5 Suffering and Evil (II)
SUFFERING AND
EVIL (II)
When we consider the probabilistic problem of evil, things are not so easy. For even though the explanation of evil I gave in the last chapter is possible, still it seems wildly improbable. Explaining all natural evil as the result of demons, for example, seems ridiculous. Does anyone really believe that earthquakes are the result of demons moving tectonic plates about or that when he stubs his toe the devil made him do it? And couldn’t God reduce the evil in the world without reducing the good? To recall the tragedy in Mexico City, what impairment of the good of the world would have resulted if the child had simply died in the collapse of the building instead of lingering eleven days in agony? The world is filled with so many seemingly pointless and unnecessary evils that it seems doubtful that God could have any sort of morally sufficient reason for permitting them. Accordingly, it might be argued that given the evil in the world, it is improbable, even if not impossible, that God exists.
Now this is a much more powerful argument than the purely logical problem of evil. Since its conclusion is more modest (“It is improbable that God exists”), it is much easier to prove. What shall we say about this argument? Is it improbable that God exists?
Well, to begin with, let’s note a very important—indeed, crucial—difference between a probability argument like this one and a purely logical argument like the one we had before. In the case of a purely logical argument, all you have to consider is the argument itself. If the logical problem of evil is a sound argument, then God cannot exist, period, no questions asked. But with a probability argument, we have to ask: probable with respect to what? To give an illustration: suppose Joe is a college student. Suppose, further, that 95 percent of college students drink beer. With respect to that information, it makes it highly probable that Joe drinks beer. But suppose we find out that Joe is a Wheaton College student and that 95 percent of Wheaton students do not drink beer. Suddenly the probability of Joe’s being a beer drinker has changed dramatically! The point is that probabilities are relative to what background information is considered.
Now apply this principle to the probabilistic problem of evil. It claims to prove that God’s existence is improbable. But with respect to what? With respect to the evil in the world? If that’s all you consider, then I should hardly be surprised that God’s existence would appear improbable with respect to that. Indeed, I should consider it to be a major philosophical achievement if Christians could demonstrate that relative to the evil in the world alone, God’s existence is not improbable. But the Christian needn’t be committed to such an arduous task. He will insist that we consider, not just the evil in the world, but all the evidence relevant to God’s existence, including the ontological argument for a maximally great being, the cosmological argument for a Creator of the universe, the teleological argument for an intelligent Designer of the cosmos, the noölogical argument for an ultimate Mind, the axiological argument for an ultimate, personally embodied Good, as well as evidence concerning the person of Christ, the historicity of the resurrection, the existence of miracles, plus existential and religious experience.1 When we take into account the full scope of the evidence, the existence of God becomes quite probable. Hence, a Christian could actually admit that the problem of evil, taken in isolation, does make God’s existence improbable. But he will insist that when the total scope of the evidence is considered, then the scales are at least even or tip in favor of Christianity. Indeed, if he includes the self-authenticating witness of the Holy Spirit as part of his total warrant, then he can rightly assert that he knows that God exists, even if he has no solution at all to the problem of evil.
In fact, the Christian might insist that insofar as the probabilistic problem of evil is taken to be an internal problem, there is nothing whatsoever objectionable or irrational about believing statements which are improbable with respect to each other, so long as one knows them both to be true. For example, relative to what we know about human reproductive biology, your own personal existence is astronomically improbable. Yet there is nothing irrational about believing both the facts of human reproductive biology and that you exist. Similarly, if one is warranted in believing that God exists, then there is no problem in the fact that this belief is improbable relative to the evil in the world.
So even though the probabilistic problem of evil is a lot easier to support than the logical problem of evil, it is, even when successful, a whole lot less decisive.
But is it in fact successful? Given the existence of the evil in the world, is it improbable that God exists? This is far from clear. It all depends on how probable it is that God has morally sufficient reasons for permitting the evil that occurs.
What makes the probability here so difficult to assess is that we are just so ignorant of God’s designs. We are simply not in a position to know why God permits various evils to occur. Certainly many evils seem pointless and gratuitous to us—but how can we be sure they really are? Perhaps they fit into a wider picture. According to the biblical scheme of things, God is directing human history toward His previsioned ends. Now can you possibly imagine the complexity of planning and directing a world of free creatures toward some end without violating their freedom? Think of the innumerable, incalculable contingencies involved in arriving at a single historical event, say, the Allied victory at D-Day! It may well be that in order to arrive at some end, God must permit sinful actions and natural evils to enter into the picture.
Take the Holocaust, for example. Few more horrific events in history can be imagined. Probably millions of people lost their faith in God through this cataclysm. But suppose that the only way God could get the nations of the world to freely establish the modern state of Israel was by allowing the Holocaust, an event so ghastly, so unparalleled in history, directed at a single persecuted people, that the world in shame and sympathy took the remarkable step of restoring the Jews to their ancient homeland. I want to say emphatically that this does not mean the Holocaust was, after all, good. That would be absurd. It was a hideous illustration of human depravity, sin piled upon sin, contrary to God’s perfect will. But perhaps God had a morally sufficient reason to permit it, namely, the establishment of the nation of Israel. A church father once said of the early Christian martyrs that the blood of the martyrs was the seed of the church. Perhaps future generations of Israelis will say with gratitude the same thing of those who died in the Holocaust. And who knows what future plans God has in store for the nation of Israel? Perhaps Israel will play so significant a role in world events that all nations will see that God had a morally sufficient reason for permitting the Holocaust.
