Dr. Ehrman,
one thing I deeply appreciate in God’s Problem is that you refuse to treat suffering as a merely abstract problem. The suffering of real people is terrible, and any serious response must include compassion, responsibility, and care for those who suffer. That matters to me as well, and I do not want to ask a question as if suffering were only an intellectual puzzle.
At the same time, I struggle with how to think about the move from the moral and existential weight of suffering to a conclusion about God. I realize that existential difficulty and rational judgment are deeply intertwined here, and it may be artificial to separate them too sharply. Perhaps the problem of suffering does not give sufficient reason to reject God’s existence on strictly logical grounds. But it may still give someone a powerful reason to say: even if such a God exists, I do not know how I could trust or worship him.
That distinction matters to me. There seems to be a difference between saying, “I cannot see a morally sufficient reason why God would permit this suffering,” and saying, “there probably is no morally sufficient reason.” And there also seems to be a difference between saying, “God probably does not exist,” and saying, “If God exists, I find it morally difficult to trust or worship him.”
In God’s Problem, and in some of your responses on the blog, you have clarified how you understand all-powerful, all-loving, and suffering. My question is slightly different: when suffering becomes evidence against God, what standard is doing the work? Is it a broadly human moral intuition, a philosophical principle, a biblical standard turned against God, or something else? Human moral intuitions are not uniform. They are shaped by culture, place, time, experience, and temperament. That does not make moral protest meaningless, but it does make me cautious about treating my own moral intuition as the final measure of what God could or could not be justified in permitting.
There is also a related symmetry question. If suffering counts as evidence against God, what, if anything, should count as evidence in favor of God, such as beauty, love, consciousness, moral aspiration, or rational order? I do not mean that these things cancel out horrendous suffering. They do not. But I wonder what evidential method explains why the dark features of the world carry decisive weight, while the bright features may carry little or no weight.
So, to put the question as clearly as I can, and with genuine respect for the personal weight this question carries for you: how do you understand the move from the moral and existential seriousness of suffering to the conclusion that God probably does not exist? And what standard determines which features of the world count in that assessment, both negatively and positively?
Respectfully,
Tjalling
Yes Tjalling you should post this one over at Prof Ehrman’s ‘Recent Posts’. There is a 200 word limit, however, so you might have to edit it a bit.
Buuut…since you brought it up…
One of the local independent broadcast TV channels that shows old movies is constantly running fundraising adverts for St Jude’s Children’s Hospital in Atlanta. St J’s specializes in cancer treatment. When I see one of these ads I can’t help but imagine the Kingdom of Heaven wobbling on its foundations.
What could be the reason for childhood cancer, in a world truly organized and maintained by a loving god? The child is hardly able to understand what’s happening, let alone consider theological justifications. All the child knows is a life of pain. And what lesson are the parents learning on their journey through what surely must be the lowest rung of Hell?
An emotional response surely, and if I’m told there is some ultimate divine justification beyond my human understanding, that will all made right in the end, well, ok, but I can only respond honestly, being who I am.
Now a Sunni Muslim, strict monotheists in a way Christians never can truly be, would say that God is simply beyond our considerations and standards. He can do what he wants and if we don’t like it, tough sh*t. Our portion is obedience.
Buddhists acknowledge that suffering is inherent in living. To live is to suffer. But it is a function of our perceptions, our capacity for desire and fear. To pass beyond desire and fear is to transcend suffering. The candle is blown out and nothing remains. But what a cost!
It is Christians who insist on eating their cake and having it. God is all powerful and all loving. He could but he doesn’t. What is more human than to wonder why?
The Bible tells us we will be subject to all kinds of suffering if we fail to follow God’s laws and not just us but our children, our children’s children and on to the fourth generation.
When I think of the chemicals in our food, the ocean with all the plastic, the very air some have to breathe, don’t we know we’ve been told to take care, not pollute everything for the sake of money?
Stephen said
Buuut…since you brought it up…
(…) I can’t help but imagine the Kingdom of Heaven wobbling on its foundations.
What could be the reason for childhood cancer, in a world truly organized and maintained by a loving god? The child is hardly able to understand what’s happening, let alone consider theological justifications. All the child knows is a life of pain. And what lesson are the parents learning on their journey through what surely must be the lowest rung of Hell?
(…)It is Christians who insist on eating their cake and having it. God is all powerful and all loving. He could but he doesn’t. What is more human than to wonder why?
Stephen, I have been sitting with your post for a while, because the St. Jude’s example is not a debating point and should not be treated as one. A child whose life is swallowed up by pain, and parents walking through what you rightly call the lowest rung of hell, makes any quick answer feel obscene.
You raised more than one thing, and each deserves its own conversation: the comparison with Islam and Buddhism, and the sharper charge that Christians want to eat their cake and have it, holding on to omnipotence and love at once. I will not try to answer all of that here. I want to pick up the one thread where I myself stand, and where your sentence cuts deepest. The others are real, and I would rather leave them standing than answer them thinly.
