6 When Beliefs Fail

Chapter 6 When Beliefs Fail

In the previous chapter, we reflected on the difference that belief makes for individuals. But what happens when beliefs we hoped would offer a secure foundation for life fail us? When a belief we hoped would bring meaning turns out to be incapable of bearing this emotional and intellectual weight?

In his memoir Immanuel, Matthew McNaught reflects on his involvement with a Christian community founded in Southampton in the 1970s, which placed an emphasis on ‘signs and wonders’ and God’s power to heal. In 2002, the pastor of Immanuel was diagnosed with terminal cancer. The community prayed fervently for his recovery – but without success. The pastor then turned to the Synagogue Church of All Nations, a Nigerian megachurch with a healing ministry led by the charismatic preacher T. B. Joshua. Joshua prayed over the pastor and declared that he had been completely healed. The pastor was then instructed to refuse medication, as taking medicine for the illness would imply a lack of faith. Sadly, the pastor died shortly afterwards. Inevitably, this traumatic development caused some in Immanuel to question their belief about divine intervention in human lives. This core belief now seemed to some to have failed. What did that mean for their faith?

This story can easily be supplemented by other cases of failed beliefs – some religious, some political, some personal. What happens in the aftermath of such apparent failures, and the crises of faith that they so often precipitate? This process of re-evaluating individual belief systems is now generally described as ‘deconstruction’. While this term was initially popularised by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida to describe the uncomfortable process of uncovering the hidden assumptions that influence our understanding of the world, it is now used in a broader context to refer to the deconstruction of belief systems. Deconstruction often begins when an individual encounters a troubling anomaly or inconsistency in their beliefs – such as a pastor who engages in abusive behaviour, harming instead of nourishing individuals’ spiritual wellbeing, or a prominent male politician who publicly supports women’s rights but whose private life reveals a very different outlook.

Some religious leaders consider any departure from or re-evaluation of what they define as ‘orthodoxy’ as amounting to a loss of faith. Yet this feels misguided – faith is dynamic rather than static, changing over time through an exploration of beliefs and the implications they have for our way of life. This process of growth inevitably involves reflection, reconsideration and adjustment. In religious contexts, deconstruction often arises when beliefs are understood merely as strictures to be accepted, without exploring their emotional, moral and existential benefits. These forms of faith are emaciated and spiritually barren precisely because they have not been correlated and connected with the realities of life.

This is a particular concern for individuals whose religious beliefs have been inherited from previous generations within their family, rather than being a result of personal discovery or reflection. A static faith, some might argue, is a dead faith, inherited from the past like a mouldering family heirloom. It may ornament a room but makes no significant difference to the realities of life. It is a reminder of the past, rather than a resource for the present. What was meant to be a living reality thus becomes little more than an inert marker of familial identity.

Deconstruction initiates a process of dismantling the fundamental principles of a belief system, leading to its disintegration. While this process itself can lead to feelings of despair and a diminished sense of personal security, it does not necessarily lead to the abandonment of a belief system. Deconstruction can lead to reconstruction, in which an individual realises that their previous faith was immature or underdeveloped, and can be reimagined in a more profound and fulfilling manner.

The psychologist Kenneth Pargament has pointed out that religious belief allows people to respond to such crises of faith in two different ways. Religious faith offers resources through its teachings, rituals and narratives for both ‘religious coping through conservation’ (that is, assimilating these events into one’s faith perspective and enriching it) and ‘religious coping through transformation’ (that is, accommodating one’s faith perspective to these events, so that it is challenged and revised in their light). Pargament’s ideas can be helpfully correlated with New Testament insights, such as Paul’s declaration that ‘we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.’

Perhaps the most illuminating narratives of belief deconstruction are found in the political and religious domains – such as Arthur Koestler’s disenchantment with Marxism-Leninism, or C. S. Lewis’s experience of a partial fragmentation of his faith following the death of his wife – which we will consider later in this chapter. We begin, however, by reflecting on the significance of the rise of religious ‘Nones’.

Losing My Religion: The Rise of Religious ‘Nones’

One of the most interesting recent trends in modern American culture is the rise of religious ‘Nones’ – that is, individuals who define themselves as ‘none of the above’ in surveys inviting them to name their religious commitment from a standard checklist of possibilities, or who self-identify as having ‘no religion’. Since 2013, Gallup has used this question to explore religious commitment: ‘What is your religious preference – are you Protestant, Roman Catholic, Mormon, Jewish, Muslim, another religion or no religion?’

Gallup reports that the percentage of Nones measured in its surveys has risen from virtually zero during the 1950s to about twenty per cent of the American adult population today. In recent years, this appears to have stabilised: between 2017 and 2022, an average of twenty or twenty-one per cent of Americans defined themselves as Nones. Similar patterns can be observed elsewhere in western culture. In the United Kingdom, for example, religious Nones have risen from twenty-five per cent in 2011 to thirty-seven per cent in 2021. It remains to be seen whether this is a plateau, or whether it will increase further in the future.

