The Problem of Pain
A man named Rick Rood wrote this interesting article about "The Problem of Evil". It starts by saying, "John Stott has said that "the fact of suffering undoubtedly constitutes the single greatest challenge to the Christian faith." It is unquestionably true that there is no greater obstacle to faith than that of the reality of evil and suffering in the world. Indeed, even for the believing Christian, there is no greater test of faith than this--that the God who loves him permits him to suffer, at times in excruciating ways. And the disillusionment is intensified in our day when unrealistic expectations of health and prosperity are fed by the teachings of a multitude of Christian teachers. Why does a good God allow his creatures, and even his children to suffer?"
www.leaderu.com/orgs/probe/docs/evil.html
According to the Bible, God punishes those who hate or ignore him as in Ezekiel 20:24-26:
"Because they had not executed my judgments, but had despised my statutes, and had polluted my sabbaths, and their eyes were after their fathers' idols. Wherefore I gave them also statutes that were not good, and judgments whereby they should not live; And I polluted them in their own gifts, in that they caused to pass through the fire all that openeth the womb, that I might make them desolate, to the end that they might know that I am the LORD."
It hardly seems God is allowing freedom, but instead demanding obedience. This passage does not suggest that the evil is the natural or inevitable result of disobedience, but the specific act of God in response to it.
Good observation. However, there are many other passages that intimate that God is a god of grace, and that mercy proceeds justice.
I also have a problem with Hume's formulation:
"David Hume, the eighteenth century philosopher, stated the logical problem of evil when he inquired about God, "Is He willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then He is impotent. Is He able, but not willing? Then He is malevolent. Is He both able and willing? Whence then is evil?"
Consider a father with a five year old playing next to a busy street. That father would indeed be evil if he did not prevent an immanent evil of that child running into the traffic. But that same father would not be evil if that child was a mature ten year old. The question is no longer a matter of the father's impotence or inability to to prevent evil, but the father now recognizing that the child is developing personhood and commonsense to prevent the evil himself from happening.
I also have a problem with the notion that pain is punishment or that pain is meant to teach us some kind of a lesson. Here is an essay I wrote on this point.
“Tell me about your God of love,” an atheist wrote to me, “for all that I see is 1 Samuel 15:3, 2 Samuel 24:15, 2 Samuel 6:6, and 1 Chronicles 21:14.” Never let it be said that atheists haven’t read the scriptures. Sometimes they have read it only too well. And I must admit that I too I have trouble squaring God’s command to “slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass” with the One who said “Permit little children, and forbid them not, for of such is the kingdom of heaven.” That God would inflict pain or even allow pain has challenged man since the days of Job.
Grandma June provided one answer to Natalie Angier. “When I was eight years old, my family was in a terrible car accident, and my older brother almost died,” she writes. “The next night, as I lay scared and sleepless on my paternal grandmother’s living-room couch, she softly explained to me who was to blame. Not my father’s Aunt Estelle, a dour, aging wild woman and devout Baptist, who, as usual, was driving recklessly fast. No, the reason Estelle’s station wagon flipped over and Joe was thrown out the back window was this: my father had stopped going to church the previous year, and God was very, very angry.”
A 16 year old has more questions for an advice columnists: “When I was a little girl it was not so bad because I got used to the kids of the block making fun of me, but now I would like to have boy friends like the other girls and go out on Saturday nights, but no boy will take me because I was born without a nose—although I’m a good dancer and have a nice shape and my father buys me pretty clothes. I sit and look at myself all day and cry. I have a big hole in the middle of my face that scares people—even myself—so I can’t blame the boys for not wanting to take me out. My mother loves me, but she cries terribly when she looks at me. What did I do to deserve such a terribly bad fate? Even if I did some bad things, I didn’t do any before I was a year old and I was born that way. I asked papa and he says he doesn’t know, but that maybe I did something in the other world before I was born, or that maybe I was being punished for his sins. I don’t believe that because he is a very nice man. Ought I commit suicide?”
