The theodicy question — how an all-powerful, all-good God can permit suffering — is often presented as the decisive argument against theism, and it is certainly a serious one. But every tradition has engaged it with more sophistication than its critics often acknowledge: the Book of Job refuses easy answers; the Buddhist tradition denies the premise by rejecting omnipotence; the Sufi tradition insists that the wound is the way; the indigenous traditions often understand suffering as part of a reciprocal and relational cosmos rather than a punishment or an anomaly. The question is not whether suffering can be explained but whether it can be inhabited — whether a framework exists that allows the sufferer to remain present to their own life without being destroyed by it.
Each step builds on the last.