If there is a god, why is there suffering?
The existence of suffering in the world does not disturb my belief in God largely because I see the matter of suffering and evil more as a commentary on humanity than a commentary on god. Because I am interested in this topic I enjoyed the Tuesday, May 20, 2008 article that appeared in the English-language Japan Times newspaper entitled “If there is a god, then why is there suffering?” by the PrincetonUniversity philosophy professor Peter Singer. The article sparked many responses and commentary from readers in the letters-to-the-editor column. Christian advocates wrote with almost calculated predictably - lauding the all-good, all-powerful God whose wisdom exceeds ours. Atheist advocates were similarly predictable, rolling out their usual Logic and Reason arguments. Since I have been printed in the letters-to-the-editor page so often this year, my response was to write directly to Professor Singer at PrincetonUniversity instead of the paper.
It is an easy question subject to habitual over-estimation (as easy questions are) whenever great natural evil occurs, or when cases of especially heinous human moral evil are discovered. Is it not true that if God is omnipotent, ubiquitous and good then the existence of evil diminishes or disqualifies His divinity by making Him an accomplice in the evil that He is supposed to stand in juxtaposition against? No, it is not true, I think. Why should anyone’s belief in God be disturbed by instances of natural or moral evil in the world, even great evil? Apparent inconsistencies do not bother me like they seem to bother others.
I think the question “If there is a god, how could there notbe suffering?” is a more appropriate one than “If there is a god, then why is there suffering?” But people don’t get it when I say that and, sensing that I am an easy target because I don’t know what I am talking about they immediately act like sharks in a feeding frenzy: get the weirdo! Explain yourself! - like they’re still looking for the novel that makes sense. The first question is important, but not as important, nor as accurate and penetrating as the second. Similarly, I am inclined to ask, “How could God be perfect if there is nosuffering in the world?” On the one hand, the problem I have explaining myself stems from a difference in values. Most people think that the absence of suffering is a key indicator of moral order, or moral value - i.e. there would be / could be no suffering in a perfect world. Again, that is a classical Greek philosophical proposition, and I think that value is an error, stemming from the confusion of selfishness with virtue. In my moral universe I conceive of a place for suffering. Most people - even the professionals in this field - do not. On the other hand, I think it benefits us to turn questions around and examine them differently.
I think the question “If there is a god, how could there not be suffering?” is a more appropriate one than “If there is a god, then why is there suffering?” Similarly, I am inclined to ask, “How could God be perfect if there is no suffering in the world?”
Free Will and Predestination, Grace and Judgment, Faith and Reason combine in a delicate nexus that we do not understand. Neither dominates nor excludes the others, but they exist and operate side-by-side in a kind of balance and function that is beyond our ken. The doctrine of the Trinity is like that. God’s three persons - the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit - are always fully present and functional simultaneously. It’s not that God is like a Father in some situations, then like a Son in other situations, and then like a guiding or inspiring Spirit in still other situations. God is fully all three all the time in all situations. But how could He be like a Father and like a Son simultaneously? No one can explain it adequately in human language because it is a mystery. Reason does not exclude Faith, nor Faith Reason. Neither does Predestination exclude Free Will or vice versa, nor the promise of Grace exclude the threat of Judgment. And, just as I consider the existence of suffering to be a commentary more on human beings than on God, inconsistencies do not negate or disqualify things in my thinking. So lamentation over the existence of evil in the world do not move me like its moves the media or the masses.
I am not saying that I just blindly trust that God knows more than me so that should suffice, and who am I to question His ways, anyway? Not at all. I am saying that I don’t care to get hung up on a question that is perpetually unsolvable. Skip it and move on to something more worthy.
Professor Singer’s question “Do we live in a world that was created by a god who is all-powerful, all-knowing and all good?” launches with a notion of godliness featuring a vocabulary that lay people think they understand, but which they really do not, and which perpetuates the problem of a culturally entrenched and grossly erroneous notion of godhead. Words like “omnipotent,” “ubiquitous,” “omniscient” and others do notdescribe the God of the Bible so much as they describe pagan divinities, especially those of the Greeks - which, it might be said, are not true or authentic divinities at all (correspondingly discrediting the attributes afforded them in human philosophy). So the god that almost all atheists in the West think they are rejecting is almost always not the God of the Bible. We might do better to stop talking about God as omnipotent, omniscient, etc. By doing so we could simply avoid the objections of atheists. But try saying that to atheists and they just gawp at you because they have bound themselves to the Greek vocabulary just as Christians have. These are notions that were incorporated into the Christian lexicon in the Greco-Roman world, and I think Christians are wrong to use them because they are non-Biblical. Zeus and Apollo, Heracles and Heres, Ares, Poseidon and the rest of the Olympians are conceived as all powerful, all knowing, etc., not Yahweh. God may very well be all-powerful, all-knowing, and ever-present just as conventional philosophy and theology says, but it serves Christians badly to say so.
