A thoughtful woman I've never met sent me Tim Keller's book on Walking With God Through Pain and Suffering. Good gracious this book has been helpful for me. Below is my attempt to summarize some main points, mostly for myself, but knowing it is beneficial for many others too.
If you believe that the world was made for our benefit by God, then horrendous suffering and evil will shake your understanding of life...To live for happiness means that you're trying to get something out of life. But when suffering comes along, it takes the conditions for happiness away, and so suffering destroys all your reason to keep living. But to "live for meaning" means that there is something in life more important than your own personal freedom and happiness, something for which you are glad to sacrifice your happiness. -Tim Keller
Does God exist soley to make us happy?
We see ourselves as able to control our own destiny, able to discern for ourselves what is right and wrong, and we see God as obligated to arrange things for our benefit, especially if we live a good enough life according to our own chosen standards. This, Sociologist Christian Smith calls, "moralistic, therapeutic deism". - Tim Keller
You gotta call it like it is and recognize this [assuming God works for YOUR benefit and happiness, i.e. the world revolves around you] is the worst pre-existent mindset from which to try to head butt suffering.
A man named Victor Frankl lived in the Nazi death camps for 3 years and noted that newcomers were often surprised at the level of faith by prisoners. But he says that "people who are their own legislators of morality and meaning have nothing to die for, and therefore nothing to live for when life takes aware their freedom."
The call for humility: "When we confront suffering, we think that what will solve it is a change in public policy, or the best expertise in psychology and therapy, or technological advances. But the world's darkness is too deep to be dispelled merely by such things. It is wrong, in our pride, to believe that we can control and defeat the darkness with our knowledge." There is no room for the ego in suffering.
Tim Keller believes this tendency to manhandle pain and suffering has come only after the Enlightenment, where reliance on human reason rose and God became more remote... and we became more entitled.
One of the biggest takeaways I have gotten from Tim's book so far is the various "theodicies", or attempts to explain God's reasoning, for suffering. Each are followed by explaining a potential weakness in the argument.
Suffering is a way of Soul-Making - This view says that "the evils in life can be justified if we recognize that the world was primarily created to be a place where people find God and grow spiritually into all they were designed to be." AKA, suffering helps us grow spiritually. "It is hard to imagine the development of these virtues, such as courage, humility, self-control, and faithfulness, if every good deed was immediately rewarded and every bad deed immediately punished. No one would do things simply because they were right and loving.... but would react instinctively to avoid pain and get pleasure. So the unfairness and difficulty of life is a means by which we grow into something more than behaviorally conditioned animals." The Weakness- pain and suffering do not appear to be doled out equally. Those with 'bad souls' do not seem to always get more soul-making opportunity than those with 'good souls'.
Suffering is a result of the fallen world / free will- "God created us not to be robots or animals of instinct but free, rational agents with the ability to choose and therefore to love. But if God was to make us able to choose the good freely, then he had to make us capable of also choosing evil. So our free will can be abused and that is the reason for evil." It's argued that a rational soul/free will is worth the risk of evil, as opposed to being God's "pets". The assumption is that God did not create evil, but that "evil is the condition that results when some good thing is twisted or corrupted from its original design and purpose." This idea is almost appealing in Western civilizations where freedom and choice is held sacred. The Weakness- This idea addresses moral evil, but how can it address natural evil (hurricanes, landslides, etc)? This could be written off by saying the Fall allowed for the violence of nature as well. Also, could God make humans free agents capable of love without also allowing them to be capable of evil? "Can we even be considered 'free' if we have the ability to sin- since sin is a form of slavery? The freewill idea assumes that God cannot control the outcome of what we decide, but we see many place in Scripture where God sovereignly directs our choices without violating our freedom." In summary, can it make sense that providing us with freedom of choice can be so important to God that it's worth allowing evil?
The Natural Law Theodicy- claims that the world created by God must have a natural order to it, things are not random. For example, every person that breaks the natural law of gravity will be hurt when they jump off a cliff. The Weakness- suffering does NOT happen in an orderly way, proportionate to bad choices. If it did, life would be "fair". We know that suffering is so often random.
