

I find this an odd intellectual strategy – to disbelieve in an entity you don’t like. (Would this work for an annoying neighbor? A hated political opponent?) But it shows the power and momentum of the fairness objection on campus these days.  

Amidst all of the objections and debate just mentioned, the Christian response of claiming ignorance of God’s ultimate methods persists. It is often said that God’s ways are “inscrutable.” Human finitude prevents us from seeing all that God sees. To return to the example above, God has his reasons for sparing one man’s daughter in a crash while allowing others to die. Frustrating as it is, it’s unlikely we’ll know these reasons this side of heaven. When the Old Testament character, Job, confronts God on why Job was consigned to so much suffering, the answer is, essentially, My ways are higher than yours. God’s argument is recorded in Job 38, which goes directly to the doctrine of creation: “’Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? . . . Have you given orders to the morning or shown the dawn its place?’” (Job 38:4,12). Job is but a single individual in a grand story, of which God is the author – the one who knows all and sees all. In our limited perspective, we must content ourselves with trust in the ultimate goodness of God. He cannot and will not do wrong.    

Second response to the fairness objection

God’s standards of justice are often different from human standards of fairness. That’s exactly what I tried to share with the skeptical students on the Zoom call with Ben. I said repeatedly that human standards of fairness and God’s standards of justice are two different things. Really different things. But on campus, the secular filter of fairness is not easily set aside. The creator is measured by the created, and the creator is found wanting. An author is condemned by the characters in her own book. A Muslim leader asked me recently in a public dialogue what “non-biblical” evidence I could provide for the Christian doctrine of salvation. “Non-biblical?” I said, “As in secular evidence?” But that’s just the point. It’s only through the revelation of Scripture that such specificity is provided by God for proper thinking about doctrine and ethics and, of course, what counts as truly “fair.”  

It should be noted that sometimes secular thinking and biblical thinking overlap, and we can thank the Lord for such common grace. Romans 1 and 2 speak of God disclosing himself in nature and conscience in ways that enable even unbelievers to apprehend something of the divine presence and proper human conduct. So it’s not uncommon for secular and nonChristian religious thinkers to embrace, partially and perhaps unwittingly, the things of God. These folks are, after all, made in his image.  

But as the gap widens between secular culture and Christianity, our campus colleagues will grow ever more deaf and resistant to biblical ideas. Unfortunately, we’re reminded in Romans 1 that to ignore God’s “invisible qualities” revealed in nature is to be “without excuse” (Rom 1:20). I find this verse quite sobering. It implies that Ben with the Hindu background and my late mother and my Muslim friend just mentioned all are accountable, minimally, for acknowledging God’s more general revelation – a revelation that should provide an inkling to standards of justice that are far above the human level. But will our friends listen to the call from above? Or will they insist on the essential righteousness of secular justice? This matter is in God’s hands; all we can do is speak the truth of Scripture in a caring way to an increasingly resistant campus culture.

Third response to the fairness objection

God’s solution is the incarnation and cross. Suffering in our world is addressed by a supposedly “unfair God” – not by eliminating suffering with a wave of the wand, which is what critics (and some believers) seem to want – but by entering the world directly on the human level and taking part in suffering. This is the unexpected, impossibly odd solution to all questions of human hardship and divine fairness. Only radical otherness would carry out this peculiar plan. I often say to students that relating to the God of Scripture is a cross-cultural experience. Everything can appear strange and upside down. Thus, our job is to place ourselves in a learning posture – as travelers of goodwill do in any foreign culture – before the Lord, so that we can come to appreciate the mystery of his ways. And what could be more mysterious than the incarnation?

As I look back on six-plus decades of life, I realize it’s taken me a long time to appreciate the strange logic of “God-suffering” as a solution to human suffering. Good Friday doesn’t make earthly sense. The desire for heavenly wand-waving persists in my thinking . . . and prayers. It intrudes on the more sublime and distasteful notion of the Lord Jesus submitting himself to human betrayal and the torments of the cat o’ nine tails, crown of thorns, spikes, cross and spear. God chose the hard way. I’d have preferred the easier way. In fact, I wish to cling to the human logic of my Muslim interlocutor mentioned above who insisted that bloody redemption is an unnecessary and undignified act of God. But in the Christian view, the “hard way” is exactly how God has disclosed himself. Nor are we in position – as many have tried – to rewrite the story.  

So when a student at the University of Montana asked me, “Why is my mother dying of cancer? Why doesn’t God answer our family’s prayers for her?” I replied a bit differently than in 1991 when my mom asked a similar question. I’m so sorry for you and your mother. I’ve gone through this myself. Honestly, I don’t know why your mother’s health is failing. Let’s keep praying – perhaps God will heal her. But this is not certain. There is no guaranteed formula for successful healing prayer. What I do know is that Jesus came to suffer with us. He understands our plight and knows the depths of our pain, not because he’s simply “all-knowing” in some theological sense, but because he has experienced suffering and death first-hand. He loves you and your whole family, and he will take care of your mother in ways that only he can do.

If I may summarize, three helpful responses to the “fairness of God” objection are to say that God’s ways are higher than ours (and therefore inscrutable), God’s justice is different than human notions of fairness, and God’s solution to our “unfair” suffering is God’s own suffering – unexpected and peculiar though it seems. And as we communicate these truths on campus, may we do so with a sense of empathy and compassion for those who find the God of the Bible – by human standards – unfair.

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{1] C. Stephen Evans; R. Zachary Manis. Philosophy of Religion: Thinking About Faith (p. 170). Kindle Edition.

[2]  See the literature on the “Hiddenness of God.”