Who are these people, and what does the emergence of this phenomenon have to say about the future of belief? Sociologically, they are likely to be male, younger, higher educated, not married, without children and liberal in their opinions and values. Among the factors that lead them to review or reject their religious commitments, the following appear to have been particularly influential: negative reactions against various forms of religious fundamentalism, a rejection of alliances between religion and politics, and intellectual disagreement with religious beliefs and practices. It is clear that Nones have a problem with religious institutions – many of them believe that religious organisations are excessively concerned with money and status, and are dangerously enmeshed with politics.

The rise of the Nones is sometimes interpreted to mean a growing absence of any religious beliefs in a significant section of the American population. This interpretation needs to be treated with caution. People who choose not to self-identify using any specific religious category often hold beliefs about God or a ‘supernatural’ world, or take part in religious or spiritual activities. Indeed, many of those who move away from one set of religious beliefs often shift towards a different set of religious beliefs, rather than abandoning beliefs in general, or religious or spiritual beliefs in particular.

A recent study has pointed out that while Nones see themselves to be ‘non-religious’, they in fact endorse ‘alternative supernatural beliefs’ that are also driven by some of the ‘same cognitive biases that underpin more conventional religious beliefs.’ This suggests that this group is defined more by their negative relationship with organised religions than by their ‘intuitions about the supernatural’. As Fredrik deBoer remarked of modern American progressives: ‘They’re still religious; they’re simply studying a different catechism.’

An earlier survey by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life found that many of America’s 46 million unaﬃliated adults were religious or spiritual in some way. For example, sixty-eight per cent reported that they believed in God, thirty-seven per cent identified themselves as ‘spiritual but not religious’, and twenty-one per cent reported that they prayed every day.

Yet despite these cautionary remarks, it is clear that the rise of religious Nones reflects concerns about the public acceptability of religious values or the public credibility of religious beliefs, leading them to develop ‘alternative meaning systems’. These adopted alternative systems themselves take the form of beliefs; the move is thus not away from believing in general, but from certain specific beliefs and tainted institutions.

What exactly leads people to question beliefs that might once have seemed stable and permanent?

Dissonance with Reality:

The Fragility of Human Goodness

In July 1944, Anne Frank wrote the following words in her diary as she and her family hid in Amsterdam from the Nazi authorities, who were in the process of deporting the city’s Jewish population to extermination or concentration camps. Despite the weight of empirical evidence to the contrary surrounding her, what kept her going was belief in the goodness of human nature. The alternatives seemed unbearable to her:

It’s really a wonder that I haven’t dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death.

After their Secret Annex was discovered a month later, Anne and her older sister Margot were deported to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where they are believed to have died in February or March 1945.

Many share Anne’s dogged determination to keep on believing in human goodness, even in the face of deliberate and systematic suffering. Yet this belief in the goodness of human nature is an interpretation of our situation. Other ways of understanding human nature are available – some of which are rather more negative. The eighteenth-century Italian playwright Giuseppe Baretti, best known for his unevidenced attribution of the words eppur si muove (‘and still it moves’) to Galileo more than a century after his death, ridiculed the idea of the fundamental goodness of humanity with a barbed one-liner: ‘I hate mankind, for I think myself one of the best of them, and I know how bad I am.’ Or we might reflect on the philosopher John Gray’s view that ‘humans are weapon-making animals with an unquenchable fondness for killing.’

Others might argue for a hybrid or more complex account of human nature. One of the most interesting of these is the Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whose brutal experiences in Soviet labour camps from 1945 to 1953 led him to conclude that the ‘line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.’ Evil is not something that can be conveniently located in the ‘other’, people who we can designate ‘evil’ in a form of cultural Manichaeism. It is rather, and more disturbingly, a potential presence and possibility within all of us, elicited or activated through circumstances and situations. Although some suggest that Solzhenitsyn derives this insight from Russian Orthodoxy, it seems much more likely that it emerged from his life-experience which was subsequently correlated with Christian understandings of the ambiguities of human nature.

My concern here, however, is not simply with the fragility of human conceptions of goodness, and their implications for those who want to lead a good life. What happens to someone when a core belief that gave them hope in the face of ‘confusion, misery and death’ turns out to be an illusion? In this section, I want to focus on the personal crises that the failure of our belief systems often precipitates through the psychological stress this creates – a process that has come to be known as ‘cognitive dissonance’.

Late in 1956, the American social psychologist Leon Festinger read a newspaper article about a group of people who believed that the United States was going to be annihilated by a cataclysmic flood on 21 December, 1955. Everyone would die in this flood, apart from those who had privileged access to a prophecy from the people of the planet Clarion, transmitted by automatic writing to one of the members of this group, who would be able to board a flying saucer and evade this destruction.

Festinger realised that there were some excellent reasons for supposing that on 22 December, the members of this group – which he called ‘The Seekers’ – would have to cope with the realisation that their belief system had spectacularly failed. The world ought to have come to an end the previous day; the Seekers would have to come up with an explanation for still being alive on earth. Festinger reckoned that the dissonance caused by this devastating disconfirmation of their belief would motivate them either to change their beliefs or seek strategies to reconfirm them. Festinger arranged for one of his research group to infiltrate the Seekers, and report on how the group responded to what he confidently expected to be a cosmic non-event.