Plentitude Theory- God could have created innumerable universes, and the distribution of evil could be different in each one but equitable across them all. The Weakness- refer to #1 & #3.
Punishment Theory- All suffering is justified because humans rebelled against God, and suffering in the world is just our deserved punishment for sin. The Weakness- refer to #1 & #3.
And FINALLY, "Alvin Plantinga writes, 'I must say that most attempts to explain why God permits evil- theodicies, as we call them- strike me as tepid, shallow, and ultimately frivolous.' One of the messages of Job itself was that it is both futile and inappropriate to assume that any human mind could comprehend all the reasons God might have for any instance of pain and sorrow, let alone for all evil."
Keller also claims that the argument that evil disproves the existence of God has been completely disregarded as bankrupt in more academic circles because "the burden of proof of demonstrating that there is no possibility at all of the coexistence of God and evil is just too heavy for the atheist to bear." The atheistic comfort is purely that the dead cease suffering, not that there's anything good to come for them after death. Atheism can report how people live but not how people ought to live. SO, it can't solve the big questions of what justice is, why suffering is wrong (if they believe it so) and what things should be like. There can't be a way for people to have strong opinions on hot button issues (abortion, same-sex marriage, immigration reform) and simultaneously deny a moral framework. If life doesn't have meaning beyond the self and this short life, how can you overcome the "lurking suspicion that all our getting and spending amounts to nothing more than fidgeting while we wait for death" (Andrew Delbanco)?
DEFENSE OF THE ARGUMENTS AGAINST GOD
The Logical Argument
If we acknowledge that the burden is on 'the atheist' to disprove that a good God and evil cannot simultaneously exist, let's talk through the conversation.
Skeptic: "A truly good God wouldn't want evil to exist, an all powerful God wouldn't allow it to exist. Yet, evil does exist, so God cannot exist.
Believer: "It may be that someone has a very strong desire for something and is able to obtain this thing, but doesn't act on this desire- because he has reasons for not doing so that seem to him to outweigh the desirability of that thing. So, God might have reasons for allowing evil to exist that we cannot understand."
It is very hard for the skeptic to prove that God COULD NOT have such reasons. We have examples in our own lives that both doctors and parents allow or inflict punishment (procedures, loss of privileges) for the greater good better health and a disciplined life.
The only response he could make is,
Skeptic: "If I can't SEE any reasons God might have for permitting evil, than there probably aren't any."
A God who is infinitely more powerful than us is also infinitely more knowledgeable than us.
"If we have a God infinite and powerful enough for you to be angry at for allowing evil, then you must at the same time have a God infinite enough to have sufficient reasons for allowing that evil. The belief that because we cannot think of something, God cannot think of it either- is more than a fallacy. It is a mark of great pride and faith in one's own mind." (The believer is reminded of Isaiah 55:9)
The Evidential Argument
Skeptic: "Of course we can't prove that there couldn't be a God, or that there couldn't be any sufficient reasons for allowing evil. But have you watched a little child die by degrees- eaten out from the inside by cancer? While evil may not technically disprove the existence of a good and powerful God, it still makes his existence unlikely."
The problem with this argument is the same as the logical one: we are unable to prove that God has no morally sufficient reasons for evil. To pretend that you can say for certain that there is no good reasons for allowing such things to happen, is to forget that we are finite.
There's a scientific theory called the 'field of chaos theory', which says things like a butterfly's fluttering in China can disrupt airflow enough that a million other variables may change, such that it could eventually alter the path of a hurricane in the Pacific. And this pattern couldn't be guessed ahead of time. It's the same theory that suggests that a boulder rolling down a mountain can have its path changed by differences in the terrain, wind conditions, atmospheric pressure, trees or pebbles in its way-- and that each variable that causes tiny changes in its course can be the difference in entire villages being wiped out, avalanches being started, and set off much larger scale events. Lastly, Keller relates this theory to Ray Bradbury's story "A Sound of Thunder" where the character is a time traveler, and is commanded that he not alter even the slightest course of history, such as stepping on a mouse, because stepping on that mouse could mean all his descendants would disappear, and animals that fed on those mice would starve, and the men who ate those animals would starve, and eventually whole families or nations would cease to exist.
