A common argument invoked by critics of an all-powerful deity is: “Why does God let bad things happen?” The idea is that if the universe were run by a super-god with infinite power, then surely He wouldn’t let kids starve to death in Africa. It’s very interesting and illuminating to look at this question using different analogies for life. Let me clarify, I’m not arguing that a fundamentalist Christian version of God actually exists or anything: outside the polarized echo chambers, it is possible to refute one side’s argument without endorsing the other side, just like a journal referee can reject a theorem’s proof without implying the theorem itself is false. The whole point of this article is to take a very old, very familiar philosophical conundrum and study it through refreshing new lenses.
I’ve had a lot of experience running and playing in massively multiplayer virtual worlds, games which provide a surprisingly good analogy for real life. When I was only a player myself, I saw how the game programmers of those worlds were basically gods. When it came to those tireless developers, players made assumptions very similar to the ones religious zealots make about gods in the real world. Just as real world followers believe God favors a particular country or even a particular baseball team, game-players believe the admins favor particular guilds and clans, even to the point of accusing the admins of corruption and cheating. Worst of all, a lot of the really hardcore players seemed to forget it was a game at all. People took their digital avatars way, way too seriously. It reminds me of when the strict believer goes crazy about obscure moral codes and ancient, obsolete legislation; some seem to think life is just a cruel “test” designed to “weed out” bad people.
When I became one of those developers, I suddenly saw how things really were. Whereas before I had seen nothing but drama and corruption up and down the Video Game Mt. Olympus, suddenly I perceived that was all an uninformed illusion. The truth was simple and profound: the sole objective of the game designers was to give players a good time. That’s it. Noone on the dev team could care less which guild was dominating the latest dungeons or which players amassed the most gold or which explorer was the first to solve some new quest. There was nothing deep or theological at all: just let the players come and let them have a great time!
So just why does God, the universe, the flying spaghetti monster, or whoever, let Bad Stuff happen? Because otherwise life would make for one really boring game! Insisting that an omnipotent deity would save people from hunger and crises is like insisting Shigeru Miyamoto should’ve weeded out all those nasty goombas and dangerous cliffs from Super Mario Bros. Such a neutered, watered-down Mario game might have cut it on the Atari, but this is 1985 and people want thrills! 
In fact it isn’t really even God who deliberately allows bad things to happen, so much as it is mankind. To a large extent, reality reflects what we want most fervently, usually at a deep level where we’re not even aware of it. Pain and suffering exist because, deep down, we feel comfortable with them. “War is over… if you want it.” If you’re the exception and you’d prefer to escape the anguishes of life, then why didn’t you say so sooner… stop blaming Zeus and Yahweh and just change reality yourself! After all, you are the dreamer 
And speaking of dreams… those twilight sojourns beyond this world provide the third vertex in the triangle. Life, games, and dreams: three analogies for one another, each capable of arising within the others like some deep and mysterious fractal. When you dream, you are the god of your dreamworld; is it always a perfect world? Or do you sometimes suffer nightmares, do you miss your flight or your final exam, finally waking filled with relief by the sound of the alarm clock? Within your dream, rational debaters argue: “This can’t be a dream; what omnipotent dreamer would allow all these nightmares to happen?” With their smug grins they insist you explain yourself: Why do YOU let bad things happen?
And the answer is the same in your dreams, the same in video games, and the same in real life: the evils of the world, the game, and the dream all arise because the inhabitants of those worlds would be unsatisfied any other way. The dream-rationalists who argue you don’t exist, deep down they want nightmares to stalk them, and you my dear reader, ever so generous and obliging, you dream them those nightmares to satisfy them. Even while God dreams you your own real life miseries. Because deep down, just like me, you enjoy the imperfection of the world. Just like God enjoys the imperfections which His own God dreams into His world
FURTHER READING
A Modernization of Genesis Chapter 1
A Modern Version of Psalm 23
The Kubla Khan Poem
How To Be Solipsistic
Metaphors On Life
very interesting topic, found your post on Christian Carnival. As a gamer myself, I can really relate to how you approached the answer to the question. Very true that the game would be quite boring without the good and the bad co-existing. I think one of the challenges of this question is that we equate “bad things” with “evil things” so people will say God is evil, because He allows “bad things” to happen, but we know that God being evil is quite impossible. We sometimes look at things from a human perspective and not God’s perspective…for example, we could easily say pain is evil from our perspective, but look a little closer at pain, it is actually a blessing from God..why?…because pain is a signal to our bodies that something is wrong and needs to be fixed, when we fall we try to break our fall, because we know that if we do not, then we may break a bone, we may place our hands in a hot oven to take out a cookie and eat it at its optimum temperature and burn ourselves but pain actually protects us from ultimately killing ourselves.
So contrast that with “bad things” I would suppose that something is wrong with our world, that is why we feel and experience so much bad things, it is a great signal to where we are in relationship to God, we continue to pull away and disobey Him and even deny His existence and the more we turn to the evil things in life the more the pain is increasing in the world, we are falling, but we refuse to break our fall with the one cure that was sent…Jesus.
I believe that we will see an increase in the “bad things” happening in the world the more we stray away from God. We are a generation that love to blame things on others, whether it be a blame on our Mother, Father, Society or God, as human beings we have to take responsibility for our fall away from God and our ultimate redemption on Christ alone. Can’t wait for the day that the good and the bad will not co-exist anymore
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The Biblical answer, of course, is free will. God allows bad things to happen because the alternative is to never give anyone any meaningful choices. As soon as you give people choices (not inane “do you want chocolate or strawberry” sorts of choices, but decisions with any real import), they now have the option of screwing things up, and so sometimes they will.
> In fact it isn’t really even God who deliberately
> allows bad things to happen, so much as it is mankind.
Bingo. Well, it’s technically both, but invariably God is allowing what man has chosen, either directly or indirectly. Sure, we choose without understanding all the ramifications of our choices, because we have imperfect knowledge of the world. But also, we frequently choose without even *caring* about all the ramifications of our choices, because we are basically selfish a lot of the time. That has consequences.
Why does a child starve in Africa? Mostly because the governments in Africa are horribly corrupt. Why do we have hurricanes? Because of the flood, a result of man’s sin. The details for any given bad thing that happens can be all kinds of complicated, but the high-level view is really simple: God allows bad things to happen because the other option would be to *disallow* anyone from ever doing anything bad, i.e., reduce everyone to automata.
God doesn’t let bad things happen. He sends us.
[...] Face Man presents Why Does God Let Bad Things Happen? posted at Glowing Face Man, saying, “In this article I respond to one of the classic atheist [...]
Congratulations, Dreamvigile. You’ve composed the most horrifying answer to the problem of evil I’ve ever heard.