The basic formulation for the problem is as follows: If God is good, He is not God. If God is God, He is not good. If God is good, He would wish to make his creatures happy. If God was all-powerful, He would be able to do what He wished. But His creatures are suffering. Thus, God lacks power or goodness or both. Either God doesn’t exist or He is impotent or He is evil.
In The Brothers Karamazov, the greatest novel of the 19th century, Fyodor Dostoevsky puts into the mouth of the atheist Ivan the one irrefutable objection to a personal God, that the only possible religious answer is that human suffering will be justified by the divine harmony and the end of history. It’s a hollow argument made by some theologians to explain the holocaust—that Hitler was God’s punishment of European Jews for their secularization and Biblical prophecy was fulfilled when the state of Israel was born.
“Listen! If all must suffer to pay for the eternal harmony, what have children to do with it, tell me, please? It's beyond all comprehension why they should suffer, and why they should pay for the harmony. Why should they, too, furnish material to enrich the soil for the harmony of the future? I understand solidarity in sin among men. I understand solidarity in retribution, too; but there can be no such solidarity with children. And if it is really true that they must share responsibility for all their fathers' crimes, such a truth is not of this world and is beyond my comprehension. Some jester will say, perhaps, that the child would have grown up and have sinned, but you see he didn't grow up, he was torn to pieces by the dogs, at eight years old. Oh, Alyosha, I am not blaspheming! I understand, of course, what an upheaval of the universe it will be when everything in heaven and earth blends in one hymn of praise and everything that lives and has lived cries aloud: 'Thou art just, O Lord, for Thy ways are revealed.' When the mother embraces the fiend who threw her child to the dogs, and all three cry aloud with tears, 'Thou art just, O Lord!' then, of course, the crown of knowledge will be reached and all will be made clear. But what pulls me up here is that I can't accept that harmony. And while I am on earth, I make haste to take my own measures. You see, Alyosha, perhaps it really may happen that if I live to that moment, or rise again to see it, I, too, perhaps, may cry aloud with the rest, looking at the mother embracing the child's torturer, 'Thou art just, O Lord!' but I don't want to cry aloud then. While there is still time, I hasten to protect myself, and so I renounce the higher harmony altogether. It's not worth the tears of that one tortured child who beat itself on the breast with its little fist and prayed in its stinking outhouse, with its unexpected tears to 'dear, kind God'! “
The classic counter is that God made man not as robots but with free moral agency. God freely limited his own freedom and put no limit on ours. God thusly could not have created a moral universe without at the same time freeing man’s spirit. If God had programmed all humans to be good, there would be no evil but there would be no virtue as well. Evil exists because free will exists. Blind force, instinct, or the orchestrations of God do not compel us. The classic Christian reply to suffering makes sense only if we assume that God is not in control of all that happens. If God controls plane crashes, terminal cancers, and atom bombs, then God must be responsible. If those actions are bad, then God must be evil and the author of evil. I cannot believe that. Rather, I believe that God created a contingent universe and delegated to humanity the freedom to work through the vicissitudes of life—dealing with war, disease, and poverty. By doing so, humanity develops morally, intellectually, and technologically. So this is another reason why I believe God’s self-limiting sovereignty and that we determine our own destiny in the face of life, death, and God.
This accords with the view of Harold Kushner, whose young son had progeria, the “rapid aging disease. By the time his son had died at 14, the boy looked like an old man. “An aching sense of unfairness” led Kushner to write the best-selling book When Bad Things Happen to Good People. Kushner argues that bad things didn’t happen because God wants to punish us for our sins, test our strength, or teach us lessons. Instead, Kushner sees randomness to the universe. Lottery winners are merely lucky—not blessed. And when bad things happen, we shouldn’t question ourselves or God and be angry because the world is imperfect and unfair. Insurance companies call earthquakes and hurricanes that kills hundred of people “acts of God”, but they use God’s name in vain. These are acts of nature, not acts of God. Nature is morally blind. The act of God is the courage of us to continue in the face of disaster.