As instructed, the Seekers gathered at midnight to await the spacecraft that would carry them to safety on the planet Clarion, making sure they removed all metal objects. As the hours passed, nothing happened – until one of the group suddenly received an additional message from Clarion by automatic writing at four in the morning. Because of their faithfulness to their instructions, the destruction of earth had been averted!

Festinger and his colleagues developed a theory of ‘cognitive dissonance’ which held that individuals experience mental discomfort when there is a tension between their beliefs and behaviour. The phenomenon is well known – think, for example, of animal lovers who eat meat, yet feel intense discomfort when they think about the processes by which this meat is produced. Unsurprisingly, they tend to avoid thinking about where meat comes from. How might this work out for someone who is convinced that people are fundamentally good, but is confronted with evidence of atrocities committed by human beings – such as genocides and other war crimes, often carried out by ordinary citizens? Or the sexual and physical abuse of local populations in Africa by United Nation peacekeeping forces, who were supposed to protect them?

One option is to see these atrocities as an atypical response to a traumatic situation – the onset of war – which will cease to be a troubling issue when the situation has passed, and normal life resumes. C. S. Lewis, an atheist scholar of Renaissance English literature at Oxford University who converted to Christianity in 1931, argued that while optimistic views of human nature had been dealt a death blow by the horrors of the Second World War, humanity’s capacity for self-deception and selective memory was so great that such lessons, learned at such cost, would simply be suppressed and forgotten once the war was over. Similar concerns were, of course, expressed after the First World War. Lewis was traumatised by the brutality of this conflict, initially blaming God for failing to prevent it, but gradually realising that the real target of his criticism ought to be human self-deception.

Another option is to block out the memory of troubling events or episodes that subvert the plausibility of individual beliefs or ensembles of beliefs – such as the goodness of humanity. The ‘art of forgetting’ plays a significant role in Renaissance literature, allowing ‘those moments that threaten to destabilise – or even to shatter – identity’ to be erased from an individual’s memory, and thus cease to be a threat to a worldview that underlies existential wellbeing.

Lewis himself bears witness to this construction of mental frontiers and imaginative barriers, as he sought to keep his traumatic memories of combat in the First World War at a safe distance. Some might see this as a ‘flight from reality’. Lewis, however, chose to see this as ‘a treaty with reality, the fixing of a frontier.’ Lewis realised that there were limits to the ‘reality’ that he could cope with, and had to draw a dividing line between what he wanted to remember and what he needed to forget.

A third option is to aﬃrm individual human goodness, while suggesting that social forces give rise to pressures and stimuli that lead good people to do bad things. One of the most influential and thoughtful presentations of this approach is found in Reinhold Niebuhr’s classic work of moral theology Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932). Niebuhr’s prophetic essay recognises the ‘constant and seemingly irreconcilable conflict between the needs of society and the imperatives of a sensitive conscience.’ The pure morality of the individual conscience is simply not transferable to the messy realities of collective human activity. It’s a fair point. Yet others would object that ‘society’ is an aggregate of human beings, so that the problem of human goodness has simply been displaced, not resolved.

Held Captive by a Big Picture:

Wittgenstein the Therapist

In famously declaring that ‘a picture held us captive’, making it diﬃcult for us to liberate ourselves from its imaginative thrall, Ludwig Wittgenstein was pointing out how easily our understanding of our world can be controlled by an ‘organizing myth’ – a worldview or metanarrative that has, whether we realise it or not, come to dominate our perception of our world, in effect predisposing us to interpret experience in certain manners as natural or self-evidentially correct, while blinding us to alternative ways of understanding it.

When you are trapped in a worldview, you need a philosophical therapist who can diagnose the problem and propose a solution. And that’s why Wittgenstein is so important to our reflections. One way of making progress in philosophy, according to Wittgenstein, is to loosen and finally escape from ‘the grip of simplifying “pictures” or conceptual templates that attempt to generalise beyond their contextually specific sphere of applicability.’

How might this be done? One way of applying Wittgenstein’s critical method is to look at the world through a series of potential informing ‘pictures’ or ‘worldviews’. We cannot dispense with these pictures; we can, however, ask which is the most reliable and appropriate. For Wittgenstein, a ‘picture’ changes the ways in which we see things. We can look at reality through a range of such pictures, and ask which of them offers the best rendering of our world.

As Gordon Baker points out, Wittgenstein sets out ‘a kind of homeopathy’ in which ‘pictures are to be treated with pictures’. His philosophical therapy involves a willingness on our part to explore comparisons, leading to a ‘conversion to a new way of seeing things’. How well does it make sense of what we observe? What does it tell us about ourselves, and other human beings? Does it promote fulfilment? Or does it trap us in a limited and limiting world, such as Max Weber’s ‘iron cage’ of rationalism? The first step to securing freedom is to realise that alternative ways of seeing the world are available.

Wittgenstein’s critical analysis is invaluable for those who find themselves shackled to a bad philosophical system or individual ‘bad beliefs’, and want to break free from their thrall. As with the approach of Alcoholics Anonymous, Wittgenstein’s first step is to force us to realise that we are ‘captive’ – that we have trapped ourselves within a limiting worldview, and need to break free from its constraints and distortions (Wittgenstein is particularly helpful to those recovering from the existential nihilism of scientism).

