“In this world, you will have trouble.” These words, which Jesus said to His disciples, are true for everyone. At certain times, like the last few months, they seem even more apt. The ongoing war in Ukraine, a hunger crisis in Gaza, and last week’s shooting at a Target store in Austin—which took three lives, including a grandfather and his granddaughter—only punctuate this summer of suffering, which began with devastating floods in Texas. We all shuddered at the reports of what those girls of Camp Mystic endured and mourned the news that 27 lost their lives.

Tragedies expose our deepest beliefs about life and the world. Not only do they reveal what those beliefs are, they test whether they are “big enough.” Skeptics often talk as if the problem of evil and suffering is only a concern of Christianity, but every religion and every worldview must explain why the world is the way it is.

Naturalistic explanations of reality deny that God exists. The world is the product of purely material causes and processes. In this view, there is no way things ought to be, only as things are. Therefore, what happened to those girls in Texas wasn’t evil, but only bad luck.

Eastern religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism, as well the New Age ideas that share the same basic worldview, deny the existence of real evil. If the physical world is an illusion, then the evil that inflicts the physical world must also be an illusion. That, of course, is more of a deflection than an explanation. Rather than asking why bad things happen, we now ask, “why do the illusions of bad things happen?”

According to postmodern ideologies, we cannot ever access reality because we are trapped within our own perspectives and experiences. But, of course, even those who did not physically experience a particular evil can know that was bad. Critical Theory, a more recent offspring of postmodernism’s perspectivalism, reduces evil to oppression and places the blame on certain groups of people. However, that explanation fails to explain natural disasters and evil deeds done by members of oppressed groups.

The only worldview big enough to both explain the existence of evil and to offer a way forward is Christianity. The Bible explains the human condition in its fullness. Created in God’s image, humans have an incredible capacity to bring good into the world. Fallen, we have an incredible capacity to bring evil and suffering into the world. In the same way, the world God made is full of beauty, truth, and goodness, but our sin has broken this world in profound and deep ways. Thus, we often find ourselves the victims of harmful forces well beyond our control.

The fact that we perceive evil in the world and in human beings as evil, despite how commonly it occurs, is a clue to the meaning of the universe and how we were made. Even more, we perceive acts of heroism and sacrifice, even in the midst of grave evil, as deeply good and true. That says something as well.

During the Texas flooding, a 26-year-old Coast Guard rescue swimmer, Scott Ruskan, was sent on his very first mission. The sole rescuer on site, he saved the lives of 165 kids and camp counselors at Camp Mystic. In fact, he also saved a number of stuffed animals when the girls he rescued asked if they could also come along. As Erick Erickson put it, “This man’s money should be rejected in every bar in America for the rest of his life. He drinks on the house.”

And yet, within the framing of Critical Theory, that kind of masculine heroism is “toxic” and oppressive. If the physical world is an illusion, like transcendental worldviews claim, both the suffering of the girls and the heroism of Ruskan are nothing more than an illusion, too. If life evolved according to the neo-Darwinian-survival-of-the-fittest story of the world, there was no honor in what Ruskan did or value in the lives that were lost that night.

A Christian worldview takes horrible tragedies to be truly horrible. It’s right to weep and even to be angry in the face of evil and suffering because this world is not as it is supposed to be. Evil, however, does not have the final say. As soon as evil entered the world, God began to act to confront it, to protect His image bearers, and ultimately, to rid the world of evil. We will always wonder why a particular evil may happen, but our efforts to overcome evil with good matter because we imagine the God who made the world and so loved it that He sent His only Son. As Samwise Gamgee said, “There’s good in the world, Mr. Frodo, and it’s worth fighting for.”

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