The same point might be made on an individual level. We just don’t know how the sufferings we endure might be used of God in our lives or, if not in ours, in the lives of those around us. Yes, they often look pointless, but we are simply not in a position to judge. Two illustrations, one from science and the other from popular culture: In the recently developing field of Chaos Theory, scientists have discovered that certain macroscopic systems, for example, weather systems or insect populations, are extraordinarily sensitive to the tiniest perturbations. A butterfly fluttering on a branch in West Africa may set in motion forces which would eventually issue in a hurricane over the Atlantic Ocean. Yet it is impossible in principle for anyone observing that butterfly palpitating on a branch to predict such an outcome. The second illustration is from the movie Sliding Doors. In this film a young woman’s life is dramatically affected by whether or not she manages to catch a subway train before the doors slide shut. The film shows that in one case her subsequent life is prosperous and wildly successful, whereas in the other case it is filled with suffering and disappointment. All because of the seemingly trivial incident of catching/ missing a subway train! But that’s not all. At the film’s end we discover to our surprise that the course of her life which is filled with hardship actually turns out to be the better life, while the seemingly happy life ends prematurely in tragedy.
The point I’m trying to make is that assessments of probability with regard to evil can be very difficult and even impossible. Certainly many evils seem pointless and unnecessary to us—but we are simply not in a position to judge. The brutal murder of an innocent man or a child’s dying of leukemia could send a ripple effect through history so that God’s morally sufficient reason for permitting it might not emerge until centuries later or perhaps in another country. To say this is not to appeal to mystery, but rather to point to the inherent cognitive limitations that frustrate attempts to say that it is improbable that God has a morally sufficient reason for permitting some particular evil. Events which appear disastrous in the short term may redound to the greatest good, while some short-term boon may issue in untold misery. Once we contemplate God’s providence over the whole of history, then it becomes evident how hopeless it is for limited observers to speculate on the probability of God’s having morally sufficient reasons for the evils that we see. We are simply not in a good position to assess such probabilities with any confidence.
But much more can be said concerning the probabilistic problem of evil. The atheist maintains that if God exists, then it is improbable that the world would contain the evil it does. Now what the Christian can do in response to such an assertion is to offer various hypotheses that would tend to raise the probability of evil given God’s existence. The Christian can show that if God exists and these hypotheses are true, then it is not so surprising that evil exists. Therefore, the existence of evil doesn’t render God’s existence improbable.2
What are some of those hypotheses? They are doctrines that emerge from the Christian concept of God. It turns out that answering the probabilistic problem of evil is easier from the Christian perspective than from the perspective of belief in the mere existence of God. Since the problem is being presented as an internal problem for the Christian, there is nothing illicit about the Christian’s availing himself of all the resources of his worldview in answering the objection. I shall mention four Christian doctrines in this connection:
First, the chief purpose of life is not happiness, but the knowledge of God. One reason that the problem of evil seems so intractable is that people tend naturally to assume that if God exists, then His purpose for human life is happiness in this life. God’s role is to provide a comfortable environment for His human pets. But on the Christian view, this is false. We are not God’s pets, and the goal of human life is not happiness per se, but the knowledge of God—which in the end will bring true and everlasting human fulfillment. Many evils occur in life which may be utterly pointless with respect to the goal of producing human happiness; but they may not be pointless with respect to producing a deeper knowledge of God. Dostoyevsky, who stated the problem of evil so forcefully, saw this point and sought to answer the problem in his novels through the portrayal of characters who through suffering increase in godliness and holiness. Innocent human suffering provides an occasion for deeper dependency and trust in God, on the part of either the sufferer or of those around him. Of course, whether God’s purpose is achieved through our suffering will depend on our response. Do we respond with anger and bitterness toward God, or do we turn to Him in faith for strength to endure?
Because God’s ultimate goal for humanity is our knowledge of Him—which alone can bring eternal happiness—history cannot be seen in its true perspective apart from considerations pertinent to the kingdom of God. The British divine Martyn Lloyd-Jones has written,
The key to the history of the world is the kingdom of God. . . . From the very beginning, . . . God has been at work establishing a new kingdom in the world. It is His own kingdom, and He is calling people out of the world into that kingdom: and everything that happens in the world has relevance to it. . . . Other events are of importance as they have a bearing upon that event. The problems of today are to be understood only in its light. . . .
