When teaching undergraduate students about the problem of suffering, I have sometimes found it hard to explain to them why it is a “problem” for those who believe in God. Many people do not find it an insurmountable problem; many others do. My concern is far less where someone lines up on that issue than on that they realize it is indeed a huge issue that should not be ignored or swept under a rug.
It took a while for some of my students at Rutgers to see the problem years ago when I was teaching about it, as I mentioned in my last post. I continue my reflections here. Again,
Hello, Bart!
Could you recommend some universities in Europe where someone can apply and participate in critical biblical courses as a student?
Thank you!
The UK is full of them. Look up the websites for all the major universities.
I think part of the post was left out.
I can see how someone could lose their faith after suffering. They’re hurting, so I get it. Still, suffering is not an indicator that there’s no God. It’s just not the God you want it to be. I think it makes more sense to say that nothing in your life experience indicates there’s a God. For me, there’s reason to believe there is a higher intelligence than myself, but I also understand that some people do not have these experiences.
As far as the Bible goes, I think it explains suffering as well as it can considering the time it was written. Before we understood the concept of good and evil—knowledge, wisdom, self-awareness, etc… suffering wasn’t a thing. We went from an animal to becoming ‘godlike’ once the switch was made in our consciousness. Now it’s up to us to do something about the problem of suffering.
this may be somewhat tangential, but since God as we believe he is, is all-knowing of past and future, then he must have known what the outcome of placing the first couple in the Garden of Eden would be. Didn’t he know that they would succumb to temptation? If he did, why put them there and then destine the entire race to suffering of all kinds and to make environment so hostile ? There is no satisfactory way for God to have the attributes he claims for himself in the scriptures and we humans ascribe to him all at once. It is a bag of contradictions. To posit some hidden plan or mystery is only a way of saying “It just doesn’t make sense”. I believe in non-sense,
In my view, the Garden of Eden is about choices. The choice to remain ignorant or to be like God and become wise—gaining knowledge about the world around us and understanding the spectrum of good and evil. Temptation comes from the desire to want something. We chose this because we want something—knowledge, wisdom, to become godlike. Adam and Eve destined the human species to learn and gain knowledge. We can’t expect to gain wisdom through some second-hand, second-rate, mediocre experience.
According to what directly the Bible says in Genesis, the Serpent was asking Eve what were her instructions as she understood it.
Did what the serpent say come true or not? & what had God told Eve directly?
NASB 1995 The Fall of Man
https://biblehub.com/nasb/genesis/3.htm
1Now the serpent was more crafty than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made. And he said to the woman, “Indeed, has God said, ‘You shall not eat from any tree of the garden’?” 2The woman said to the serpent, “From the fruit of the trees of the garden we may eat; 3but from the fruit of the tree which is in the middle of the garden, God has said, ‘You shall not eat from it or touch it, or you will die.’” 4The serpent said to the woman, “You surely will not die! 5“For God knows that in the day you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
No, the serpent lied to Eve. One could say Eve was lying to herself.
God causes forest fires with his lightning bolts because lots of animals are burned alive in the fire. According to the Bible, God gets off on the aroma of burning flesh. God is a sadistic monster.
I have always found the free-will argument wanting, though I suspect in my Hegelian ways, I have developed a synthesis between Leibniz and Voltaire. I believe Jesus gave us adequate teachings to exercise our free will in building God’s kingdom here and now, but we can never expect that all man-made suffering will cease. Thus, we first tend our gardens and attempt to widen their influence. The brevity of that statement is more Pangloss than I intended. And, yes, it deals only with the human agency in suffering. I suspect your next installment will touch on nature’s suffering, and the possibility that such events give us the opportunity to put Jesus’ teachings into practice.
I look forward to it.
If anyone has not heard the Bernstein-Sondheim composition of “Make Our Garden Grow,” I would recommend it — as both art and as aspiration.
I really enjoyed your book on suffering. I have tried bringing up the “free will but no suffering in heaven” argument with people but they just looked at me in bewilderment. “But we are perfected in heaven” is a common answer. But if I say why then can’t we be perfected now for the sake of reducing suffering they always have some answer. And of course as you point out a lot of suffering is not caused by humans anyway so free will has nothing to do with that. Some do try to connect free will to events such as earthquakes, volcanoes, tornadoes etc by saying God sends them in response to people choosing sin and everybody is born a sinner who chooses sin so none are innocent. It all gets entwined with various theologies.
Anyway if we all have free will why do christians who say that often pray to God to make people do things (“Lord make them give me that job” and the like.) Doesn’t even make sense.
Off course free will can explain suffering caused by voluntary committed human acts but it can not explain all the other suffering and it can certainly not explain why a (omni)potent God does nothing to limit it.
