A close-minded materialist wrote another bashing of religion for our local newspaper, one of fifty or more over the last twenty years. This time he returned to a familiar subject, the problem of evil in our world, a favorite of atheists since the time of Epicurus. Simply put, a loving and powerful God would be expected to protect his children from evil and suffering in all its forms, but God obviously doesn’t. So either God is impotent or unconcerned, or God doesn’t exist at all. Either way, we are left to fend for ourselves, and the fending is always difficult, often harrowing, and ultimately tragic, with death having the final say. That is the problem we all face.
I grant him the truism that suffering engulfs us all. Everywhere there is disorder that needs cleaning up. Our kids get sick, our credit debt is getting out of control or we get hacked, we look at the war news that offers no end, we lose our temper and scream at our spouse or best friend, and the Dodgers even get swept in four games. And this is nothing compared to the real tragedies that play out in places like Sudan, Venezuela, Lebanon, or hospitals where innocent children die of cancer. The world is on fire with suffering of every kind.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if these things never happened. And if God cared, if God acted like a loving parent instead of an absent parent, they wouldn’t. This is an understandable and even noble concern–one that led to the collapse of my theistic Christian faith many years ago. I feel compassion for the writer; I have traveled down that same road. But I have come back to God.
Here is the reasoning that led me back. If you eliminate suffering from human experience, you are left with nothing of importance worth doing. Consider what drives us to do our best—to work hard at our jobs, to sacrifice leisure in our homes, to resist temptation in its many guises. It all comes down to fixing the things that need fixing, things in our environment, things in ourselves. Fixing is not fun. It takes work, self-control, and very often suffering.
Now consider a different world, one in which we never have to suffer. Most of us know what that is like if we’ve spent a week at the beach. It becomes boring. We might complain of Monday morning, but consider a life in which there are no Monday mornings. What would we do? Fun gets old after a while.
God is not interested in making our lives comfortable, stress-free, and painless. On the contrary, God has designed a world in which we must use our free will, limited intelligence, and physical strength to survive. Without being tested, we would get lazy and worthless even to ourselves. We would also become bored.
Most importantly, we would not grow morally and spiritually. Compassion, kindness, patience, unselfishness, resilience, courage, dedication to duty, forgiveness, and humility could never be formed. These are virtues born of struggle, travail, and sometimes conflict. They don’t come easy, but they mature us into good people, sometimes even great people. The philosopher John Hick, whose book Evil and the God of Love is the most complete study of the problem I’ve come across, puts it this way: “It would seem, then, that an environment intended to make possible the growth in free beings of the finest characteristics of personal life must have a good deal in common with our present world.”
Even the entertainment we enjoy points to this conclusion. What is the subject of the movies we enjoy? We are fascinated by scenes of injustice, crime, violence, and its resolution. The sports we enjoy expose us to disappointment and even anger, but we take the risk anyway. Imagine a jacuzzi world in which nothing went against us and no one suffered.
We are made for sterner stuff. We are energized by and driven to do our best in a world like ours, and in the process we grow in character, grow our souls, and ready ourselves for the next world and even more growth. This is what God is interested in.
Do you thank God for happy outcomes? That is a good practice. Just as good is to thank God for the chance to fail.
Stafford Betty, Professor of Religious Studies, CSUB, (ret) is the author of When Did You Ever Become Less by Dying? and Heaven and Hell Unveiled. His novels include The Imprisoned Splendor, The Afterlife Therapist and Guardians of the Afterworld. His latest book, The Hell Dwellers: A Novel about the Dark Side of the Afterlife is published by White Crow Books. Stafford can be found at staffordbetty.com.