Some worldviews offer us reassurance that the world is coherent and existentially inhabitable. Yet others are often constructed to justify the marginalisation, exclusion or even persecution of others. The most familiar example of this is the dehumanising racial ideology of National Socialism, which treated Jews, Roma, Poles and Serbs as Untermenschen (‘sub-humans’).

However, similar racial ideologies became influential in the United States after the First World War. During the 1920s, William McDougall – chair of the Psychology Department at Harvard University – advocated disenfranchising blacks, restricting intermarriage between races and complete segregation of blacks from whites on ‘scientific’ grounds. A decade later, Wallace Fard Muhammad, the founder of the ‘Nation of Islam’ in the United States, set out a creation narrative which claimed that blacks were ‘God’s Original People’, and that ‘whites were grafted into existence by Yakub, an evil black scientist, around 6,000 years ago.’

Sadly, there is no shortage of ideologies which cause one set of human beings to regard others as representing a lower form of life – and hence as not entitled to the respect and rights afforded to proper human beings. Belief systems can easily lead to the construction of a moral framework that privileges some and legitimises discrimination and violence against others or gives a dangerous amount of normative or interpretative authority to a particular institution. The author and journalist Arthur Koestler learned this lesson the hard way.

Abandoning a Big Picture:

The Case of Arthur Koestler

As a campaigning journalist on the Republican side of the Spanish Civil war, Koestler had enthusiastically embraced Marxism-Leninism as a totalising theory of life and history which promoted justice and freedom. Yet Koestler’s early infatuation with Marxism as an explanatory theory and political programme was shattered by events in the Soviet Union during the 1930s, especially Stalin’s ‘purges’ of political opponents and other ‘unreliables’, which are estimated to have led to the execution of more than half a million people. Koestler decided the most powerful way of challenging Marxism-Leninism was through fictional narration rather than through factual analysis. His novel Darkness at Noon (1941) is a cautionary tale about the dangers of self-delusion, above all the belief that human beings can create and sustain a perfect society, exposing both the inner contradictions and inhumane outcomes of a totalitarian ideology.

The Russian Revolution promised to end the oppressive slaughters of the Tsarist era. Yet somehow, Koestler remarked, every Russian revolutionary discovered that they had ‘to become a slaughterer, in order to abolish slaughtering’, whipping ‘the groaning masses of the country towards a theoretical future happiness.’ As Koestler later explained in The Invisible Writing (1954), he found that he simply could not cope with the cognitive dissonance between theory and reality. ‘I went to Communism as one goes to a spring of fresh water, and I left Communism as one clambers out of a poisoned river strewn with the wreckage of flooded cities and the corpses of the drowned.’

What exactly was the problem? For Koestler, Marxism-Leninism may have originated as a purely theoretical account of historical process; it ended up, however, as an ideology that justified and served the interests of the Soviet Communist Party, which proclaimed itself sole interpreter of Marxist theory, enforcing its authority by force. Isaiah Berlin tracked the origins of this authoritarianism back to Marx himself, who interpreted the world ‘in terms of a single, clear, passionately held principle, denouncing and destroying all that conflicts with it.’

Koestler’s most fundamental point remains valid and significant. A worldview may be both ‘rational’ and ‘evidenced’, attractive and compelling to its audience – yet despite these obvious merits, it can still lead to the suppression of human dignity, value and freedom. Koestler reminds us that we should not judge a worldview simply by its intellectual credentials; we must ask what it does to people. Rationalist critics may feel that ‘liveability’ seems a poor criterion to use in making such judgements, but Koestler’s experience points us in a very different direction, and forces us to ask whether the effect a belief has on individuals and communities should be a reason to aﬃrm – or reject – it.

Koestler helps us see that the core of any oppressive system is a belief – a conviction that one group is somehow superior to another. For example, many believe that women are physically weaker than men. What matters, however, is how this belief is applied – such as excluding women from certain social roles, or subordinating them to men. Oppressed groups internalise the ideology of inferiority, seeing themselves through a dominant social or cultural lens, rather than challenging the legitimacy of this lens.

Koestler is an important witness to how individual beliefs or a ‘big picture’ can entrap individuals, allowing them to oppress others in the fight against oppression, and to tell lies in the fight for truth – while at the same time anointing these beliefs with an ideological balm that somehow makes them appear true, noble and inevitable.

Yet Koestler’s realisation of the illusory promise of Marxism-Leninism ultimately led him to question the reliability of any such ‘big picture’. Where many abandoned one worldview to embrace another, Koestler became suspicious of the overreach of worldviews and metanarratives in general. Where he once regarded the universe as an ‘open book’, he now saw it as a ‘text written in invisible ink’, allowing us at most to ‘decipher a small fragment’ of its complexity. Big pictures could only cope with the density and disorder of human history by simplifying and distorting it, offering a ‘specious clarity’. That is why Marxist theory ‘had frozen to a dogmatic cult, with a simplified, easily graspable catechism.’ All the questions had been answered correctly and authoritatively; there was no need for further reflection, merely to learn and repeat the right answers.