The end of the argument is "If even the effects of a butterfly's flight or the roll of a boulder down a hill are too complex to calculate, how much less could any human being look at the tragic, seemingly "senseless" death of a young person and have any idea of what the effects of history will be?" If God's utilizing a million "random" events toward good ends, how can we see a tiny snapshot of it and assume to have the slightest idea how it will be used?
The Visceral Argument
This one gets me. It's the one that says, "You can keep all your long chains of syllogistic reasoning. I know the arguments. I know the existence of this kind of cruelty does not technically disprove the existence of a personal God. But it makes no sense that things like this are justified. This is just wrong. I don't want to believe in a God who would let this happen- whether he exists or not."
'This visceral argument is not strictly logical, but does have a moral logic to it. While we may know in our mind that death and suffering are the way things go, we "rage, rage" against them. Elie Wiesel's book Night (about being imprisoned in Nazi death camp) writes, "Never shall I forget those flames which consumed by faith forever. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust." Keller reminds us that there were still others who saw the same sights and came out with their faith in God intact, even strengthened. One of them lived in a forced labor camp, became a professor at Princeton Theological Seminary, and wrote a book where the main message encourages us to view "the present power of death in terms of its empty future and therefore in the knowledge of its defeat."
'So not everyone who experiences radical evil automatically loses faith in God. This must mean that we do not simply respond to nauseating, gut wrenching evil. Deep down we are telling ourselves something about it, we interpret it in a particular way.'
'There is a moral assumption in the minds and hearts of those who find suffering weakening their faith rather than strengthening it. The assumption is that God, if he exists, has failed to do that right thing and violated a moral standard... We are saying that God is somehow complicit with evil. But this creates a conundrum for the skeptic who disbelieves in God. It is inarguable that human beings have moral feelings. A moral feeling means I feel some behavior is right and some is wrong, and even repulsive. Now, if there is no God, where do such strong moral instincts and feelings come from? Today many would say our moral sense comes from evolution. Our feelings about right and wrong are thought to be genetically hardwired into use because they helped our ancestors survive. White that explanation may account for moral feelings, it can't account for moral obligation. What right have you to tell people they are obligated to stop certain behaviors if their feelings tell them those things are right, but your feel they are wrong? Why should your moral feelings take precedence over theirs? Where do you get a standard by which your moral feelings and sense are judged as true and others as false? On what basis do you say to someone, "What you have done is evil", if their feelings differ from yours? This is a conundrum because the very basis for disbelief in God-a certainty about evil and the moral obligation not to commit it- dissolves if there is truly no God. The ground on which you make your objection vanishes under your feet. So not only does the argument against God from evil not succeed, but it actually has a 'boomerang effect' on its users. It shows you that you are assuming something that can't exist unless God does. And so, in a sense, you are relying on God to make an argument against God.'
C.S. Lewis went through this entire boomerang effect himself. Want to read about his thought process from atheist--> believer? Buy this book and read pages 104-105, or I will email them to you. 'In the end, he came to realize that evil and suffering were a bigger problem for him as an atheist than as a believer in God. He concluded that the awareness of moral evil in the world was actually an argument for the existence of God, not against it... if there was no God, his definition of evil was just based on a private feeling of his.'
In a word, unless we allow ultimate reality to be moral, we cannot morally condemn it. - C.S. Lewis
Because this post is way too long, see the next post for a story/example on a normal person (aka, not academic :] ) who experienced this boomerang effect.
'In summary, the problem of senseless suffering does not go away if you abandon belief in God. If there is no God, why have a sense of outrage and horror when unjust suffering occurs to any group of people? Abandoning belief in God doesn't help with the problem of suffering at all and,' as Keller points out, 'removes many resources for facing it.'
Suffering can be redemptive, a way of serving others, and a way of glorifying God... It can come into our lives like smelling salts to wake us up to all sorts of facts about life and our own hearts to which we were blind.