Let us not therefore be stumbled when we see surprising things happening in the world. Rather let us ask, “What is the relevance of this event to the kingdom of God?” Or, if strange things are happening to you personally, don’t complain but say, “What is God teaching me through this?” . . . We need not become bewildered and doubt the love or the justice of God. . . . We should . . . judge every event in the light of God’s great, eternal and glorious purpose.3
It may well be the case that natural and moral evils are part of the means God uses to draw people into His kingdom. This was brought home to me several years ago as I worked through Patrick Johnstone’s Operation World. It is precisely in countries that have endured severe hardship that evangelical Christianity is growing at its greatest rates, while growth curves in the indulgent West are nearly flat. Consider, for example, the following reports4:
China: It is estimated that 20 million Chinese lost their lives during [Mao’s Cultural Revolution]. . . . Christians . . . stood firm in what was probably the most widespread and harsh persecution the Church has ever experienced. The persecution purified and indigenized the Church. . . . The growth of the Church in China since 1977 has no parallels in history. Researchers estimated [that there were] 30-75 million Christians [by 1990]. . . . Mao Zedong unwittingly became the greatest evangelist in history.
El-Salvador: The 12-year civil war, earthquakes, and the collapse of the price of coffee, the nation’s main export, impoverished the nation. . . . Over 80% live in dire poverty. . . . An astonishing spiritual harvest has been gathered from all strata of society in the midst of the hate and bitterness of war. In 1960, evangelicals were 2.3% of the population, but today are around 20%.
Ethiopia: Ethiopia is in a state of shock. Her population struggles with the trauma of millions of deaths through repression, famine and war. . . . Two great waves of violent persecution . . . refined and purified the Church, but there were many martyrs. . . . There have been . . . millions coming to Christ. Protestants were fewer than . . . 0.8% of the population . . . in 1960, but by 1990 this may have become . . . 13% of the population.
Examples such as these could be multiplied. The history of mankind has been a history of suffering and war. Yet it has also been a history of the advance of the kingdom of God. A chart released in 1990 by the U.S. Center for World Mission documented the amazing growth in evangelical Christianity over the centuries. The researchers who compiled the data estimated that, in A.D. 100, for every evangelical believer in the world there were 360 non-Christians. By the year 1000 there were 220 non-Christians for every evangelical believer in the world. By 1900 that ratio had shrunk to 27 non-Christians per evangelical believer. And by 1989, for every evangelical believer in the world there were only 7 non-Christians.5
According to Johnstone, “We are living in the time of the largest ingathering of people into the Kingdom of God that the world has ever seen.”6 It is not at all improbable that this astonishing growth in God’s kingdom is due in part to the presence of natural and moral evils in the world.
Second, mankind is in a state of rebellion against God and His purpose. Rather than submit to and worship God, people rebel against God and go their own way and so find themselves alienated from God, morally guilty before Him, groping in spiritual darkness, and pursuing false gods of their own making. The terrible human evils in the world are testimony to man’s depravity in his state of spiritual alienation from God. Moreover, there is a realm of beings higher than man also in rebellion against God, demonic creatures, incredibly evil, in whose power the creation lies (1 John 5:19) and who seek to destroy God’s work and thwart His purposes. The Christian is thus not surprised at the moral evil in the world; on the contrary, he expects it. The Scriptures indicate that God has given mankind up to the sin it has freely chosen; He does not interfere to stop it but lets human depravity run its course (Rom. 1:24, 26, 28). This only serves to heighten mankind’s moral responsibility before God, as well as our wickedness and our need of forgiveness and moral cleansing.
Third, God’s purpose is not restricted to this life but spills over beyond the grave into eternal life. According to Christianity, this life is but the cramped and narrow foyer opening up into the great hall of God’s eternity. God promises eternal life to all those who place their trust in Christ as Savior and Lord. When God asks His children to bear horrible suffering in this life, it is only with the prospect of a heavenly joy and recompense that is beyond all comprehension. Moreover, there is an eternal life following this one that awaits those who have trusted God in faith and obedience in this life.
The apostle Paul, for example, for the sake of the gospel underwent suffering that was, when you reflect on it, unbelievable. It would be a devastating experience, not only physically excruciating but possibly even permanently crippling emotionally, to be whipped for a crime you didn’t commit. But Paul was whipped five different times just for preaching the gospel, each time receiving twenty-six lashes to the back and thirteen to his breast with a triple-thonged whip. Not only that, but three times more he was stripped and beaten by Roman authorities with wooden rods. On one occasion in the city of Lystra he was surrounded by a mob, who stoned him and dragged his body out of the city, leaving him for dead. Can you imagine what it must feel like to be stoned? You could probably only pray that someone would knock you out quickly with a rock to the head; but probably you wouldn’t be so lucky. It would be a horrible way to die. Paul’s body must have been a mass of scars, wounds inflicted for no better reason than his being a Christian. No wonder he could say indignantly of those who denied his apostleship, “Finally, let no one cause me trouble, for I bear on my body the marks of Jesus” (Gal. 6:17).
People who have been imprisoned, even for a few months, have also testified what a life-shattering experience this sort of confinement can be. But Paul was frequently imprisoned for his faith for lengthy intervals in Roman jails, under what by modern standards could only be described as unspeakable conditions: unheated, unsanitary, bound hand and foot with chains. He called himself “a prisoner for Jesus Christ.”