The outcome of Koestler’s dramatic abandonment of Communism was thus not the adoption of another worldview, but rather a dawning realisation that no such big picture could be trusted. We live in a twilight world of shadows, in which there are no certainties. A throwaway line at the end of Darkness at Noon, as Rubashov waits in his cell for the arrival of his executioners, is significant here. ‘Perhaps reason alone was a defective compass, which led one on such a winding twisted course that the goal finally disappeared in the mist.’ There were limits to human reason, which might lead us astray if pressed too far.

For Koestler, Marxism was an example of such an overreach of reason; so, perhaps, were all other attempts to rationalise the complexities of nature or social reality. The political writer Rafael Behr makes this point neatly: ‘every aspiration to contain human experience in a unified theory, every urge to order mankind in neat rows, every codified system of belief that despises dissent, involves some inward violence.’

Our two examples of beliefs that seem to totter on the brink of failure under relentless pressure from the world of observation and experience have focused on the diﬃculties in speaking of human goodness and the deeply problematic link between a worldview and the institution that embodies, interprets and enforces it. For many observers, Koestler’s problem lay primarily with an authoritarian institution, and secondarily on the ideology on which it was based. The Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci certainly thought so, and argued the need for a new kind of radical intellectual if Communism was to gain in strength in his native Italy – not someone who parroted the views of the Soviet Communist Party, but rather an ‘organic intellectual’ who understood Marxism, and could explain and defend this to ordinary people. Marxism had to focus on its intellectual and political appeal, and avoid appealing to the institutional authority of the Soviet Union as the basis of its credibility.

Although I have focused on the relationship between Marxism and the Soviet Communist Party, the same pattern of a problematic relation between beliefs and institutions can be observed elsewhere. For example, Galileo’s problems were not with Christianity as such (one of the great myths of the late nineteenth century, by the way), but with the centralised authority of the Pope as an interpreter of the Bible. Where Galileo was in correspondence with the Catholic biblical scholar Paolo Antonio Foscarini about late Renaissance biblical hermeneutics, Pope Urban VIII feared that these new theories might weaken the authority of the Catholic church in the face of the rising threat from Protestantism. The best defence of the Church’s institutional authority seemed to be a reiteration of its past interpretations of the Bible – a judgement that most now consider to be flawed.

While some Christian theologians or apologists see themselves as defending the institution of the church and aﬃrming its teachings, others (such as C. S. Lewis) see themselves as commending the basic ideas of a consensual Christianity – what Lewis termed ‘mere Christianity’, which was denominationally open-ended. Lewis thus defended Christian ideas, not a Christian institution.

This neatly brings us to consider an explanatory diﬃculty of religious belief. While every worldview experiences some degree of discomfort at its interfaces with the world of observation and human experience, it is widely agreed that Christianity experiences a particular challenge on account of the existence of suffering and pain in the world. If God is good, why is there suffering in the world? Surely God ought to be doing something about that? If there is a God, that is.

Christianity and the Problem of Suffering:

Setting the Scene

Suffering is a universal human experience, framed in different ways by a variety of worldviews. Most consider suffering not as an intellectual riddle that we can hope or need to solve; it is rather something that has to be endured, raising the issue of how we can cope with both its pain and the deeper existential distress that it so often causes.

This insight was characteristic of classic Greek philosophy and literature, which were much more concerned with cultivating the art of right living than their modern counterparts. Greek tragedy thus shunned simplistic intellectual resolutions of complex questions, focusing instead on narrating how people learned to deal with suffering. The American philosopher Martha Nussbaum highlights the educative role of suffering in Greek tragedy, in that it helps us to grasp what it means to be human through an explicit ‘acknowledgement of diﬃcult human realities’.

Whether suffering is seen as an intellectual problem or not depends on the specific theoretical lens through which it is interpreted. For reasons that we shall explore, the Enlightenment’s emphasis on rational explanation has led to a new emphasis on explaining or rationalising suffering, and particularly on demonstrating the consistency of a philosophical worldview that aﬃrms both the goodness of God on the one hand, and the reality of suffering on the other. As Charles Taylor has argued, this seems to have created the expectation that every aspect of the universe is completely accessible to human reason, so that we are able to comprehend everything rationally.

Yet the problem goes much deeper than our unattainable longing to see things with total clarity; we seem to think that a meaningful life is about the evasion of pain. We feel we are entitled to avoid suffering and see its existence as an intellectual scandal. Yet this is an inadequate modern response to an age-old problem. More reliable alternatives are available, as the psychologist Robert Emmons points out:

‘The good life’ is not one that is achieved through momentary pleasures or defensive illusions, but through meeting suffering head on and transforming it into opportunities for meaning, wisdom, and growth, with the ultimate objective being the development of the person into a fully functioning mature being. On this formula for happiness, age-old wisdom and modern science are in agreement.

