The Field Promotion

Few accusations sound more morally serious than this one:

“If God were good, He would not run the world this way.”

That sentence feels compassionate. Often it is. But it also contains a promotion request. The speaker has moved from grief to judgment, from pain to governance, from this hurts to this should have been ruled differently.

Fine. Take the chair. For one day, govern reality.

I. The Accusation

Few reach or experience deep suffering, but when disaster arrives, a diagnosis lands, a grave is dug, a war breaks out, or when the pain is real, the questions come, and they often turn toward God.

These are understandable. They are usually born of compassion. No one enjoys watching others suffer, and if we held the power to help, most of us believe we would use it. So this article grants all of that.

Suffering is real and heavy. Grief should be heard, and we concede that many wounds have no answer that we can see from where we stand.

So we will make it explicit, and recognize that the accuser has asked, in effect, for a promotion. We will grant it. And we grant it NOW.

II. The Promotion

Prayer is powerful and effective, and one can imagine the offer arrives in writing.
A field promotion that escalates until the office is larger than any human has ever held. Be careful what you ask for...

Every person alive and every person yet unborn. Every ecosystem, from the predator to the prey it feeds on. Every physical law, including the ones that make a body strong and the ones that let it break. You now hold the office you said was being run badly. Now is your time to rule.

Congratulations. The universe is yours to govern.

III. Define Suffering

Your first order is the one you came in with: eliminate suffering. Before you can sign it, you have to say what it means. This is harder than it sounds, because the word covers a range that does not want to be governed by a single rule.

Does suffering include physical pain? Then you must decide about the pain that warns a child off a hot stove, the ache that tells a runner to stop before the bone snaps, the grief that measures how much a person was loved. Does it include emotional pain? Then you are legislating disappointment, longing, and the sting of being told no. Does it include the discomfort of effort, the strain that builds a muscle, a mind, a character?

Draw the line too wide and you delete striving, growth, and love itself, because none of them exist without the possibility of loss. Draw it too narrow and you have not answered the accusation that started this. Either way, the first order is already stuck at the definition.

IV. Edit Freedom

Much of the world’s suffering is caused by people. So reach for the obvious lever: remove the freedom to harm. But freedom is one piece, not several. The same will that can strike can also embrace. The same choice that can betray is the choice that makes loyalty mean something.

Constrain the will so that cruelty becomes impossible, and you have also made courage impossible, because courage is the free choice to do right when wrong was available. You have made love impossible, because coerced affection is not love. You have made forgiveness pointless, mercy unnecessary, and character an illusion. You wanted fewer villains. You have built a world with no heroes, because you removed the soil both grow in.

V. Rewrite Nature

Not all suffering comes from choice. Earthquakes level cities, disease empties homes, drought starves a region. So govern the physics. Soften the laws that let bodies break and calm those seismic shifts. But the laws are a single fabric, not a set of dials you can turn one at a time.

The tectonics that produce earthquakes also recycle carbon and keep the planet habitable. The cell division that heals a wound is the same process that, uncorrected, becomes cancer. The energy that warms is the energy that burns. Rewrite the law to remove the harm and you tend to remove the good that shared its mechanism. Every edit ripples outward through a system you did not design and do not fully understand.

VI. Track the Consequences

Here is the platform you actually sit at. Every order you sign propagates through every person, every century, every hidden dependency, and every unborn generation.
Pull a lever below and follow it downstream.

Abolish Pain Remove all physical and emotional pain. Abolish Death No living thing ever dies. Abolish Evil Acts Make every harmful choice impossible. Abolish Scarcity Everyone has everything, always.

Order signed: pain is abolished

The nervous system loses its alarm. The child never learns the stove is hot; the runner never feels the fracture; the patient never reports the tumor while it can still be treated. Grief disappears, and with it the measure of how much anyone was loved. Comfort stops meaning anything, because nothing it relieves remains.

You did not remove the wound. You removed the warning, and the love that grief was made of.

Order signed: death is abolished

Nothing dies, so nothing yields its place. Predators cannot eat, because prey cannot die; the food web collapses into starvation that cannot end. Every generation stays, forever, on a planet that cannot hold them. Birth becomes cruelty, because there is no room. The tyrant is now immortal. So is his regime.

You wanted no more funerals. You built a prison with no exits and no vacancies.

Order signed: evil acts are impossible

To make cruelty impossible, you had to remove the freedom to choose it. But the same freedom powered courage, loyalty, mercy, sacrifice, and love. Now no one can betray, so no one can be faithful. No one can harm, so no one can heroically refuse to. You have a population of puppets who never sin and never mean a single kind thing they do.

You abolished the villain by abolishing the person. Nobody is guilty. Nobody is good.