But I think this is a sterile argument that doesn’t address the core issue of the suffering of the innocent. I think for example of the two million Jewish babies and children that were swallowed by the maw of the Nazi death camps, including kids of relatives of my wife. It makes me think that if there is a God, it’s a God who is blind. That children must die so that we will be good strikes me as incomprehensible. Following the death of his young boy, Huxley replied to a letter from the Reverend Charles Kingley: “As I stood behind the coffin of my little son the other day, with my mind bent on anything but disputation, the officiating minister read as part of his duty, the words “If the dead rise not, let us eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die.” I cannot tell you how inexpressibly they shocked me. Paul had neither wife nor child, or he must have known that his alternative involved a blasphemy against all the best and noblest in human nature. I could have laughed with scorn. What! Because I am face to face with irreparable loss, because I have given back to source from whence it came, the cause of great happiness, still retaining through all my life the blessings which have sprung and will spring from that cause, am I to renounce my manhood, and, howling, grovel in bestiality? Why the very apes know better, and if you shoot their young, the poor brutes grieve their grief out and do not immediately seek distraction in the forge.”
I have great sympathy for this reaction, and should I lose my wife or child, my grief would be as great, but I could not be persuaded that their lives had been at no purpose. I think of the Oxford don C.S. Lewis who aggressively promoted the orthodox Christian answer to evil and suffering in The Problem of Pain. You may remember the movie “Shadowlands”, played by Anthony Hopkins as Lewis, in which he had a crisis of faith when he watched his young bride die of cancer. At the end of the day, there are no satisfactory answers—only the consolation of faith in the One who also suffered-- and our friends. In one of the last scenes in “Shadowlands,” we see the professor hugging his young step-son after his wife had just died-- both in tears. Perhaps that is the only real answer in the face of the silence and distance of God. Faith is not all green pastures and still waters. The comforters in the Book of Job put forth their rational arguments, and at the end Job—without an explanation but with the existential experience of God—turns for questioning to wondering silence: “I will lay mine hand upon my mouth.” In this fragment of time on this island in space, we are in this together and we must help each other out. Evil and suffering is inextricably part of the human condition individually and institutionally, and if there is one thing we must believe in, it is that we can make a difference. To live is to suffer. To suffer is to find meaning. And, if there is purpose in life, there must be purpose in suffering and death. The Psalmist said that “My help cometh from the Lord, which made heaven and earth.” It did not say, “My tragedy comes from the Lord.” The bad that happens in our life has no meaning. But we can redeem it by giving it meaning.
It's really due to Epicurus, not Hume. Many explanations for evil have been invented. Some, such as the free will defense you cite, do an acceptable prima facie job with moral evils such as war and crime, but do not even touch on contingent evils such as natural disasters and epidemic diseases.
Why reject the free will defense of evil as a method of teaching the ways of God to man? My answer would be that it is obviously random and often misapplied. God allows a child to die a cruel death to teach the parents to serve him better? Not truly credible. God's methods of insruction in this defense seem crude and unfocused —the innocent are often taken with the guilty.
It is true that natural disasters appear random and that is because they are random. Insurance companies call them Acts of God, only because they are outside of the domain of man's control, such as a hurricane. I agree that there is no credibility to the idea that they such disasters are meant to impart a moral lesson (a view that many fundamentalists ascribe to the 9/11 attacks-- Wall Street was attacked because of what the gays were doing in San Francisco.) The rebuttal is a ditty that circulated after the 1907 earthquake in San Francisco, that goes like this:
If, as some say, God spanked the town
For being over frisky,
Why did He burn the churches down
And save Hotaling's whiskey?