On top of all this, Paul suffered from natural disasters, too. For example, he apparently suffered from a debilitating illness, which some have speculated to have been epilepsy or some sort of eye disease. Furthermore, he was involved in three separate shipwrecks on the Mediterranean Sea. Can you imagine what it would be like to be involved in even one wreck at sea? But three times? And in one of those, Paul was adrift at sea for a night and a day before being saved. Can you imagine the terror of being adrift at sea in the night, desperately clutching some piece of wreckage, trying to fight off exhaustion, hour after hour, in constant peril of drowning? Moreover, in his travels throughout the Roman Empire preaching the gospel, Paul was constantly in danger from both human enemies and natural disasters. There were dangerous river crossings, and robbers were a threat while on the road. At any time, whether in the cities where he preached, or in the countryside, or at sea while he traveled, he could be set upon by enemies who sought his life. Whether those enemies were Jews, Gentiles, or false Christians, each of them had their particular reasons to get rid of Paul. He worked long, hard hours, often going without sleep, frequently without food, and without adequate protection from exposure to the elements. And psychologically, he bore the constant burden of anxiety for the fledgling Christian churches he had founded, which seemed to be in constant danger of being torn apart by heresies. In the end, in Rome, Paul made the ultimate sacrifice and was executed for his faith.
In sum, Paul’s life as an apostle was a life of incredible hardship and suffering, one which he described as punctuated by “afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, tumults, labors, watching, hunger” (2 Cor. 6:4-5, RSV); the apostles were ignominious, misunderstood, and slandered, and possessed virtually nothing materially in this world. And yet Paul bore his sufferings without bitterness. Why? Because it was worth it. He understood that this life is but the antechamber to eternity, and he longed to go and be with Christ. He wrote,
So we do not lose heart. Though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed every day. For this slight momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, because we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen; for the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal (2 Cor. 4:16-18, RSV).
Can you believe it? After what this man suffered, he calls it a “slight, momentary affliction”! You see, Paul lived this life in the perspective of eternity. He understood that the length of this life, being finite, is literally infinitesimal in comparison with the eternal life we shall spend with God. The longer we spend in eternity, the more the sufferings of this life will shrink toward an infinitesimal moment. It may well be that there are evils in the world that serve no earthly good at all, that are entirely gratuitous from a human point of view, but which God permits simply that He might overwhelmingly reward in the afterlife those who undergo such evils with faith and confidence in God.
One reason the problem of evil seems so intractable to us today is because we no longer live in this perspective. To borrow Paul’s phrase, we look to the things that are seen, not to the things that are unseen. As the old beer commercial put it, “You only go around once in life, so grab for all the gusto you can get.” With such a shallow, selfish view of life, it is no wonder we can’t understand how God could permit us to suffer: it doesn’t contribute to our gusto! Even as Christians, we absorb this worldly attitude. The pressures and affairs of this life seem so real and so urgent that we forget to lift up our eyes beyond the horizons of our own life to the eternal life that waits for us beyond.
But when we keep in mind that life does not end at the grave and that in heaven God “will wipe away every tear from [our] eyes; there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying. There shall be no more pain” (Rev. 21:4, NKJV), but only the fullness of divine joy and glory, then the problem of evil does not seem so severe. As Tolstoy once put it (in his short story by that name), “God sees the truth, but waits.” In the end, divine rewards and punishments will do more than enough to make up for what we have suffered here.
Fourth, the knowledge of God is an incommensurable good. When I first became a Christian, it struck me that in order to obtain eternal life in heaven, it would be worth it if God asked us to undergo an earthly life of the most extreme asceticism, suffering, and self-denial, but that God in His graciousness doesn’t even ask us to do that; instead, He fills our lives with peace, joy, love, meaning, and purpose. But no matter what He asked us to endure, it would be worth it to gain heaven. The passage cited above from Paul also serves to make this point. He imagines, as it were, a scale, in which all the sufferings and rottenness of this life are placed on the one side, while on the other side is placed the glory that God will give to His children in heaven. And the weight of glory is so great that it is literally beyond comparison with the sufferings we endure. That’s why Paul called the sufferings of this life a “slight, momentary affliction”: he wasn’t being insensitive to the plight of those who suffer horribly in this life—on the contrary, he was one of them—but he saw that those sufferings were simply overwhelmed by the ocean of joy and glory that God will give to those who trust Him. For to know God, the locus of infinite goodness and love, is an incomparable good, the fulfillment of human existence. The sufferings of this life cannot even be compared to it. Thus, the person who knows God, no matter what he suffers, no matter how awful his pain, can still truly say, “God is good to me!” simply by virtue of the fact that he knows God, an incommensurable good.
These four Christian doctrines increase the probability of the coexistence of God and the evils in the world. They thereby serve to decrease any improbability that these evils might seem to cast upon the existence of God.
