3) The problem of evil and suffering
There need to be good reasons why God does not keep intervening to achieve good outcomes, yet still be justifiable reasons why sometimes he does. The existence of evil and suffering has been called the “rock of atheism” and is the number one reason why people give up faith, or never acquire it in the first place. It’s a huge issue which we very briefly review here. The complaint is obvious: if God is all loving and all powerful, then why do so many bad things happen? When believers then put forward their examples where they feel God has intervened to help them, this can often make the situation worse, for why on earth did God not save my relative from cancer but then miraculously heal someone else’s athlete’s foot that would have got better in a couple of weeks with a bit of cream without God’s assistance?
The “theodicies” (explanations as to why a good God does allow evil and suffering) are actually very sophisticated, and, I think, very effective. Probably Irenaeus’ ideas are most effective, and revolve around our human cherishing of free will. It really is very difficult to see how God can stop evil and suffering without taking away our freewill. This is combined with the extreme difficulty of stopping evil and suffering from existing in a physical universe. (Very briefly, physical universes change, so even if God started by making a paradise, with, say, a beautiful river, in time, the river erodes its bank to create a cliff over which I might fall – or someone might push me). Clearly, there’s so much more to say, but if you have time to think it through, I think you will discover that it’s impossible to have a physical world without suffering – not unless God “frantically ran around” continually doing miracles in order to “make everything alright”. Even then, such a world would make human actions meaningless, for, whatever we did, God would always give a happy ending. It would, of course, also make it blindingly obvious that God is real, and so, perhaps, destroy the power of having faith (we could look at why God wants faith rather than proof of him another time).
However, the complaint against God caused by the existence of suffering remains an intense, and, for many, an unbearable, impediment to faith, and calls to have a “grown up” philosophy of life may seem cruel in the face of terrible loss. So, we are left with the question: “Why is life so painful?” There is the comfort of the life of heaven: when we are purely spiritual beings, living on a spiritual plane, then suffering will cease, for the causes will no longer apply (a spiritual universe does not change, and, in the heavenly presence of God, our wills will be fully attuned to God’s will).
Does this mean that there are no miracles? That is, that God never intervenes in the world? This is more reasonable, and removes some big problems, but, for some, leaves God impotent. We would therefore have to think that – just on rare occasions – God:-
- Either realises that there is an opportunity to achieve some good without messing up the whole future of the universe (This is “The Terminator” problem of one change, even for the good, affecting other future developments that were even more desirable)
- Or he decides that he really wants to achieve some good thing, so he “breaks his own rule of not usually intervening” regardless of unwanted side effects further down the line.
While this is not impossible, the collated evidence does make it hard to believe the claims that God could not prevent wars, famines, death by illness and accident, but now and then helps someone here and someone else there – sometimes in relatively minor ways.
Spiritual Devotion 