For several months now, excessive suffering and evil have gripped Iran and Iranians, pinned them against a wall, and held them down under a rain of blows. Whether from the bullets that scattered our compatriots like autumn leaves on the ground, or the missiles that took the pure lives of our children from the sky. Perhaps the sheer scale of the injustice and futility of this situation, which doesn’t even seem to have achieved anything (and even if it had, it still wouldn’t have been worth the loss of innocent children), has thrown us into crises of feeling abandoned in the universe, or feeling rage at the transcendent forces that some of us believe in. Perhaps some believers, during this time, have felt they had put their faith in a powerless God, while others among us may have soothed their psyche with the thought that there must be some wisdom behind it. Likely some of us who are non-believers have, out of the sheer intensity of the suffering, felt a pull toward believing in a God who could pull us out of this hellish situation.

Or perhaps suffering and injustice are simply a storm that isn’t about us at all, simply something that happens, and we are merely part of its flow, and the degree to which each of us considers ourselves so significant in the universe that we see the world’s events as revolving around us, aimed at defining meaning for our own lives, is itself a kind of narcissism: first toward the human species, and then, at a further level, toward the “self.”

The rest of this piece attempts to look at the problem of excessive suffering through different lenses, in the hope that some perspective or some question might help make the situation a little more bearable and easier to digest for someone.

Suffering Before the Gods

The Rogue Question

Why, in a world supposedly governed by a just, all-powerful, all-loving God, does suffering exist on such a massive scale? Why do children get sick, why is there war, why do rape and torture happen? This question, known as the “problem of evil,” is one of the oldest challenges in the philosophy of religion. But here’s the interesting part: this question, in this particular form, only makes sense within a framework that already assumes a powerful, benevolent creator God. Step outside that framework, toward a tradition like Buddhism, for instance, and the question itself takes on a different shape.

The Classical Formulation

Philosophers like Epicurus, and later David Hume, framed the problem as a trilemma: either God doesn’t want to prevent evil (so isn’t benevolent), or can’t (so isn’t omnipotent), or simply doesn’t exist. The standard Abrahamic responses to this challenge tend to cluster around a few themes: human free will (much of evil results from our own free choices), suffering as a ground for moral growth, the limits of human understanding in the face of divine justice, and ultimate compensation in another world.

But these responses face serious objections. If God knows in advance what choice we’ll make, and punishes us according to that same choice with that same foreknowledge, this no longer looks like justice, it looks like a script written in advance, with real punishment at the end. And if evil is justified as a ground for growth, that justification might hold for the ordinary hardships of life, but it clearly falls short for maximal evils like rape or genocide. Ivan Karamazov, in Dostoevsky’s novel “The Brothers Karamazov”, makes exactly this point: even if the suffering of one innocent child is ultimately resolved into some “final harmony of the universe,” he refuses to accept that harmony,because no justification can make a child’s suffering acceptable.

The problem of hell sharpens this tension further. Earthly suffering, however terrible, is finite and temporary; hell in its traditional sense means infinite punishment for finite sin. This disproportion led philosophers like Bertrand Russell to conclude that the concept of hell, even if God exists, is a mark of primitive morality, not justice.

More Modern Theological Responses

Modern theology has proposed various ways to ease this tension. Process theology says God is not omnipotent; God can only “persuade,” not compel, and suffers alongside the world without the power to forcibly stop evil. Open theism says God does not know the future with certainty, because the future isn’t yet determined, genuine human free will hasn’t settled it yet. Christian universalism says everyone is ultimately saved, and that hell, if it exists at all, is purgatorial rather than eternal. Each of these responses comes at a cost, typically by giving up one of God’s classical attributes: omnipotence, omniscience, or complete control over the world.

Buddhism: A Different Framework

Buddhism, though, starts from an entirely different point. The Buddha, faced with metaphysical questions like “does God exist?”, often responded with silence, the “noble silence.” His reasoning was that such questions don’t help toward liberation from suffering. In a famous text, the Buddha answers with the parable of the poisoned arrow: if you’ve been struck by a poisoned arrow, you first need to pull it out, not sit around asking what kind of wood it was made from. Dwelling on the origin of the universe does exactly that; it distracts from suffering and the path out of it.

