The Problem of Suffering: A Third Objection to Belief in God
Having addressed the problems of evidence for the existence of God and whether or not belief in God is illogical, now I would like to move on to a third objection to belief in God, the problem of suffering. According to one atheist, "The existence of suffering is an impossible problem for believers in an all-good, caring God to solve." [The five best reasons not to believe in God]
An implicit assumption in such reasoning is that suffering is necessarily bad. According to one dictionary definition, suffering is "the state of undergoing pain, distress, or hardship." We know that we can learn from pain, distress, and hardship. Suffering can build character, suffering can force people to do great things. Without hardship there would be no heroes.
But let's define suffering a little more narrowly as the atheists do. Let's confine our discussion to such suffering as "suffering of innocent children and animals" and such hideous human acts as murder, rape, and torture. Supposedly, "... a God who was benevolent and loving, as we are told the Christian God is, would never create the world we live in. Believing in him requires either shuttering yourself off from the carnage all around you; or crafting frankly ridiculous excuses (God works in mysterious ways?)."
I think the first problem with this reasoning is that it takes one aspect of the Christian God, magnifies it, and ignores all the other attributes of God that any Christian knows also exist in the Bible. In the Old Testament we have stories of God bringing a Great Flood to destroy nearly all life in Noah's world, we have stories of God destroying whole cities, and we have stories God's people being told by God to go to war and kill people. Many Christians are very uncomfortable with these stories because they do not like to think of God allowing suffering much less instigating it, so instead they prefer to talk about God as all-loving etc. However, the idea of a God who is all sunshine and rainbows simply does not provide a full picture of what God is all about in any religion, Christian or otherwise.
Truly if a creator exists then by definition all that he created is his responsibility including the potential for suffering. That is part of the Christian definition of God, so you cannot setup a strawman definition of God and say that He must not exist because his creation is imperfect.
Another aspect of suffering in Christianity is that God suffers as well. Christians believe that Jesus was innocent and that he suffered. When we sin it greatly pains God, and God feels our pain.
But getting back to our earlier assumption that suffering, narrowly defined as above, is bad... is even that a valid assumption? Whether a Christian or not, whether you believe in God or gods or none, you might consider the thoughts of stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius, "Now that which does not make a man worse, how can it make a man's life worse? But neither through ignorance, nor having the knowledge, but not the power to guard against or correct these things, is it possible that the nature of the universe has overlooked them; nor is it possible that it has made so great a mistake, either through want of power or want of skill, that good and evil should happen indiscriminately to the good and the bad. But death certainly, and life, honour and dishonour, pain and pleasure, all these things equally happen to good men and bad, being things which make us neither better nor worse. Therefore they are neither good nor evil." [http://classics.mit.edu/Antoninus/meditations.2.two.html]
Life is short, and any suffering that one individual must undergo is but a blink of an eye compared to the vast age of the cosmos. Whether we live for 1 year or 100 years it is a brief time and once it is over what is important is how you lived your life. What is important is not whether you suffered, for everyone does, but how you dealt with that suffering and how that affects the world around you. This is true whether God or gods exist or not.
An implicit assumption in such reasoning is that suffering is necessarily bad. According to one dictionary definition, suffering is "the state of undergoing pain, distress, or hardship." We know that we can learn from pain, distress, and hardship. Suffering can build character, suffering can force people to do great things. Without hardship there would be no heroes.
But let's define suffering a little more narrowly as the atheists do. Let's confine our discussion to such suffering as "suffering of innocent children and animals" and such hideous human acts as murder, rape, and torture. Supposedly, "... a God who was benevolent and loving, as we are told the Christian God is, would never create the world we live in. Believing in him requires either shuttering yourself off from the carnage all around you; or crafting frankly ridiculous excuses (God works in mysterious ways?)."
I think the first problem with this reasoning is that it takes one aspect of the Christian God, magnifies it, and ignores all the other attributes of God that any Christian knows also exist in the Bible. In the Old Testament we have stories of God bringing a Great Flood to destroy nearly all life in Noah's world, we have stories of God destroying whole cities, and we have stories God's people being told by God to go to war and kill people. Many Christians are very uncomfortable with these stories because they do not like to think of God allowing suffering much less instigating it, so instead they prefer to talk about God as all-loving etc. However, the idea of a God who is all sunshine and rainbows simply does not provide a full picture of what God is all about in any religion, Christian or otherwise.
Truly if a creator exists then by definition all that he created is his responsibility including the potential for suffering. That is part of the Christian definition of God, so you cannot setup a strawman definition of God and say that He must not exist because his creation is imperfect.
Another aspect of suffering in Christianity is that God suffers as well. Christians believe that Jesus was innocent and that he suffered. When we sin it greatly pains God, and God feels our pain.
Luke 12:6-7 English Standard Version (ESV)
6 Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies?[a] And not one of them is forgotten before God. 7 Why, even the hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not; you are of more value than many sparrows.
Footnotes:
- Luke 12:6 Greek two assaria; an assarion was a Roman copper coin worth about 1/16 of a denarius (which was a day's wage for a laborer)
But getting back to our earlier assumption that suffering, narrowly defined as above, is bad... is even that a valid assumption? Whether a Christian or not, whether you believe in God or gods or none, you might consider the thoughts of stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius, "Now that which does not make a man worse, how can it make a man's life worse? But neither through ignorance, nor having the knowledge, but not the power to guard against or correct these things, is it possible that the nature of the universe has overlooked them; nor is it possible that it has made so great a mistake, either through want of power or want of skill, that good and evil should happen indiscriminately to the good and the bad. But death certainly, and life, honour and dishonour, pain and pleasure, all these things equally happen to good men and bad, being things which make us neither better nor worse. Therefore they are neither good nor evil." [http://classics.mit.edu/Antoninus/meditations.2.two.html]
Life is short, and any suffering that one individual must undergo is but a blink of an eye compared to the vast age of the cosmos. Whether we live for 1 year or 100 years it is a brief time and once it is over what is important is how you lived your life. What is important is not whether you suffered, for everyone does, but how you dealt with that suffering and how that affects the world around you. This is true whether God or gods exist or not.
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