A good example of such older approaches to this riddle of human suffering is found in early Christianity. The New Testament, for example, recognises suffering as a ‘given’, something that was an everyday aspect of life, yet which had been given new dignity and significance through the suffering and death of Christ. The New Testament does not offer any explanations for suffering or see it as necessary to do so. The letters of Paul, which offer the most substantial engagement with suffering, consider suffering to be an integral aspect of existence in the ‘new age’ within which the ‘old age’ still remains an active presence. Paul’s concerns include reassuring his readers that to suffer does not mean that they have been abandoned or rejected by God; that Christ suffered before them, and for them; and that they may look ahead to the hope of a new order, of which they will be part.

These views remained central to Christian thinking for the next thousand years. Although many Christian theologians – such as Augustine of Hippo – felt it important to reflect on how suffering was to be understood, the dominant theme within Christian spirituality was that reflection on Christ’s sufferings enabled believers to cope better with suffering in their own lives, and to grow through this. Suffering was a fact of life and was not to be seen as a disconfirmation of religious belief. Yet this changed during the ‘Age of Reason’ as a new philosophical emphasis on the perfection of God framed the existence of evil and suffering in the world as a contradiction. Hopes subsequently grew of eliminating suffering through medical advances, making its persistence an increasing personal concern.

The term ‘theodicy’ was invented by the philosopher Leibniz in 1710 to refer to the kind of impersonal theoretical rationalisations of the problem of evil that we are familiar with today. Yet there is a growing realisation that this enterprise of ‘theodicy’ is problematically linked with the rationalising concerns of the Age of Reason. Though suffering and evil have been around since the dawn of civilisation, earlier generations of philosophers and theologians do not appear to have seen these as calling the existence of God into question; if anything, it made clinging to God all the more important in diﬃcult times.

The belief that suffering is a problem for believing in God is a relatively new idea, reflecting a new confidence in the capacity of human reason to comprehend our universe. Charles Taylor, one of the most perceptive analysts of the rise of modern secularism, points out that the writers of the Age of Reason too often assumed that human beings have complete access to the structures of the universe and the nature of human life, and can answer every ‘why’ question – including why suffering and evil exist.

The result is that many modern Christian writers offer detached and disengaged rationalisations of the existence of suffering in the world, rather than showing how it is possible to live meaningfully in the presence of suffering. The philosopher James K. A. Smith argues that many philosophers have ‘bought into the spectatorish “world picture” of the new modern order’, which makes us think we are ‘positioned to see everything’ and hence can – and should – ‘expect an answer to whatever puzzles us, including the problem of evil.’ As Stephen Wykstra cautions, drawing on his principle of ‘Reasonable Epistemic Access’, we need to be sceptical of those who declare that we can take a ‘God’s eye’ view of the world, being able to see everything in its totality and grasp its full significance.

C. S. Lewis made this point in his Problem of Pain (1940), in which he wrestled with the questions raised by the human experience of pain and suffering. Lewis here suggests that we cannot see things clearly from our human perspective and will always see things darkly and incompletely. Drawing on an analogy that would have been familiar to his British readers at this time during the Second World War, Lewis suggests that the life of faith is like walking around during the Blackout – the periods of enforced darkness, devoid of any artificial light, designed to prevent German bombers from having visual sight of their ground targets.

Lewis used this analogy to suggest that we don’t see everything clearly. There isn’t enough light. But ‘the blackout is not quite complete. There are chinks.’ For Lewis, we must learn to live and work with the partial apprehension of a complex and ambivalent world, in which pain does not fit easily with some core Christian themes – yet does not contradict them either.

This, then, is the context within which discussion of God and suffering is now set in western culture. Yet this is a recent (and, in my view, reversible) development, which is increasingly being subjected to criticism on account of – to mention only a few concerns – its intellectual over-reach; its under-evidenced notions of God, goodness and human freedom; and its abstract and impersonal framing of issues that might be suitable for a college seminar room, but fails to connect with the deeper questions of everyday life.

With these points in mind, we turn to reflect on the challenges that suffering causes for belief in God in the contemporary world, focusing on C. S. Lewis’s reflections following the death of his wife from cancer.

Suffering: C. S. Lewis and the

Reconstruction of Belief

One of the surprise bestsellers of 2007 was William Paul Young’s The Shack, a twenty-first century re-imagining of the book of Job published by Windblown Media, a Californian company that nobody had ever heard of. The book sold twenty million copies. As if that wasn’t enough, ten years later the novel was made into a Hollywood blockbuster that grossed over $96 million globally. Some critics of the movie complained about its ‘pontificating’ which they felt blunted the imaginative power and dramatic force of the novel. Yet the remarkable popular success of both book and movie made it clear that many today remain intensely engaged with the issue of suffering, yet are dissatisfied with the abstract and inaccessible philosophical rationalisations which are routinely presented as solutions to these enigmas.

The problem is that philosophical theories that aim to make sense of suffering are often presented in immensely dull and technical ways, that treat suffering as a rational problem demanding an intellectual solution, often involving arcane definitions and distinctions that baﬄe their readers, leaving them drowning in a glutinous alphabet soup. The success of The Shack made it clear that what people were looking for was a meaningful and accessible engagement with the problem of suffering which they did not find in self-help manuals, traditional spiritual comfort food, and least of all in an abstract rational analysis based on generic notions of divinity which failed to engage the emotional aspects of suffering and pain.

