Degenerative disease

Few things can be as bad as having a degenerative illness. So this dramatically illustrates the problem of evil. Why would an omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent God permit degenerative diseases? 

Consider two related cases. A medical test for something unrelated on a healthy, asymptomatic teenage boy or girl, adult man or woman turns up the fact that they have a gene for a genetic disorder. This could take two forms. In one case the genetic defect makes it inevitable that they will develop the disease. In the other case the genetic defect makes it likely that they will develop the disease. Say a 50/50 chance.

The results in themselves generate a psychological dilemma. The patient would be relieved to know they don't have the fateful gene. But hearing the results carries the risk that they do have the fateful gene. 

That completely changes their outlook on life. Before they got the news, the presumption was that they'd have a normal healthy lifespan. But that's been abruptly and brutally replaced by terrible foreboding. 

There is, however, another way to look at this. Thanks to modern medicine, many people are presumptuous about the life ahead of them. They take life for granted. So they squander the gift of life on frivolity. Ephemeral, trivial pursuits, because they have time to burn. The prospect of death or the ravages of old age lie decades away.

If the prognosis is inevitable, the patient lives with a sense of doom. If the prognosis is 50/50, there is still an unshakable sense of dead.

But having a preview of the future gives them time to reflect on what makes life important. What should we live for? Likewise, it gives them an incentive to view this life from the perspective of eternity. Even at its best, this life can only be so good, and even then the good comes to an end. 

So while the prognosis is devastating, it concentrates the mind on what matters. It gives them lead-time reorient their lives while they're still healthy. It gives them advance notice to prepare for the afterlife, since they have nothing to hope for in this life. Things won't get better, or even stay the same, but become inexorably and horribly worse until they die.