If God had 1 procent of the power of (the image of ) God as described in the Holy Books He/She/ They would not have allowed Hitler to survive the bomb attack on him. It was only a matter of centimeters.
If a parent who created a child would use the free will argument not to correct bad behavior of his child no one will accept that as a valid argument. So why it would be a valid argument for the total passivity of God the creator if ‘his children ‘ behave like wild animals.
I think Bertrand Russell summed a few good points in all these regards:
“The world, we are told, was created by a God who is both good and omnipotent. Before he created the world he foresaw all the pain and misery that it would contain; he is therefore responsible for all of it. It is useless to argue that the pain in the world is due to sin. In the first place, this is not true; it is not sin that causes rivers to overflow their banks or volcanoes to erupt . . . I would invite any Christian to accompany me to the children’s ward of a hospital, to watch the suffering that is there being endured, and then to persist in the assertion that those children are so morally abandoned as to deserve what they are suffering.”
Russell, Bertrand. Why I Am Not a Christian, and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects. New York A Touchstone Book, 1982. (p29-30)
I had this thought about suffering last week. I experimented with psychedelic drugs during my early 20’s and I still enjoy a little pot every now and again. I’m in a masters program now and, I admit, there are times when the suffering really feels like it will NEVER be worth it. But, then I make a perfect grade on my test and it all feels like it’s paying off… I imagine that going to Heaven would be like the best drug trip you could ever imagine x1000 plus you actually do get super-powers while you do it and it lasts for hundreds of years. With that in mind, I can imagine that God can make our suffering up to us if He really wants to – especially if it somehow works out into some kind of master plan. Like if maybe our suffering is part of a Sim’s game for supernatural beings which serves to better their personalities. Seems to me that such a scene is kind of what is depicted at the beginning of Job. That’s what makes sense to me to make me feel that the problem of evil has a solution.
Even though “free will” is a really horrible explanation for suffering, and I completely agree with your general view, I think there’s a tinge of a circular reasoning in your heaven argument.
You say “if God gave people free will as a great gift, why didn’t he give them the intelligence they need to exercise it so that we can all live happily and peaceably together?”
I think this presupposes that free will should be interwoven with intelligence from the get-go. But in a theistic framework free will is not predicated on one’s intelligence: you’re being “free” to choose how to live irrespective of it. If God gave everyone a specific intelligence so that they make specific choices in order to live happily, then I don’t see room for “freedom”; in that setting people would look a lot like the robots you mentioned, programmed to act in certain ways (i.e. to make the right choices in order to live happily). It wouldn’t make sense to make people with just the appropriate amount and kind of intelligence in order for them to live righteously so that they go to heaven; He could just send them there right away from the manufacturing stage.
I’m not presupposing what had to be. I’m asking the question why free will necessarily requires suffering.. Intelligence not to sin does not have to limit free will, since presumably that’s what it will be like in heaven, for the people who believe in a Christain afterlife.
This is slightly different to what you say in the book. It is 1 thing to say why “didn’t he give them the intelligence they need to exercise it so that” people live without suffering and another to posit that people that exercise a certain kind of intelligence will not suffer in heaven – and then wonder why God couldn’t give this exact kind of intelligence to everybody.
First, this again presupposes that intelligence is a kind of a static thing that you either have it or you don’t; I think intelligence is like a muscle: you have some raw material of it, but the whole point (and presumably the room where “free will” resides) is how to navigate life intellectually to mold this raw material into something better or worse: so, if God gave people “the intelligence they need” to not suffer, I think that would negate free will’s existence to begin with.
Second, it seems that you also presuppose that people in heaven stay there indefinitely (because they know -due to their intelligence- how to excercise their free will). But who knows for sure if they can’t get expelled from heaven due to their misuse of free will?
I”m not saying that intelligence WILL limite suffering. I’m saying in heaven we will have intelligence, and we will not have suffering, and that means that there can be a kind of intelligence that does not require suffering. We will not have to be programmed like robots not to incur harm on others.
I don’t know why this sounds circular to me. Maybe I don’t get it.
I feel it’s circular because the kind of intelligence that get people to heaven is supposedly the one these same people exercise with their free will. It’s not like God endowed them with a finished product; God gave them a raw material and they -“freely”- chose to mold it toward that direction. I think in the theistic framework, everyone gets pretty much a similar raw material, and the whole point is how you mold it – with your choices (i.e. “free will”). So what I’m arguing is the kind of intelligence, you speak of, that does not require suffering is the one we supposedly “freely” mold during our lives; God would not give us the sophisticated final version of it (that sends you to heaven), because that would violate our free will.
Sorry if I have been burdensome, maybe I can’t understand you or something evades me. Thank you for the back and forth. Either way, as I noted on my first comment, I do agree with your overall take that “free will” is a terrible theodicy. I actually have no respect for it for various reasons.