The only answer that makes sense to me is to presuppose a God who is not immanent and who is not omnipotent, at least in the way we perhaps would like to believe. Thus, natural disasters that wipe out the good and the bad, the wise and the dumb, the rich and the poor, are all inseperable from the human condition. And, as such, God gives humans the gift of evil so that we can transcend ourselves through medicine, inventions, discovery, and charity. A world that is free from evil would also be free from morality and love as well as science and reason. Perhaps we cannot do good without experiencing evil anymore than we can have light without also having darkness. In Shadowlands, Lewis proclaims that "Pain is God's megaphone to rouse a deaf world." But in the rueful acceptance and grief of the death of his wife, he finds that "We can't have the happiness of yesterday without the pain of today. That's the deal."
www.leaderu.com/orgs/probe/docs/evil.html
According to the Bible, God punishes those who hate or ignore him as in Ezekiel 20:24-26:
"Because they had not executed my judgments, but had despised my statutes, and had polluted my sabbaths, and their eyes were after their fathers' idols. Wherefore I gave them also statutes that were not good, and judgments whereby they should not live; And I polluted them in their own gifts, in that they caused to pass through the fire all that openeth the womb, that I might make them desolate, to the end that they might know that I am the LORD."
It hardly seems God is allowing freedom, but instead demanding obedience. This passage does not suggest that the evil is the natural or inevitable result of disobedience, but the specific act of God in response to it.
Good observation. However, there are many other passages that intimate that God is a god of grace, and that mercy proceeds justice.
I also have a problem with Hume's formulation:
"David Hume, the eighteenth century philosopher, stated the logical problem of evil when he inquired about God, "Is He willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then He is impotent. Is He able, but not willing? Then He is malevolent. Is He both able and willing? Whence then is evil?"
Consider a father with a five year old playing next to a busy street. That father would indeed be evil if he did not prevent an immanent evil of that child running into the traffic. But that same father would not be evil if that child was a mature ten year old. The question is no longer a matter of the father's impotence or inability to to prevent evil, but the father now recognizing that the child is developing personhood and commonsense to prevent the evil himself from happening.
I also have a problem with the notion that pain is punishment or that pain is meant to teach us some kind of a lesson. Here is an essay I wrote on this point.
“Tell me about your God of love,” an atheist wrote to me, “for all that I see is 1 Samuel 15:3, 2 Samuel 24:15, 2 Samuel 6:6, and 1 Chronicles 21:14.” Never let it be said that atheists haven’t read the scriptures. Sometimes they have read it only too well. And I must admit that I too I have trouble squaring God’s command to “slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass” with the One who said “Permit little children, and forbid them not, for of such is the kingdom of heaven.” That God would inflict pain or even allow pain has challenged man since the days of Job.
Grandma June provided one answer to Natalie Angier. “When I was eight years old, my family was in a terrible car accident, and my older brother almost died,” she writes. “The next night, as I lay scared and sleepless on my paternal grandmother’s living-room couch, she softly explained to me who was to blame. Not my father’s Aunt Estelle, a dour, aging wild woman and devout Baptist, who, as usual, was driving recklessly fast. No, the reason Estelle’s station wagon flipped over and Joe was thrown out the back window was this: my father had stopped going to church the previous year, and God was very, very angry.”
A 16 year old has more questions for an advice columnists: “When I was a little girl it was not so bad because I got used to the kids of the block making fun of me, but now I would like to have boy friends like the other girls and go out on Saturday nights, but no boy will take me because I was born without a nose—although I’m a good dancer and have a nice shape and my father buys me pretty clothes. I sit and look at myself all day and cry. I have a big hole in the middle of my face that scares people—even myself—so I can’t blame the boys for not wanting to take me out. My mother loves me, but she cries terribly when she looks at me. What did I do to deserve such a terribly bad fate? Even if I did some bad things, I didn’t do any before I was a year old and I was born that way. I asked papa and he says he doesn’t know, but that maybe I did something in the other world before I was born, or that maybe I was being punished for his sins. I don’t believe that because he is a very nice man. Ought I commit suicide?”
The basic formulation for the problem is as follows: If God is good, He is not God. If God is God, He is not good. If God is good, He would wish to make his creatures happy. If God was all-powerful, He would be able to do what He wished. But His creatures are suffering. Thus, God lacks power or goodness or both. Either God doesn’t exist or He is impotent or He is evil.
