Countless thoughtful, compassionate people cite high levels of undeserved suffering as a basic obstacle to belief in a benign creator. Anyone arguing in response that a grave challenge need not necessarily amount to an insuperable stumbling block will face further questions about tactics as well as substance.
For example, a Christian whose first recourse is to piety may naturally draw cheers from fellow believers who share a broad cluster of assumptions. But sceptics could be forgiven for responding with a volley of queries.
A good deal of ground-clearing may therefore be needed before the central challenge can be faced head-on. Is theistic belief credible in the first place? What sort of deity are we talking about? What about claims involving answered prayer and alleged miracles? And what sense can be made of providence?
The case set out in my brief new book The Hardest Problem: God, Evil and Suffering therefore unfolds indirectly. Targeted as much at doubters as believers, it includes sideways glances at philosophy as well as at terrain shared by several world faiths. My templates include several works of CS Lewis. I also drew inspiration from the neuroscientist and polymath Iain McGilchrist, one of the world’s foremost contemporary thinkers.
Where, then, is God to be found in an arena where people die in pain and apparently pointlessly through disease or poverty or violence? Here in outline are a few signposts. Classical monotheism has tended to offer two responses to suffering and evil. First, it is said, pain cannot be avoided where physical laws have their own integrity. A material world involves inbuilt constraints. Evil is also considered unavoidable in a setting where flawed human beings are free to become better or worse.
When the renowned Jewish thinker Jonathan Sacks confronted the question of where God was at Auschwitz, he said that God had been there “in the words ‘You shall not murder.’ He was there in the words ‘Do not oppress the stranger,’ in the words ‘Your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground.’” Rabbi Sacks immediately added that the Holocaust was not in and of itself a new challenge to faith. Exactly the same question could have been asked about Cain and Abel, among innumerable other disasters.
Do things look a little different in this light? Well, only the chronically insensitive suppose that horrors including the slave trade, the caste system and the gulag can ever be retrospectively vindicated in any straightforward sense. The same applies to the death from dysentery of a baby in Africa today.
There is a limit in principle to what can be achieved by rationalistic discourse. The ground on which the argument develops will be moral and practical to a high degree.
Ask reflective Jews, Christians or Muslims how to square the circle, and they are likely to insist that the resources of faith do not provide a demonstrative solution to questions about the volume of suffering in the world, but rather a resolve never to abandon the path of love.
Church teaching has tended to harness the argument in compelling but often misinterpreted ways. First, by a suggestion that there is some similarity between the divine love that knows self-conscious existence to be a precious gift which can only be bought at a price, and the love of parents who conceive a child knowing perfectly well that they are bringing her or him into a broken world and exposing their daughter or son to risks over which they will have no control. Mothers and fathers “choose life” because they believe in its possibilities.
Second, a potent answer to the waste and suffering entailed by evolution is the presence of God incarnate experiencing the joys, sorrows, injustices and mortality that we all face. It is a commonplace that Christians do not merely believe God to be great or transcendent. They also hold that he took off his crown to share our flesh. God was rejected by humankind on the cross, but made of that rejection an example of divine humility.
Another biblical theme follows on from this: God’s creative process, which began by bringing something out of nothing, will end with the deliverance of everything and everyone out of the nothingness of sin and death into perfection.
St Paul plainly had no access to Darwin’s discoveries, but was well aware that suffering, death and decay were part of creation, and did not shy away from the idea that God was responsible for that reality.
The matter is encapsulated in Romans 8:20-21: “For the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.”
Rupert Shortt is a research associate at Cambridge University. The Hardest Problem: God, Evil and Suffering is published by Hodder & Stoughton (£14.99).
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