This is a real problem. The American philosopher of religion Nicholas Wolterstorff found himself unable to read academic works on theodicy following the death of his son in a climbing accident in 1983. They just didn’t connect with his situation. ‘I cannot fit these pieces together. I am at a loss. I have read the theodicies produced to justify the ways of God to man. I find them unconvincing. To the most agonised question I have ever asked I do not know the answer.’ When it enters our lives, we are overwhelmed by the immensity of the question of suffering. As Johann Baptist Metz remarks, this is ‘a question that can neither be answered nor forgotten, a question for which we, from our side, have no answer; it is the question of “too much.”’

Wolterstorff is one of many Christian writers to explore the question of whether the painful presence of suffering in the world negates Christian belief. C. S. Lewis, now a canonical Christian writer, found the devastation of World War One so troubling that he doubled down on his teenage atheism.

Shortly after the end of the war, Lewis published a collection of poems entitled Spirits in Bondage in March 1919 under the pseudonym ‘Clive Hamilton’. Lewis’s ‘Ode for New Year’s Day’, written when under fire from German artillery near the French town of Arras in January 1918, protests against a silent uncaring heaven, a disinterested spectator of the carnage of the war. The existence of evil and suffering in the world was a moral outrage that would lead any intelligent person to reject belief in God.

This is an influential argument, and many have experienced its force. David Hume, for example, argued that the world we know and experience is so clearly inadequate that it could only have been made by an ‘infant deity’, or some elderly deity in his dotage, who urgently needed to be retired from duty.

Yet there is a problem with this argument. How can Hume reach this conclusion? He has no knowledge of any other universe, so cannot make a comparative judgement. His belief that this world of suffering and pain is inadequate or substandard seems to rest on an intuition, a feeling that there must surely be a better universe than the one we know.

It is important to pause here, and note how much influence emotions, feelings and intuitions have on human reasoning. As the psychologist Jonathan Haidt points out, many of our supposedly ‘rational’ moral arguments reflect emotional stances; moral reasoning is usually a post hoc construction, generated after a judgement has been reached on other grounds.

Hume himself argued that moral judgements, like aesthetic judgements, derive from sentiment rather than reason, so that we achieve moral knowledge by ‘immediate feeling’ rather than by a ‘chain of argument’. Steven Wykstra points to the problem that emerges here: the way we feel about our world does not count as evidence. Most of us, he notes,

have at some times in our lives felt instances of suffering in this world to be evidence against theism, according to which the universe is the creation of a wholly good Being who loves his creatures, and who lacks nothing in wisdom and power. If it has proven hard to turn this feeling into a good argument, it has, perhaps, proven just as hard to get rid of it.

Lewis – who initially studied and taught philosophy at Oxford – was aware of Hume’s argument. Yet he came to see this as a vulnerable line of reasoning, dependent on unacknowledged prior beliefs which could not be proved to be true, and might simply amount to matters of personal taste.

My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?

The force of the argument from the injustice of evil and suffering depends upon the strong conviction that ‘the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my fancies.’ Yet Lewis found he could not articulate a meaningful notion of ‘justice’ without grounding this transcendentally in something that lay beyond his own personal beliefs or those of the community to which he belonged. It was a classic example of the diﬃculties faced by thinkers of the Age of Reason – having to judge one belief in terms of another belief. In the end, Lewis set his atheism to one side, and reaﬃrmed faith in God.

Thirty years later, however, Lewis found that the experience of the slow death of his wife, Joy Davidman, from cancer in 1960 reopened the question of pain and suffering for him emotionally, not simply intellectually. Lewis wrote A Grief Observed (1961), one of his rawest and most challenging books, as a way of recording and reflecting on his thoughts and experiences as he grieved. Suffering is portrayed as relentlessly opaque, resisting rational explanation.

Where is God? … Go to him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double-bolting on the inside. After that, silence.

Lewis’s journal for this diﬃcult period records his thoughts, no matter how incoherent, as he explored every intellectual option open to him. Lewis was determined to confront and engage with each of them, experiencing the emotional distress and cognitive dissonance they each evoked. Maybe God was a tyrant. Maybe there wasn’t a God.

So, was this the end of Lewis’s Christian faith? Was the suffering and death of his wife such a blatant contradiction of Lewis’s core beliefs that his only option was to abandon them? Was the cognitive dissonance unbearable for him? That is certainly the impression created by the movie Shadowlands (1993), which suggests that Lewis’s faith collapsed after Davidman’s illness and death, leading him into some undemanding form of Stoic humanism.

Yet here, as so often, movies offer their own version of history. In reality Lewis’s faith recovered. A Grief Observed describes what Lewis regarded as a process of testing – not a testing of God, but a testing of Lewis. ‘God has not been trying an experiment on my faith or love in order to find out their quality. He knew it already. It was I who didn’t.’ In a letter written a few weeks before his death, Lewis remarked that while A Grief Observed ‘ends with faith’, it nevertheless ‘raises all the blackest doubts en route’. It was, nevertheless, a reconstructed faith, more attentive to the raw emotions caused by suffering and doubt in the life of faith.