I think your sentence captures the whole force of the problem: “He could, but He did not.”
I do not want to soften that.
The only thing I would add is that Christianity, at its deepest, does not give me a God who explains suffering from a safe distance. It gives me a God who enters it. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” is not an explanation of godforsakenness. It is God undergoing it.
But even that is not a tidy answer. A God who suffers with us and still does not intervene is, in the hour of the child’s pain, still a God who does not intervene. The cross does not make childhood cancer smaller. It does not explain it. It leaves your question standing.
What it changes, perhaps, is not the “why” but the “who.” And if there is any final setting-right, I cannot believe it would come from a God who stayed clear of the cost.
And maybe this is where I have been picturing it wrongly all along: as a courtroom, with God in the dock and ourselves as the judges. The child is not weighing theodicies. The child is not judging God or defending Him. The child is simply suffering, and is held or is not held. At the bedside, the question is not first “why?” but “is the child alone in this?” That is the one question the cross actually answers. Not “why,” but “I am here.”
So I am not trying to talk you out of the wobble. Let the Kingdom wobble. Mine wobbles too. I only wonder whether the God who wobbles is quite the God Christians actually find at the center of their faith.
And I write this aware that Jesus, in the Gospels, was rarely as careful as I am here. He was closer, more abrupt, with less distance from the wound. I am not sure my carefulness is not its own kind of safe distance.
“sentence captures the whole force of the problem: ‘He could, but He did not.’
I do not want to soften that.
…Christianity, at its deepest, does not give me a God who explains suffering from a safe distance. It gives me a God who enters it. ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ is not an explanation of godforsakenness. It is God undergoing it. …
A God who suffers with us and still does not intervene is, in the hour of the child’s pain, still a God who does not intervene. The cross does not make childhood cancer smaller. It does not explain it. It leaves your question standing. …
The child is simply suffering, and is held or is not held. At the bedside, the question is not first ‘why?’ but ‘is the child alone in this?’ That is the one question the cross actually answers. Not ‘why,’ but ‘I am here.'”
** you do not have permission to see this link **
When I was Muslim, I used to ask Christians:
“If Jesus was really God, why did He eat, sleep, and bleed like us?”
…I used to ask it with pride like it was some unbeatable argument.
But later I realized something:
That question was not exposing Christianity.
It was exposing my misunderstanding of what kind of God Jesus claimed to be.
Because the real question is not:
“Why would God become weak?”
The real question is:
“What kind of God would willingly step into human suffering at all?”
Islam taught me about a God who was distant and untouchable.
But Christianity introduced me to a God who stepped into hunger, exhaustion, grief, pain, betrayal, blood, and suffering with us.
And suddenly His humanity stopped feeling like weakness to me.
It became proof of love.
If Jesus ate, it means He came close enough to experience hunger beside us.
If He slept, it means He embraced the exhaustion we carry.
If He bled, it means He did not stand above suffering watching us from a distance.
He entered it Himself.
Philippians 2 says Christ emptied Himself and took on flesh.
Not because He stopped being God, but because He wanted humanity to finally see what God is actually like.
And it turns out God is willing to suffer for the people He loves.
That changed everything for me.
Because every other religion demanded sacrifice from humanity.
Jesus became the sacrifice Himself.
And no prophet in history ever claimed that.
Judith said
The Bible tells us we will be subject to all kinds of suffering if we fail to follow God’s laws and not just us but our children, our children’s children and on to the fourth generation.
When I think of the chemicals in our food, the ocean with all the plastic, the very air some have to breathe, don’t we know we’ve been told to take care, not pollute everything for the sake of money?
I think you’re on to something Judith. I think a huge problem, say, with climate change theory is that there are those, more importantly, those in power, particularly, corporate power, oh, to name names, Monsanto, Dupont; what about Reynolds tobacco, who plow forward in the name of profit. And unfortunately many go along because of a lack of power, or, in some cases, a belief that no matter, we’re living ‘in the end-times’ so there will be a new earth anyway. And now, look at what is happening here in the U.S. with foreign aid going away and now this huge Ebola outbreak! So many of these are simply criminal and just float along going unnoticed. Big bucks.
I feel like I’m ranting. . pointlessly. It’s just too much, really.
I certainly don’t wish to interrupt the discussion, but it just so happens I’m reading Alter’s translation of Job at the moment.
There is nary a trace of the so-called patient Job. In fact, if anything, he comes off as extremely impatient, not only with his friends but with God himself. He believes he’s got a rather strong case against God.
BJH1960,
thank you for bringing up Job. You have put your finger on something that matters more than it first appears. The “patience of Job” is there at the start of the book. He loses everything and still blesses God. But the moment he begins to speak, in chapter three, that patience seems gone. He is furious and he wants a hearing. He demands an advocate. He believes, as you say, that he has a strong case against God, and he will not let it go.
Stephen,
this is why I come back to your post, because Job is your ally.