So it seems that the probabilistic problem of evil is far from unanswerable. Even if God’s existence is improbable relative to the evil in the world alone, that does not make God’s existence improbable, for balancing off the negative evidence from evil is the positive evidence for God’s existence. Moreover, it is extremely difficult to establish from the evil in the world that God’s existence is improbable, for God could have morally sufficient reasons for permitting such evil. We do not find ourselves in a good position to judge with any confidence that this is improbable. Finally, we can render the coexistence of God and evil more probable by adopting certain hypotheses inherent in the Christian worldview, for example, that the purpose of life is the knowledge of God, that mankind is in a state of rebellion against God and His purpose, that God’s purpose extends beyond the grave to eternal life, and that the knowledge of God is an incommensurable good. Taken together, these considerations make it not improbable that God and the evil in the world should both exist. Thus, the probabilistic version of the internal problem of evil seems no more decisive than the logical version.
But if the problem of evil fails as an internal problem for Christianity, does it present an insuperable external problem? The versions of the problem I have discussed so far tried to show that two beliefs held by Christians, namely that God exists and that the world contains the evils we observe, are either inconsistent or improbable with respect to each other. Most atheists have now abandoned the internal problem in their attacks upon Christianity. Instead they claim that the apparently pointless and unnecessary evils in the world—usually referred to as gratuitous evil—constitute evidence against God’s existence. That is to say, they argue that the two statements “An all-powerful, all-good God exists” and “Gratuitous evil exists” are incompatible with each other. What makes this an external problem is that the Christian is not committed to admitting the truth of the statement “Gratuitous evil exists.” The Christian is committed to the truth that “Evil exists,” but not that “Gratuitous evil exists.” The atheist objector is therefore arguing that the presence of gratuitous evil in the world disproves the existence of God.
The key question here will be whether we have good evidence to think that gratuitous evil exists. The Christian will readily admit that much of the evil we observe in the world appears to be pointless and unnecessary and, hence, gratuitous. But he will challenge the objector’s inference from the appearance of gratuitous evil to the reality of gratuitous evil. Here much of what I’ve already said about the probabilistic internal problem of evil will be relevant. For example, the objector must assume that if we cannot discern God’s morally sufficient reason for allowing certain evils to occur, then it is probable that there is no such reason. But we’ve seen how uncertain and tenuous such probability judgments on our part are. Our failure to discern the morally justifying reason for the occurrence of various evils gives very little ground for thinking that God—especially an all-knowing God who sees the end of history from the beginning and providentially orders the world—could not have morally sufficient reasons for permitting the evils we observe in the world. Moreover, my point about the necessity of considering the full scope of the evidence is also relevant. For when we ask whether the evil we observe in the world really is gratuitous, the most important question we must consider is, ironically, whether God exists. For if the statements “An all-powerful, all-good God exists” and “Gratuitous evil exists” are incompatible, as the atheist claims, then it follows logically that if God exists, then gratuitous evil does not exist, or in other words that the evil in the world only appears to be gratuitous but in fact is not. As Daniel Howard-Snyder points out, the problem of evil is thus a problem only for the person who finds all its premises and inferences compelling and who has lousy grounds for believing in God; but if one has more compelling grounds for believing in God, then the problem of evil “is not a problem.”7
It should also be noted that the atheist’s claim that the statements “An all-powerful, all-good God exists” and “Gratuitous evil exists” are incompatible is not itself obviously true. Some Christian philosophers have suggested that while God could eliminate this or that specific evil without decreasing the goodness of the world, nevertheless there must exist a certain amount of gratuitous evil in the world if the goodness of the world is not to be impaired. Thus the existence of gratuitous evil would not disprove the existence of God. In fact it is possible that only in a world in which gratuitous natural and moral evils exist the optimal number of persons would freely come to accept the offer of salvation and find the knowledge of God. The atheist might protest that in that case the evils would not really be gratuitous after all: they would serve the greater good of securing people’s eternal salvation. So the Christian must deny that gratuitous evil exists, despite the evidence to the contrary. But if one allows a greater good like salvation to count against the apparent pointlessness of some evil, then that makes it all the more difficult for the atheist to prove that truly gratuitous evil exists, for how could he possibly surmise what in God’s providential plan for history does or does not contribute to the ultimate salvation of the greatest number of people?
So we may never know why God permits any particular evil in our lives. But why should we know? Remember the York signal box mistake? Since we’re not in the control tower, we shouldn’t expect to be able to know why every evil is permitted by God or how it fits into His plan. But more than that: if the Christian story is true, then we don’t need to know either. We are simply called upon to trust in God and His goodness no matter what the circumstances. This is not blind faith, for there are good reasons to believe in God’s existence, and we have the self-authenticating witness of His Spirit as well. We are not called upon to figure out why God has permitted us to suffer some evil; we are called upon to trust Him.
This is, I think, the true message of the book of Job. For many years I never really liked the book of Job because it doesn’t ever explain why God permits evil in the world. God’s answer to Job out of the whirlwind doesn’t explain anything. But I think I’ve come to see the wisdom of the book of Job. God is saying, “You don’t need to know why I permit terrible suffering and evil in the world. That’s My business. What you need to learn is to trust Me in spite of everything.” That’s what Job did. “Though he slay me, yet I will hope in him” (Job 13:15a). And God rewarded him many times over. It may well be that there are evils in the world that serve no earthly good at all, that are entirely gratuitous from a human point of view, but which God permits simply that He might overwhelmingly reward in the afterlife those who undergo such evils in faith and confidence in Him. To reiterate a point made earlier, it may well be the case that God is not so much concerned with what you go through as with your attitude while you go through it.