Instead of “who created the world?”, Buddhism asks “how does the world work?” Its answer is dependent origination: everything is the effect of prior conditions, with no need for an external first cause. The causal chain has no beginning; the question “what started this chain?” is, from a Buddhist standpoint, a malformed question, because it assumes from the outset that there must be a “beginning.”

Later Buddhist philosophers, such as Vasubandhu, argued against the Hindu Nyaya school’s belief in a creator God with arguments that strikingly echo Hume’s and Russell’s later critiques in the West: if God was already complete and needed nothing, why create at all? If God is the cause of the world, what caused God? And if God is benevolent, why does suffering exist? It’s more precise to call Buddhism non-theistic rather than atheistic in the active Western sense, it doesn’t say “definitely not,” it says the question is beside the point on the path to liberation.

Suffering Without a Judge

The central point here is this: in Buddhism, suffering (dukkha) is not the result of punishment by an external being. It’s the result of the very structure of existence: everything is impermanent, nothing can truly be held onto, and this very clinging is the source of suffering. Karma, the closest Buddhist concept to “justice,” is an impersonal causal law, more like a law of physics than the decision of a judge. There is no being who decides to punish you; your actions simply have consequences, the way putting your hand in fire burns it, not because anyone wants to punish you.

This difference bears directly on the problem of hell too. Buddhist cosmology does include realms of suffering (naraka), but unlike the Christian hell, residence there is temporary, however long it may last. Once the karmic energy behind that state is exhausted, the being is reborn again into the cycle of samsara. There is no eternal punishment.

But this picture isn’t flawless. The problem of children’s suffering, which was central to the Abrahamic discussion, returns in Buddhism in a different form: the karmic explanation attributes a child’s suffering to actions in a past life, an explanation that is neither falsifiable nor always safe from the risk of justifying innocent suffering and blaming the victim. This is one point where Buddhism, like the Abrahamic religions with the problem of evil, still lacks a fully satisfying answer.

Presence Instead of Explanation

Perhaps the core difference lies here: Abrahamic religions typically seek a metaphysical justification for suffering, an answer to “why did God allow this?” Buddhism, at least in its Mahayana form, offers a different kind of response. The bodhisattva ideal is someone who reaches the threshold of complete liberation but deliberately postpones entering final nirvana in order to help all other beings toward liberation too. This response doesn’t treat suffering as a metaphysical problem to be solved, but as something to be accompanied and acted against. The question shifts from “why did God allow this?” to “what can I do?”

A Further Layer: Who Is It That Suffers?

There’s another layer that deepens this difference. In the Abrahamic framework, a fixed “self” is usually assumed, one that experiences suffering and is accountable before God; the same “self” that sins, is punished, or is saved. Buddhism takes a step further back and questions this “self” itself. The teaching of anatta (non-self) holds that there is no fixed, separate, independent core called “self”; what exists is a stream of thoughts, feelings, and experiences, like a whirlpool in a river that has a stable shape while no water in it ever stays the same.

This may sound like an abstract philosophical point, but it has a direct bearing on the discussion of suffering: if the “self” is a fixed, fragile thing, then everything threatens it, and this very clinging to defend that “self” generates a large part of suffering. But if the “self” is only a stream, there’s no longer anything that’s really being attacked, only the stream changing. Interestingly, this idea, independent of Buddhism, has found a similar shape today in neuroscience; philosophers like Thomas Metzinger argue that the “self” is a model the brain constructs, not something that experiences that model from outside. Evidence like Benjamin Libet’s experiments, or the drop in default mode network activity during deep meditation, reinforces this picture from a scientific angle as well.

The implication of this view for the problem of evil is worth noting: many of the questions we ask under the assumption of a fixed “self” — “why must I suffer?”, “why did God let this happen to me?” — take on a different shape once that fixed “self” is set aside. The question is no longer “why me,” but “how does this stream of experience work, and how can its suffering be eased.”

In Sum

Abrahamic religions and Buddhism start from two entirely different points, and for that reason, the problem of evil takes a different shape in each. In the Abrahamic tradition, the existence of a conscious, benevolent creator turns suffering into a puzzle that must be justified. In Buddhism, by setting aside that very premise, suffering no longer requires a metaphysical justification; it’s a description of the structure of existence, one whose remedy is embedded in that same structure. Neither framework fully “solves” suffering — but both show how much the question of suffering depends on the assumptions we already bring to it.