O,theodicy!It seems either unsolvable or easily sorted out.It stares at us if we believe there’s a God,or if faith in a God died because of disappointment.The concept of God as totally Good clashes with the absolute nature of the only God worth believing in,a God that’s absolute,so absolute that we must include its non-existence as well.This our minds aren’t equipped to do.If we only complain about suffering without factoring the good ,we have no balance.Eventually,we need to detach from the question “why is there suffering if God is good” and accept that some of our questions are based on false premises.To me,the Book of Job expresses one momentous truth:God is beyond us.We frown at it diminishing us,but diminished we must be,as we don’t chose to be born or when we die,good people suffer bad things and bad people enjoy good and happy lives.We know we don’t really have free will, not in a complete sense, though of course make choices, for which we are responsible, unless we are psychopaths. What meaningful connection is there, really, between free will and suffering?
I agree — we *don’t* have free will, even though most people simply assume we do. I’m not free to do millions of things I wish (would will) I could. Flying like a bird is just one of them. Being smarter is another. Extending my life is a third. Liking beets is a fourth….
To me, suffering is all that really matters. I haven’t come across a satisfying explanation yet, although IMHO opinion, Buddhism is closer to one than Christianity. But even there, cultivating one’s mind to be more resilient against pain would be terribly difficult if one were born into such circumstances, so that’s still not a solution. But being an atheist is also not satisfactory because then we are left with the unanswerable questions of how did we get here, and why is there something instead of nothing? So it seems we’re stuck with mystery, whether we like it or not. I agree with the existentialists who say it is up to us to find meaning, and our best social science suggests the path to that is deeply loving relationships, so I guess Jesus got something right! 🙂
As I recall from reading your books, that you moved to the position of not believing in God in light of countless examples of human suffering in which the allegedly omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent God seems either powerless, AWOL or simply cruel.
Apologists including the one proceeding my comment have myriad tropes, from “the times back then”, to his working in strange and mysterious ways, to admonishing critics by pointing out that as mere mortals we have no conception of the infinite genius of God. Hogwash.
By way of one example; this year I was directly in the path of three horrible hurricanes. As an Atheist who openly professes to no belief in God, one would think that my home and possessions would be destroyed. In reality, thousands of Christians (presuming statistics here) surrounding me lost homes, possessions and in too many cases, their lives.
Just what heretical acts and what blasphemies did these people commit to that they should reap such a cruel vengeance from an all powerful God? A God who according to scripture should protect those who love him when invoked. Why wouldn’t a loving God send these hurricanes out to sea or in an instant dissipate them.
Hey, God works in mysterious ways. 🙂
Dr. Ehrman, I’m quite serious about aGod who is so impotent relative to human misery and suffering as being worthy of worship or respect.
That is not a mysterious God. That is a sociopathic God.
God’s inability to communicate.
From not telling Eve to eat from the tree.
To his “repentance in Gen 6:6 – make the same mistake 8:14 & blessing Noah who didn’t properly instruct his bkids, yet condemns them.
Then clearly Prophet Samuel, King David & King Solomon blessed by God were lousy parents!
The lapse of communication continues in the Bible & also notably Jesus & his disciples. Maybe that is why St Paul was included, he could communicate In Greek & that’s what the Roman Bishops wanted for the Bible.
was grieved in His heart.
KJV
And it repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart.
Exiting the Ark
13And it came to pass in the six hundredth and first year, in the first month, the first day of the month, the waters were dried up from off the earth: and Noah removed the covering of the ark, and looked, and, behold, the face of the ground was dry
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_Ham
Hi Bart, I have been waiting for this subject. I born a Catholic, sent to Catholic grade school taught by nuns who scared the “be-Jesus” INTO us. I thought I would never be saved, especially after being told that I had to be “born again” first by an evangelical. I tried hard, but I was stuck with just the one birth. I got sane one day when I realized that any self respecting, omniscient, all powerful God of “perfect love” would not create billions of humans knowing the vast majority would be eternally condemned. Thanks to you, Bart, I finally started reading the Bible and noticing what it *actually* states: (1Peter 1:20>) Jesus was planned before creation, BEFORE the Garden, to be glorified. Humans are saved not of themselves, but by the Grace of God (Ephesians 2:8). That we don’t choose to be saved, God choses (John 6:44>,12:39>). Jesus never said one word about Free Will. In fact, if you don’t understand what he’s saying, it’s on purpose (Mark 4:10>) and you are a son of Satan (John 8:43>). Wow, harsh! Biblically, John Calvin was right and Augustine, Aquinas, Scotus and Molina were just theological pretzel bakers.