So it seems to me that from the Christian point of view the existence of the moral evil in the world becomes understandable. The purpose of human life is not happiness as such, but the knowledge of God. In order to bring people to salvation or into a deeper relationship with Him, God may permit great suffering in our lives. There may be no purpose for this suffering in earthly terms at all, but it may be a summons to trust in God with the prospect of a reward in heaven that is literally incomparable to the suffering, both in its greatness and its duration.
But what about natural evil? Again, elements in the Christian story can help to make it more understandable. To begin with, it is important to see how inextricably intertwined natural evil is with human, moral evil. Imagine that there were no moral evil in the world, that everybody lived in accordance with the teachings of Jesus—what a wonderful world that would be! If there were a drought in Ethiopia, the world would rush to the aid of the people there to prevent famine. The wealth of the world would be largely redistributed, instead of being hoarded in the materialistic Western nations. As a result, disease would greatly diminish, medical care would be more readily available, and people would live in decent housing instead of shacks or shoddily constructed tenement houses that are demolished in natural catastrophes. Think of the mercy and the love that would be shown to those who suffer! Of course, terrible natural evils would remain and accidents would still occur, but if there were no moral evil, many natural evils would disappear or be greatly reduced.
Second, a world containing gratuitous natural evils may be necessary for people to come to a knowledge of God. God’s overriding aim is for people to come to the knowledge of Himself in a free, uncoerced way. Perhaps it is just a fact that only in a world containing pointless natural suffering would people turn to God. Who knows? It may be that God has created a world containing natural evils that don’t contribute to any higher good in this life but which serve as the context in which He knew people would freely believe and trust in Him.
Finally, God may have simply created a world operating physically according to certain natural laws and then, for the most part, sat back and let nature run its course. Of course, He may intervene sometimes to do a miracle, but that is the exception rather than the rule. It is not wrong of Him to permit natural evils, for in the afterlife He rewards with an incommensurable good those who endure in faith those natural afflictions. Though He may not intervene physically in most cases to prevent suffering, that does not mean He is uninvolved, for by His Spirit He is ever there to strengthen and comfort the suffering.
But let’s get specific and see how this reasoning would apply to the two incidents that so graphically portrayed to me the problem of evil: the Mexican boy who slowly died from the collapse of a building and the Colombian girl who drowned in the aftermath of the mudslide. In the first place, both incidents concerned natural evils intertwined with human moral sin. The whole of Latin America has been victimized by an unjust and uncaring upper class, which has, in its lust for power and wealth, exploited the masses, leaving them poor and underprivileged. The suffering of those two children is indirectly attributable to this corrupt and unchristian system, for if the societies in which the children lived were following Christian principles, their families would not have been forced to live in unsafe housing that was improperly located or so poorly built that it disintegrated under the stress of earthquake or rain. In a world free from sin, it’s possible that neither of the tragedies would have taken place. Hence, man must shoulder some of the blame for those evils.
Why did God permit these children to suffer so? I don’t know. Perhaps through the tragic death of this boy, God knew Mexican authorities would be shocked into requiring new construction standards for earthquake-proof buildings, thereby saving many future lives. Maybe He let it happen because the authorities should be so shocked. Maybe He permitted it so that some other person, facing death or illness in a hospital and seeing the reports on television, would be inspired by the boy’s courage to face his own challenge with faith and bravery. Maybe God permitted the Colombian girl to slowly drown because He knew that only then would her family—or somebody else—turn to Him in faith and repentance. Or perhaps He knew that only through such a terrible incident would her family move away to a place where they, or even their descendants, might in turn come to be influenced or to influence someone else for Christ. We just don’t know.
But maybe there wasn’t any earthly reason why God permitted those catastrophes. Maybe they served no earthly good whatever. Perhaps the catastrophes were simply the unfortunate by-product of natural geological and meteorological laws and the children their unlucky victims. But God permitted this suffering in the lives of these children in order that they and their families might be driven into deeper dependence on Him. We don’t know why God permitted this suffering, but this I do know: when that little girl and boy finally left this life and stepped into the next, Jesus enfolded them in His loving arms, wiped away their tears, and filled them with a glorious happiness beyond all expression, saying, “Well done, my child; enter into the joy of your Master.” In that eternity of bliss, they will know a weight of glory beyond all comparison with what He asked them to suffer here. Therefore, the abused child described by Ivan Karamazov, who beat her breast with her little fist and cried out to “dear, kind God,” did exactly the right thing, bless her soul, and shall not lose her reward, whereas Ivan in his rebellion against God found life too bitter to live.
Finally, there is one last point which I should like to make that seems to me to constitute a decisive refutation of the problem of evil, namely, the argument that evil proves that God exists. Yes, I believe that there is actually a proof from evil for the existence of God. This remarkable fact became clear to me as I was speaking on various university campuses in North America on “The Absurdity of Life Without God.” In this lecture, I attempted to show that if God does not exist, then life is without ultimate meaning, value, or purpose. For apart from God, there is no standard of value; moral values simply become either expressions of personal taste or societal conventions adopted and instilled for the purpose of living together. My conclusion was a purely negative one: I never tried to show that objective values do exist, but only that without God they cannot exist.