In The Brothers Karamazov, the greatest novel of the 19th century, Fyodor Dostoevsky puts into the mouth of the atheist Ivan the one irrefutable objection to a personal God, that the only possible religious answer is that human suffering will be justified by the divine harmony and the end of history. It’s a hollow argument made by some theologians to explain the holocaust—that Hitler was God’s punishment of European Jews for their secularization and Biblical prophecy was fulfilled when the state of Israel was born.
“Listen! If all must suffer to pay for the eternal harmony, what have children to do with it, tell me, please? It's beyond all comprehension why they should suffer, and why they should pay for the harmony. Why should they, too, furnish material to enrich the soil for the harmony of the future? I understand solidarity in sin among men. I understand solidarity in retribution, too; but there can be no such solidarity with children. And if it is really true that they must share responsibility for all their fathers' crimes, such a truth is not of this world and is beyond my comprehension. Some jester will say, perhaps, that the child would have grown up and have sinned, but you see he didn't grow up, he was torn to pieces by the dogs, at eight years old. Oh, Alyosha, I am not blaspheming! I understand, of course, what an upheaval of the universe it will be when everything in heaven and earth blends in one hymn of praise and everything that lives and has lived cries aloud: 'Thou art just, O Lord, for Thy ways are revealed.' When the mother embraces the fiend who threw her child to the dogs, and all three cry aloud with tears, 'Thou art just, O Lord!' then, of course, the crown of knowledge will be reached and all will be made clear. But what pulls me up here is that I can't accept that harmony. And while I am on earth, I make haste to take my own measures. You see, Alyosha, perhaps it really may happen that if I live to that moment, or rise again to see it, I, too, perhaps, may cry aloud with the rest, looking at the mother embracing the child's torturer, 'Thou art just, O Lord!' but I don't want to cry aloud then. While there is still time, I hasten to protect myself, and so I renounce the higher harmony altogether. It's not worth the tears of that one tortured child who beat itself on the breast with its little fist and prayed in its stinking outhouse, with its unexpected tears to 'dear, kind God'! “
The classic counter is that God made man not as robots but with free moral agency. God freely limited his own freedom and put no limit on ours. God thusly could not have created a moral universe without at the same time freeing man’s spirit. If God had programmed all humans to be good, there would be no evil but there would be no virtue as well. Evil exists because free will exists. Blind force, instinct, or the orchestrations of God do not compel us. The classic Christian reply to suffering makes sense only if we assume that God is not in control of all that happens. If God controls plane crashes, terminal cancers, and atom bombs, then God must be responsible. If those actions are bad, then God must be evil and the author of evil. I cannot believe that. Rather, I believe that God created a contingent universe and delegated to humanity the freedom to work through the vicissitudes of life—dealing with war, disease, and poverty. By doing so, humanity develops morally, intellectually, and technologically. So this is another reason why I believe God’s self-limiting sovereignty and that we determine our own destiny in the face of life, death, and God.
This accords with the view of Harold Kushner, whose young son had progeria, the “rapid aging disease. By the time his son had died at 14, the boy looked like an old man. “An aching sense of unfairness” led Kushner to write the best-selling book When Bad Things Happen to Good People. Kushner argues that bad things didn’t happen because God wants to punish us for our sins, test our strength, or teach us lessons. Instead, Kushner sees randomness to the universe. Lottery winners are merely lucky—not blessed. And when bad things happen, we shouldn’t question ourselves or God and be angry because the world is imperfect and unfair. Insurance companies call earthquakes and hurricanes that kills hundred of people “acts of God”, but they use God’s name in vain. These are acts of nature, not acts of God. Nature is morally blind. The act of God is the courage of us to continue in the face of disaster.