Order signed: scarcity is abolished

Everything is instantly given, so nothing is ever earned. Effort is pointless; there is nothing to strive toward. Generosity is meaningless, because no one lacks. Gratitude evaporates, because nothing was a gift. Patience, discipline, ambition, and craft all lose their reason to exist. A world with no need is a world with no purpose.

You ended want. You also ended the point of getting up in the morning.

Notice the pattern. Every reform that removes an evil also removes a good that grew from the same root. Reformers meet the shape of the desk, where one policy is fastened to a hundred others. The system is interlocked, and you are its new governor.

VII. Build the Better Universe

Set the individual orders aside. The accusation was never really about one policy. It was about the whole design. So build the whole thing. Put forward the complete alternative: a universe that keeps every good you value and removes every evil you object to, with no hidden cost that lands on someone else’s century.

Keep love meaningful, which requires freedom. Keep courage possible, which requires danger. Keep mercy possible, which requires wrongs to forgive. Keep growth possible, which requires resistance. Keep justice real, which requires that choices carry weight. Keep every one of those, and remove suffering entirely, and account for every consequence across every life that will ever be lived.

Take your time. This is the plan the accusation assumed you already had when it said the current one was run badly.

VIII. The Missing Attribute

By now the difficulty is not motivation. You are compassionate. That was never in question. The difficulty is that governing reality requires something the accusation quietly assumed and never possessed.

A fair objection lands here. Total knowledge is only the beginning of the job. To act on that knowledge you would also need the power to carry it out and the presence to be everywhere the work is done. The office demands the whole set of attributes working together, knowledge and power and presence held at once, without any of them failing under the weight of the others.

And notice what the office does not require. It never requires the logically impossible. No governor is asked to make a square circle, or to build a stone so heavy that omnipotence itself cannot lift it. A contradiction is no feat withheld from God, only a string of words that describes nothing at all. The demand of the office is mastery over everything that can actually be done, which is a far heavier burden than any word game.

This is the thorn. If you accuse God of misgoverning reality, you are claiming enough knowledge, power, and reach to govern it better. The accusation borrows the throne it means to condemn. It assumes the vantage point of the office while denying that anyone occupies it.

IX. Hand Back the Keys

The field promotion exposes the bluff, and the accuser began with a confident sentence,
“If I were God, I would run this differently.”
But the moment that sentence becomes an office, the confidence collapses.

Define suffering. Preserve freedom. Stabilize nature. Stop evil. Keep love meaningful. Keep justice real. Keep courage possible. Keep mercy possible. Track every consequence through every person, every century, every hidden dependency, and every unborn generation. Then govern.

The point is not that pain disappears. The point is that accusation is cheap from the spectator seats. If you want to indict the Governor of reality, bring more than outrage. Bring the universe you would build in His place.

Hand back the keys not because the questions were unwelcome, or not because the pain was small. Hand them back because the office was always larger than the accusation, and the One who holds it has never once been overwhelmed by the role you could not maintain at all for even a single day.

X. Come Home

Hand the keys back, and something surprising happens. The One whose office it always was does not only govern suffering. He governs salvation and restoration too. The same throne that weighs every consequence also opens a door, and the invitation standing behind the whole argument has been repentance from the start. Turn around. Come home.

There is a warning folded into this for anyone who has spent the whole piece measuring God. If judging the government of reality requires an authority we do not possess, then our judgement of one another should be handled with fear and care. Paul was grieved that the church would not judge at all, letting plain wrong go unaddressed inside the body while dragging one another before outsiders. And Jesus warned against the opposite failure, the judgement of the hypocrite who inspects a speck in a brother while a plank sits in his own eye. Both cautions point the same direction. Our judgement is meant to reflect His, measured, honest, merciful, and aware that we will answer for it.

So the demand letter ends where every honest reckoning ends. Lay down the accusation, lay down the seat you were never built to hold, and let the One who holds it receive you. He desires to be known, and He is reaching out to you right now. Today, or rather right NOW.

Sources and further study for the problem of evil, free will, and the limits of the moral accusation against God.

• Dwayne Desylvia. The Field Promotion. GODISNOWHERE (2026). The source essay for this article: the problem of evil recast as a promotion. If you would govern reality better, take the office and discover what it requires.
• Alvin Plantinga. God, Freedom, and Evil (1974). The Free Will Defense: a world containing free creatures capable of moral good is more valuable than a world of automata, and such freedom entails the possibility of evil. The philosophical backbone of the Edit Freedom section. Library ↗
• C.S. Lewis. The Problem of Pain (1940). On why a stable, law-governed nature (with its capacity to harm) is the precondition of free creatures who can act at all. Background to the Rewrite Nature section. Library ↗
• The Problem of Evil (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). A survey of the logical and evidential problems of evil and the major theistic responses, including the free-will defense and skeptical theism. Read the entry ↗