You said last time that we need to search for the right questions to ask. What did you mean by that?
I think that I myself have often been asking questions for which we cannot find good answers. For example, the question of why God allows so much evil and suffering in the world. You said that it was especially your concern for human suffering that contributed to your loss of faith. As it has for masses of others, of course. It’s probably the single most difficult problem that calls into question for nearly all of us the concept of a God who is both omnipotent and loving. Philosophers and theologians and thinkers of all kinds have struggled with this problem and written many volumes. For myself, all this evil and suffering has haunted me ever since I woke up to the invasion of Holland in WWII. But I’m coming to accept what Job discovered: so much of God’s being is shrouded in mystery, beyond our grasp. Maybe we should stick to what we can know and understand.
That sounds like a possible copout to me. Whenever you can’t come up with a good answer to a really important but tough question, you resort to hidden mysteries. But so, what questions to you are the “right” ones then?
Maybe we should begin with the question why there is so much evil and suffering.
And?
The answer is because of us. We, the human community, are responsible for all the man/woman-made suffering. We have choices, and we keep making the wrong ones.
There is nature-made suffering as well: disasters, epidemics, incurable disease, animal attacks. Even here there may often be a dimension of human responsibility involved.
There is also the suffering caused by acts of mental derangement.
And then there is of course accident-caused suffering. All of it shows we are part of what you’ve often heard described as a “fallen world,” a creation that, as St. Paul describes it, is groaning for liberation from its bondage to decay and suffering.
But you believe that God made us and nature too, and that he made it good. Apparently not good enough?
He made us not as robots or puppets but as moral agents of decision-making. God must’ve decided that puppets with no freedom to choose between good or evil could not glorify Him in the way He intended. He made us good but with the freedom to choose evil.
But if, according to the story, God created Adam and Eve good, how could they choose evil?
Because evil had already entered the universe. Exactly how and why we don’t know much about. The Bible tells us evil was present and in combat with God. John Milton in “Paradise Lost” gives us a vivid poetical account of this warfare. The conflict between good and evil has always been part and parcel of our human existence. And evil is something like a rotten apple or an epidemic: it spreads and has a way of contaminating all it comes into contact with.
How can God stand it?
Well, the Bible tells us He couldn’t, and so he destroyed pretty much the whole mess and started over, but promised he wouldn’t destroy again.
Does He care about suffering?
Yes, a lot. The Bible speaks again and again of a God who grieves, whose “sorrow is beyond healing,” as Jeremiah has it, whose essence is love, and who hurts when the object of his love hurts or turns away from him. The gospels certainly leave no doubt about the love and compassion of God revealed in Christ.
Well, if there’s a God who loves the world enough to have his Son killed in order to save it, why didn’t he do something to save those five or six million lives in the concentration camps? Or why doesn’t he do something now to stop the genocide in Darfur that’s been going on and on? Couldn’t he prevent these awful things?
I’m sure he could. Just like he could’ve sent his angels to rescue Jesus from crucifixion. But that’s not the set-up. God is not Spiderman. If there are cancer cells in your body, God’s not going to reach in to reverse all the natural laws of biochemistry, etc., and snatch those cells away. He’s not going to snatch you away if you should step in front of a moving truck. He’s not going to immobilize the killers that descend on a village in Sudan. He could, and sometimes he does intervene. But he’s established natural laws, and he’s given human beings the responsibility to make moral choices. There’s a relationship between cause and effect. That’s the set-up.
And so human suffering goes on and on?
Yes, until people change. That’s why Christ came. And until a new heaven and earth are born.
But the question you ask often haunts nearly all of us, people of faith included. It’s a question about how to reconcile those two, as you framed it: the love of God and the proliferation of evil. I won’t pretend that we’ll resolve the limitation of our understanding. What we can do is to try to see how for believers evil poses a big question but does not necessarily threaten their faith; in fact, pain may often intensify it.
But let’s look at that more next time.
...to be continued
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