But I found people repeatedly objecting that we can and do recognize that objective values do exist (for example, that racism or child abuse is really wrong and that love of one’s neighbor is really good) and that we can know these values exist whether or not we know that God exists. Now clearly the objection the students raised didn’t refute anything I had said. In fact, the Bible teaches that natural man, who has no knowledge of God, knows instinctively the moral law of God (Rom. 2:14-15).
But the experience impressed upon me that we all do sense that certain acts are really right or wrong, that objective values do exist. In essence what the students had done was add another premise to my argument that converted its purely negative conclusion into a positive one. For now the argument looks like this:
1. If God does not exist, then objective moral values do not exist.
2. Evil exists.
3. Therefore, objective moral values exist.
4. Therefore, God exists.
Step 1 was the point I was arguing and is agreed to by many Christians and atheists alike. Step 2 is the premise furnished by the problem of evil itself. Step 3 is the conclusion supplied by the university students, who saw that the moral evils in the world are objectively wrong. And step 4 is the logical conclusion of the argument: since objective moral values cannot exist without God and objective values do exist (as shown by the moral evil in the world), it follows that God exists. Therefore, evil actually proves that God exists.
If this argument is correct—and I think that it is—it constitutes a decisive refutation of the problem of evil. And notice that it does so without attempting to give any explanation at all for evil—we, like Job, may be totally ignorant of that—but it nonetheless shows that the very existence of evil in the world implies God’s existence.
So in summary, I think we’ve seen that despite first appearances the intellectual problem of evil—whether in its internal or external forms—can be satisfactorily solved.
But, of course, when I say “solved” I mean “philosophically solved.” All these mental machinations may be of little comfort to someone who is intensely suffering from some undeserved evil in life. I recall reading, for example, that when Joni Eareckson Tada suffered her paralyzing accident, there came a parade of people through her hospital room, each offering explanations as to why God had permitted this thing to happen to her. Though they were well-intentioned, to her these people took on the appearance of Job’s comforters, and their rational explanations (a few of which were actually pretty good, I think!) came across as cold and uncaring. But this leads us to the second aspect of the problem I wanted to discuss: the emotional problem of evil.
You see, for many people, the problem of evil is not really an intellectual problem: it’s an emotional problem. They’re hurting inside and perhaps bitter against a God who would permit them or others to suffer so greatly. Never mind that there are philosophical solutions to the problem of evil—they don’t care and simply reject a God who allows suffering such as we find in the world. It is interesting that in Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov this is what the problem of evil finally comes down to. Ivan never refutes the Christian solution to the problem of evil. Instead, he just refuses to have anything to do with the Christian God. “I would rather remain with my unavenged suffering and unsatisfied indignation, even if I am wrong,” he declares.8 His is simply an atheism of rejection.
What can we say to those who are laboring under the emotional problem of evil? In one sense, the most important thing may not be what you say at all. The most important thing is just to be there as a loving friend and sympathetic listener. But some people may need counsel, and we ourselves may need to deal with this problem when we suffer. Does the Christian faith also have something to say here?
It certainly does! For it tells us that God is not a distant Creator or impersonal ground of being, but a loving Father who shares our sufferings and hurts with us. Alvin Plantinga has written,
As the Christian sees things, God does not stand idly by, cooly observing the suffering of His creatures. He enters into and shares our suffering. He endures the anguish of seeing his son, the second person of the Trinity, consigned to the bitterly cruel and shameful death of the cross. Some theologians claim that God cannot suffer. I believe they are wrong. God’s capacity for suffering, I believe, is proportional to his greatness; it exceeds our capacity for suffering in the same measure as his capacity for knowledge exceeds ours. Christ was prepared to endure the agonies of hell itself; and God, the Lord of the universe, was prepared to endure the suffering consequent upon his son’s humiliation and death. He was prepared to accept this suffering in order to overcome sin, and death, and the evils that afflict our world, and to confer on us a life more glorious than we can imagine. So we don’t know why God permits evil; we do know, however, that He was prepared to suffer on our behalf, to accept suffering of which we can form no conception.9
You see, Jesus endured a suffering beyond all comprehension: He bore the punishment for the sins of the whole world. None of us can comprehend that suffering. Though He was innocent, He voluntarily underwent the punishment for your sins and mine. And why? Because He loves you so much. How can you reject Him who gave up everything for you?
When we comprehend Christ’s sacrifice and His love for us, this puts the problem of evil in an entirely different perspective. For now we see clearly that the true problem of evil is the problem of our evil. Filled with sin and morally guilty before God, the question we face is not how God can justify Himself to us, but how we can be justified before Him. If Christ has endured incomprehensible suffering for us to bring us to the saving knowledge of God, then surely we can endure the suffering that He asks us to bear in this life. Think of what He endured out of His love for you, and you will be able to more easily trust Him when you walk the path of pain yourself.
