God didn’t kill all those people at Virginia Tech, the shooter did. Why, however, didn’t God intervene and stop it? This is a deep question about God’s role in the world. Why doesn’t God make Himself manifest, especially when there are tragedies to be averted? Here’s one possible reason. Imagine if God had intervened to prevent the homicidal maniac fromdoing what he did. Leave aside the violation of free will. Just focus on the consequences. The shooter would be—by miraculous intrusion—disarmed, the shootings would have been prevented, and life would go on.
In other words, life would proceed as if God had not intervened in the first place. So God in this view becomes a kind of cosmic errand boy, who is supposed to do our chores and clean up our messes and we then wish Him a very good day and return to our everyday lives. But perhaps God’s purpose in the world is to draw His creatures to Him, and the empirical evidence is that tragedies like the one at Virginia Tech help to do that.
At this point I can imagine the indignant outburst, “Are you saying that God causes horrible massacres to occur just so that people can turn to Him?” To repeat: God didn’t cause this to happen. Blame guns, blame the school’s security system, most of all blame the killer himself. But don’t blame God. As C. S. Lewis points out, most of the evil and suffering in the world has been produced by human beings with whips, guns, bayonets, gas chambers, and bombs. These crimes are not divinely inflicted but man-made. Even so, it is not unreasonable to suppose that there is a providential purpose behind history, and if human horrors show us our dependence on God’s love and restorative powers, that’s not such a bad thing. In no way is God responsible for evil; He is responsible only for using evil to bring forth good.