So while admitting that we do better at describing what God is not like than we do at describing what He is like, many still rely on words like “omniscient,” et al as the best or most practical common description of God. They are driven, perhaps, by a motivation to speak positively rather than negatively. Phrasing things negatively sounds backwards and sophomoric, unctuously clever, ingenuous and devious. Maybe deviant and just plain stupid, as well. But that is a mistake. I suggest embracing and advocating the negative description of God. So, instead of saying that God is omniscient, omnipotent and ubiquitous we should say that He is not unknowing, He is not unpowerful, and He is not absent from the world. More than that we cannot say.
The question of God’s existence is such a minor matter.
Furthermore, and on another point, proper exegesis suggests that it is not so much a matter of living in a world that was created by a divinity as it is a matter of living in a world whose existence was caused by a divinity and whose “creation” remains an ongoing process. They are different questions.
The suffering of children often appears as an argument against God’s goodness and, by corollary, of His existence. It has to be repeatedly addressed by theists because it seems to feature so commonly and prominently in atheist arguments. How could a virtuous and loving god permit the suffering of innocents, especially children whose innocence is a truism in the contemporary Western world? Children are habitually held in a different moral light than adults - more virtuous because they are supposed to live in a condition of “innocence,” not yet fallen from a condition of Grace, and so unspoiled by the depravity of awareness - a condition that includes but is not restricted to the “oxidizing” effects of sexual awareness. Hence the suffering of children is habitually held as especially terrible - more terrible than the suffering of adults who are considered responsible, or“guilty” for what they do because they are supposed to know what they are doing (or, they are supposed to know better, in the case of bad choices). It is played as some kind of trump card in the rhetoric of atheists who think that children’s suffering is more incomprehensible and egregious than that of adults and therefore demands more explanation, urgently. So, Professor Singer wrote in his article, “…it seems impossible that they could deserve to suffer and die.” Sorry to say that however impossible it might seem, and however cruel and immoral it might sound for me to say so, it is possible nevertheless. Go figure.
Why? Because the word “innocent”is habitually misused, thus skewering the debate from the start. I can barely conceive of an “innocent” human, child or adult, because I do not use the word “innocent” in terms of legal culpability. I think that people habitually over-state their “innocence” as part of a culturally nurtured pattern of exaggerated expectation of entitlement in life, and when most people hear, think about, or use the word “innocent” it is in the context of lamentation over wrongful suffering. They think it means “not culpable.” Hence the proposition that children are not just morally but legally innocent because they are not culpable for wrongdoing (theirs or others’) since they lack responsibility in the world. And, therefore, their suffering demands rational explanation. That is not the theological meaning of “innocent,” however. Over-use of the word has changed its meaning.
If one wants to build an atheist argument based on, or featuring the suffering of innocents, then I suggest it might be better to use the suffering and deaths of animals, not humans. Because animals never fell from a condition of Grace they remain morally “innocent” to this day, in a manner of speaking. But then, one might argue that not having fallen from a condition of Grace disqualifies animals from the moral discussion because it places them outside the debate parameters. Animals have no capacity to err and then to act responsibilitly - in other words, no capacity for responsible decision making, which is a feature of morality as we understand it.
Why should Christians’ exposition of the consequences of Free Will be judged an inadequate response to the suffering of innocents, one that allows examples of suffering from natural evils - accidental deaths from famines, drought, flood, fire, etc. - to disqualify their rebuttal that God is not responsible for the evils that human beings create by themselves? What I mean to suggest is that although it is sad and tragic if when a child dies, although it is sad and tragic for many to die by random natural incidents - volcanic eruption, tsunami, earthquake, etc. - it is adamantly a great thing to live in a universe governed by physical laws such that death results from adverse conditions. (Death is part of the plan. It is good. It is natural. It is programmed into our DNA. It is environmentally beneficial, and psychologically and spiritually necessary, and so it is part of the Grace of life.) Thank God the laws of physics prevail. Thank God we live on a tectonically active planet, where volcanoes erupt, rivers flood, species - including our own - live and then extinguish. What really bothers me is not so much the idea of “innocents” dying by road accident as it is the idea of someone not dying after being hit by a truck. That kind of suspension of the laws of physics is really scary. I suggest that the world is perfect as it is. Despite earthquakes and fires, pollution and famine, species extinction and collision with asteroids, the deaths of children and the prosperity of the vicious, etc., the Earth remains perfect. On what grounds does anyone complain? The Earth is as it is perfectly, but we livein it imperfectly.
Americans seem to hold the question of belief in God’s existence in pathologically high regard, as a litmus test of a person’s faith or religiosity. So the question, “Do you believe in God?” is not so much a query into whether or not one believes in God as it is a query into what one believes about god. But I suggest that the question of God’s existence is a minor matter, secondary to the matter of a spiritual life in a community of faith. I mean, a person can be religious in the absence of belief in God. So why do Americans keep on about it as they do? It sounds like a contradiction, doesn’t it? But it’s not, really. A person does not need morality to be ethical. But ethics are necessary to achieve morality.
But I could be wrong.