The Christian God demands his followers to not hide from, but run to the victims of such assaults, natural or human, bearing whatever power they have to comfort and heal. This is, the Bible tells us, the pragmatic answer both to the human condition generally and our own condition specifically. The remedy lies not with God alone, but God in us. Still, the philosophical question remains: what is God’s relation to evil? Most debates on this subject eventually come down to a core issue: how can an absolutely good and absolutely sovereign God allow evil on his (or her) watch. So much depends on how one defines goodness and sovereignty, however, that responses must be appreciated as denominationally or religion-specific.

The Latter-day Saint understanding of God is not framed by the traditional Christian doctrines of creation ex nihilo and original sin. These doctrines arose in the contest among Christians over Gnostic arguments that matter was evil. The winning side of the contest asserted that God created the world from nothing and, hence, (1) the material world is good and (2) humans, as created beings ontologically unrelated to God, brought evil into being by their action. For Latter-day Saints, the material world is good, but evil did not originate with creation, much less in human nature. Evil is uncreated and co-eternal with good and God; so are we. Evil, like God and us, simply is, but evil pollutes, like a fly in the ointment, God’s order for the flourishing of human life in God’s image. Thus, in Mormonism, most of the bad experiences in this life are explained in terms of humans choosing the fly over the ointment. But, notwithstanding this interplay of independent agency and existence, evil’s uncreatedness does not place it beyond God’s power; neither is God blind to or unmoved by evil’s effect.

The Latter-day Saint God is not the Deist’s watchmaker in the sky who, having wound his timepiece, stands back and watches it tick. However independently existent and capable of causing disorder the fly may be, the fly is just a fly; subordinate to both God and, Latter-day Saints would argue, to humans as empowered by God. This is the second dimension of the Latter-day Saint understanding of good and evil: its limits are set, but God’s are not. Why God doesn’t prevent evil immediately is a function of a world comprised of competing agencies, pending final judgment. In the meantime, God is good and makes good on his promise to heal and to quicken us in this life (not merely after death).

There is a very bad sermon story having to do with two children who wake up on Christmas morning and find a pile of manure in their room. One exclaims: “Where’s the pony?” The other asks: “Who put this pile of dung in my room?” The moral of the sermon argues for the optimism of the first child, but it never tells you who was right. The better sermon, at least from my denominational neck of the woods, is that God finds the pony, even when there’s only a pile of manure. For Latter-day Saints, God’s mightiness to save is defined not by his capacity to prevent evil, but to create good when only evil seems possible. He doesn’t turn evil into good, but he overcomes it with the good. In the words of the New Testament, he “returns good for evil” and so can we if, as Jesus commanded, we would be “perfect, even as your Father which is in haven is perfect.” Thus, for Latter-day Saints, God’s perfection is in his capacity to make life in the midst of life’s many deaths and to engender in his children the power to do the same, even calm the seas.