But I think this is a sterile argument that doesn’t address the core issue of the suffering of the innocent. I think for example of the two million Jewish babies and children that were swallowed by the maw of the Nazi death camps, including kids of relatives of my wife. It makes me think that if there is a God, it’s a God who is blind. That children must die so that we will be good strikes me as incomprehensible. Following the death of his young boy, Huxley replied to a letter from the Reverend Charles Kingley: “As I stood behind the coffin of my little son the other day, with my mind bent on anything but disputation, the officiating minister read as part of his duty, the words “If the dead rise not, let us eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die.” I cannot tell you how inexpressibly they shocked me. Paul had neither wife nor child, or he must have known that his alternative involved a blasphemy against all the best and noblest in human nature. I could have laughed with scorn. What! Because I am face to face with irreparable loss, because I have given back to source from whence it came, the cause of great happiness, still retaining through all my life the blessings which have sprung and will spring from that cause, am I to renounce my manhood, and, howling, grovel in bestiality? Why the very apes know better, and if you shoot their young, the poor brutes grieve their grief out and do not immediately seek distraction in the forge.”
I have great sympathy for this reaction, and should I lose my wife or child, my grief would be as great, but I could not be persuaded that their lives had been at no purpose. I think of the Oxford don C.S. Lewis who aggressively promoted the orthodox Christian answer to evil and suffering in The Problem of Pain. You may remember the movie “Shadowlands”, played by Anthony Hopkins as Lewis, in which he had a crisis of faith when he watched his young bride die of cancer. At the end of the day, there are no satisfactory answers—only the consolation of faith in the One who also suffered-- and our friends. In one of the last scenes in “Shadowlands,” we see the professor hugging his young step-son after his wife had just died-- both in tears. Perhaps that is the only real answer in the face of the silence and distance of God. Faith is not all green pastures and still waters. The comforters in the Book of Job put forth their rational arguments, and at the end Job—without an explanation but with the existential experience of God—turns for questioning to wondering silence: “I will lay mine hand upon my mouth.” In this fragment of time on this island in space, we are in this together and we must help each other out. Evil and suffering is inextricably part of the human condition individually and institutionally, and if there is one thing we must believe in, it is that we can make a difference. To live is to suffer. To suffer is to find meaning. And, if there is purpose in life, there must be purpose in suffering and death. The Psalmist said that “My help cometh from the Lord, which made heaven and earth.” It did not say, “My tragedy comes from the Lord.” The bad that happens in our life has no meaning. But we can redeem it by giving it meaning.
It's really due to Epicurus, not Hume. Many explanations for evil have been invented. Some, such as the free will defense you cite, do an acceptable prima facie job with moral evils such as war and crime, but do not even touch on contingent evils such as natural disasters and epidemic diseases.
Why reject the free will defense of evil as a method of teaching the ways of God to man? My answer would be that it is obviously random and often misapplied. God allows a child to die a cruel death to teach the parents to serve him better? Not truly credible. God's methods of insruction in this defense seem crude and unfocused —the innocent are often taken with the guilty.
It is true that natural disasters appear random and that is because they are random. Insurance companies call them Acts of God, only because they are outside of the domain of man's control, such as a hurricane. I agree that there is no credibility to the idea that they such disasters are meant to impart a moral lesson (a view that many fundamentalists ascribe to the 9/11 attacks-- Wall Street was attacked because of what the gays were doing in San Francisco.) The rebuttal is a ditty that circulated after the 1907 earthquake in San Francisco, that goes like this:
If, as some say, God spanked the town
For being over frisky,
Why did He burn the churches down
And save Hotaling's whiskey?
The only answer that makes sense to me is to presuppose a God who is not immanent and who is not omnipotent, at least in the way we perhaps would like to believe. Thus, natural disasters that wipe out the good and the bad, the wise and the dumb, the rich and the poor, are all inseperable from the human condition. And, as such, God gives humans the gift of evil so that we can transcend ourselves through medicine, inventions, discovery, and charity. A world that is free from evil would also be free from morality and love as well as science and reason. Perhaps we cannot do good without experiencing evil anymore than we can have light without also having darkness. In Shadowlands, Lewis proclaims that "Pain is God's megaphone to rouse a deaf world." But in the rueful acceptance and grief of the death of his wife, he finds that "We can't have the happiness of yesterday without the pain of today. That's the deal."
Labels: evil, philosophy, theology
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