In the end, Lewis held his faith together, not so much by a rational argument or logical analysis, but rather through a controlling image that captured his imagination, and gave him imaginative space to hold multiple themes together – namely, the image of the crucified Christ. Lewis here draws on a longstanding Christian devotional practice which generally takes the form of affective contemplation of the sufferings of Christ, generally mediated through reflections on the passion narratives and images of the crucified Christ. Such a devotional reflection on the suffering and death of Christ engages the emotions and imagination, allowing the believer to step into the scene of Christ’s crucifixion and experience the sense of awe, bewilderment and distress that this so clearly evoked on those who saw it happen – and then correlate this with their own situation.

As Lewis found, the intellectual issues may not be resolved; yet they are no longer seen as posing an existential threat to faith. Rather, this refocusing on a person (rather than an idea) allows a believer to find a way of envisaging life in a suffering world, and make it meaningful by living it out.

This point is brought out by the novelist Francis Spufford in his Unapologetic, one of the finest recent explorations of the capacity of a Christian worldview to make emotional sense of things. Spufford suggests that a fixation on over-intellectualised accounts of suffering is ‘a phase in the early history of our belief’ that tries to ‘abolish the mystery’ of suffering. Instead, we need to face up to something that nobody can explain, and learn the wisdom of coping with it.

We take the cruelties of the world as a given, as the known and familiar data of experience, and instead of anguishing about why the world is as it is, we look for comfort in coping with it as it is. We don’t ask for a creator who can explain Himself. We ask for a friend in a time of grief … We don’t say that God’s in His heaven and all’s well with the world; not deep down. We say: all is not well with the world, but at least God is here in it, with us.

Coping with Trauma and Suffering:

Viktor Frankl and Jordan Peterson

This leads us into the move from the intellectualisation of suffering to living meaningfully in a world of suffering. Meaning-making is not a purely cognitive matter; it is also about enactment, living in certain ways. In their different ways, both Judaism and Christianity offer ‘present suffering as part of a broader story of redemption. In complicated ways, each tradition depicts catastrophe as a path forward.’ Both experienced trauma – Judaism through the Babylonian deportation and exile, and Christianity through the crucifixion of Christ – and both developed the strength and flexibility to endure in the face of present and future disaster.

The question of finding meaning through suffering surged in significance during the traumas of the First and Second World Wars. Yet it has been given a new importance with the increase in human lifespan in western culture, which often involves living with suffering over extended periods. As early as 1958, the psychologist Edith Weisskopf-Joelson noticed that American culture seemed intolerant of suffering, and reluctant to help people to find belief systems to cope with this. ‘The incurable sufferer is given very little opportunity to be proud of his suffering and to consider it ennobling rather than degrading.’

So how can this be done? In an important reflection on means of coping with suffering, Sarah Bachelard suggests that it is helpful to distinguish ‘resigning ourselves to the inevitable’ in relation to a crisis or suffering, and ‘giving ourselves’ into this crisis or suffering, allowing this to challenge our preconceptions about what the world ought to be like and learn to live within it as it is. We insert ourselves into the world, and create meaning through the things we encounter, rather than those we expected or hoped to find, not least by allowing what we find to be seen as a means of growth.

Perhaps the best-known engagement with this issue arises from the work of Viktor Frankl, whose experiences in Nazi concentration and extermination camps during the Second World War helped him to appreciate the importance of discerning meaning in spite of traumatic situations. Frankl argued that survival in concentration camps depended on maintaining the will to live, which involved finding meaning and purpose in demoralising or traumatic situations. Those who coped best were those who had developed frameworks of meaning that enabled them to fit their experiences into these mental maps, and allowed them to interpret and experience them as times of personal growth and development. In exploring this point, Frankl often cited Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous one-liner, ‘If someone knows the “why” of life, then the “how” can look after itself.’

More recently, the psychologist Jordan Peterson has insisted we recognise the fragility of human existence and recognise the pervasiveness of suffering. ‘Pain and suffering define the world.’ They are givens, not options.

We can be damaged, even broken, emotionally and physically, and we are all subject to the depredations of aging and loss. This is a dismal set of facts, and it is reasonable to wonder how we can expect to thrive and be happy (or even to want to exist, sometimes) under such conditions.

While Peterson’s approach to suffering is opaque and controversial, his willingness to engage this pervasive phenomenon and explore its existential threat has secured him a substantial readership.

Frankl and Peterson share some common themes: both recognise the depth of human suffering and the challenges it poses for religious belief – yet paradoxically both consider a spiritual worldview that recognises the existence of God and a transcendental reality to hold the key to living well in a suffering world. To live a ‘good life’ is not about self-satisfaction, but rather living responsibly, facing up to a suffering world, and finding meaning and opportunities for service within it. Suffering is not something we are asked to comprehend; it is something we must confront, and create meaning in doing so. Beliefs help us cope with times of darkness.

But what if those beliefs themselves cause darkness?

↑ Back to top

6 When Beliefs Fail