A former colleague of mine used to make it his habit to visit shut-ins in nursing homes in an attempt to bring a bit of cheer and love into their lives. One day he met a woman whom he could never forget:
On this particular day I was walking in a hallway that I had not visited before, looking in vain for a few who were alive enough to receive a flower and a few words of encouragement. This hallway seemed to contain some of the worst cases, strapped onto carts or into wheelchairs and looking completely helpless.
As I neared the end of this hallway, I saw an old woman strapped up in a wheelchair. Her face was an absolute horror. The empty stare and white pupils of her eyes told me that she was blind. The large hearing aid over one ear told me that she was almost deaf. One side of her face was being eaten by cancer. There was a discolored and running sore covering part of one cheek, and it had pushed her nose to one side, dropped one eye, and distorted her jaw so that what should have been the corner of her mouth was the bottom of her mouth. As a consequence, she drooled constantly. . . . I also learned later that this woman was eighty-nine years old and that she had been bedridden, blind, nearly deaf, and alone, for twenty-five years. This was Mabel.
I don’t know why I spoke to her—she looked less likely to respond than most of the people I saw in that hallway. But I put a flower in her hand and said, “Here is a flower for you. Happy Mother’s Day.” She held the flower up to her face and tried to smell it, and then she spoke. And much to my surprise, her words, although somewhat garbled because of her deformity, were obviously produced by a clear mind. She said, “Thank you. It’s lovely. But can I give it to someone else? I can’t see it, you know, I’m blind.”
I said, “Of course,” and I pushed her in her chair back down the hallway to a place where I thought I could find some alert patients. I found one, and I stopped the chair. Mabel held out the flower and said, “Here, this is from Jesus.”
That was when it began to dawn on me that this was not an ordinary human being. . . . . Mabel and I became friends over the next few weeks, and I went to see her once or twice a week for the next three years. . . . It was not many weeks before I turned from a sense that I was being helpful to a sense of wonder, and I would go to her with a pen and paper to write down the things she would say. . . .
During one hectic week of final exams I was frustrated because my mind seemed to be pulled in ten directions at once with all of the things that I had to think about. The question occurred to me, “What does Mabel have to think about—hour after hour, day after day, week after week, not even able to know if it’s day or night?” So I went to her and asked, “Mabel, what do you think about when you lie here?”
And she said, “I think about my Jesus.”
I sat there and thought for a moment about the difficulty, for me, of thinking about Jesus for even five minutes, and I asked, “What do you think about Jesus?” She replied slowly and deliberately as I wrote. And this is what she said:
I think how good He’s been to me. He’s been awfully good to me in my life, you know. . . . I’m one of those kind who’s mostly satisfied. . . . Lots of folks would think I’m kind of old-fashioned. But I don’t care. I’d rather have Jesus. He’s all the world to me.
And then Mabel began to sing an old hymn:
Jesus is all the world to me,
My life, my joy, my all.
He is my strength from day to day,
Without him I would fall.
When I am sad, to him I go,
No other one can cheer me so.
When I am sad, He makes me glad.
He’s my friend.
This is not fiction. Incredible as it may seem, a human being really lived like this. I know. I knew her. How could she do it? Seconds ticked and minutes crawled, and so did days and weeks and months and years of pain without human company and without an explanation of why it was all happening—and she lay there and sang hymns. How could she do it?
The answer, I think, is that Mabel had something that you and I don’t have much of. She had power. Lying there in that bed, unable to move, unable to see, unable to hear, unable to talk to anyone, she had incredible power.10
Paradoxically, then, even though the problem of evil is the greatest objection to the existence of God, at the end of the day God is the only solution to the problem of evil. If God does not exist, then we are lost without hope in a life filled with gratuitous and unredeemed suffering. God is the final answer to the problem of evil, for He redeems us from evil and takes us into the everlasting joy of an incommensurable good: fellowship with Him.
1 For a discussion of such arguments see William Lane Craig, ed., Philosophy of Religion: A Reader and Guide (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002; New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2002).
2 I am indebted for the following to Robert Merrihew Adams, “Plantinga on the Problem of Evil,” in James Tomberlin and Peter Van Inwagen, eds., Alvin Plantinga, Profiles, vol. 5. (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel, 1985), 225-255; and to Marilyn McCord Adams, “Problem of Evil: More Advice to Christian Philosophers,” Faith and Philosophy 5 (1988): 121-143.
3 David Martyn Lloyd-Jones, From Fear to Faith (London: Intervarsity Press, 1953), 23-24.
4 Patrick Johnstone, Operation World (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1993), 163-164, 207-208, 214.
5 Ralph D. Winter, Mission Frontiers, November 1990, 18.
6 Johnstone, Operation World, 25.
7 Daniel Howard-Snyder, “Introduction,” in Daniel Howard-Snyder, ed., The Evidential Argument from Evil (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), p xi.
8 Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Constance Garnett (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, n.d.), 226.
9 Alvin Plantinga, “Self-Profile,” in Alvin Plantinga, 36.
10 Thomas E. Schmidt, Trying to Be Good: A Book of Doing for Thinking People (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1990), 180-183.