In my last reply I said the courtroom for me is the wrong picture. I want to take that back a little, or at least complicate it, because Job wants the courtroom. He does not want comfort, he does not want explanation, he wants a trial. He wants to put God in the dock and state his case to his face. “I would lay my case before him and fill my mouth with arguments.” That is a man pressing charges.
And here is the thing I cannot get past, the thing that I think speaks directly to you. When the book ends, God does not rebuke Job for this. God rebukes Job’s friends. These friends are the ones who defended God. They are the ones who said, in effect, that the suffering must be deserved, that there must be a reason, that a righteous God would not let an innocent man suffer for nothing, so Job must not be as innocent as he claims. They built the theodicy. They kept the courtroom respectable. And God says to them: you have not spoken rightly of me, as my servant Job has.
We might want to read that slowly, because it is almost unbelievable. The man who shouted at God is told he spoke rightly. The men who explained God’s ways are told they did not. The complaint is vindicated. The defense is condemned.
So when you say “He could, but He did not,” and when you refuse the answers that sound too neat, you are not standing outside the book. You are standing inside it, in the place the book itself treats as the honest place.
The neat answer, the one that makes the suffering make sense, is exactly what the book puts in the mouths of the men who get it wrong.
And Job never gets his explanation. That is the other thing worth saying. He is vindicated, in a sense, and still no one ever tells him why. There is no file handed down from heaven explaining the loss of his children. The book does not give him that. Whatever Job receives at the end, it is not the answer he demanded.
The Psalms do the same thing. Most laments turn a corner somewhere near the end, a “but yet I will trust.” Psalm 88 does not. It begins in darkness and ends in darkness. Its last word, in the Hebrew, is something like “darkness” itself. “You have taken from me friend and neighbor; the darkness is my closest companion.” No resolution. No light breaking through. And that prayer sits inside the prayer book, included, preserved, prayed. Someone decided that a prayer which ends in the dark with no upturn was still a prayer, still scripture, still something the faithful were meant to be able to say.
I bring this up because I think the picture many people have, believer and unbeliever alike, is that either faith requires you to stop asking, to accept, to make your peace and fall silent, or you fall into unbelief. But the texts themselves do not require that. They give the complaint room. They give it words. They put it in the mouth of the man God calls right, and they keep a prayer that never finds its way back to the light.
That does not make childhood cancer smaller. Nothing does. But it does mean that the wobble you described is not the enemy of the thing. It may be closer to the center of it than the tidy faith that has no room for Job.
BJH1960 said
I certainly don’t wish to interrupt the discussion, but it just so happens I’m reading Alter’s translation of Job at the moment.
There is nary a trace of the so-called patient Job. In fact, if anything, he comes off as extremely impatient, not only with his friends but with God himself. He believes he’s got a rather strong case against God.
I just opened up Job at Chapters 9 and 10, wherein Job says, He destroys the guilty and the blameless.
Jill_L said
BJH1960 said
I certainly don’t wish to interrupt the discussion, but it just so happens I’m reading Alter’s translation of Job at the moment.
There is nary a trace of the so-called patient Job. In fact, if anything, he comes off as extremely impatient, not only with his friends but with God himself. He believes he’s got a rather strong case against God.
I just opened up Job at Chapters 9 and 10, wherein Job says, He destroys the guilty and the blameless.
Jill, the line you quote from Job 9 is one of the hardest lines in the book, and because you quoted it without adding much comment, I am not entirely sure how you mean it. So let me respond carefully.
Job 9:22 is often translated very directly: “He destroys both the blameless and the wicked.” That is quite a sentence, and it is meant to disturb us.
But I think its setting matters. Job is not calmly stating a doctrine about God. He is speaking from inside his case against God. He is saying that, from where he stands, the world looks morally unintelligible: the blameless and the wicked are swept away together, and there seems to be no court in which he can make his case.
That does not make the line less disturbing. It may make it more disturbing. The book preserves not only faith’s conclusions, but also faith’s protest. It does not rush to correct him. It lets the sentence stand.
BJH1960 said
I certainly don’t wish to interrupt the discussion, but it just so happens I’m reading Alter’s translation of Job at the moment.
There is nary a trace of the so-called patient Job. In fact, if anything, he comes off as extremely impatient, not only with his friends but with God himself. He believes he’s got a rather strong case against God.
I love Alter. I haven’t delved into his Job yet but if my reaction to doing so is anything like my reading of Ezekiel, I will take a deep breath before diving in! These old books are so deep and powerful – and disturbing. Nothing like Sunday School! SS teachers probably think they’re protecting their students but they’re really protecting themselves.
Representative example – Job 13,15:
The pious KJV version –
Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him: but I will maintain mine own ways before him.
What it really says, courtesy of the NRSVUE –
See, he will kill me; I have no hope; but I will defend my ways to his face.
***
I bring this up because I think the picture many people have, believer and unbeliever alike, is that either faith requires you to stop asking, to accept, to make your peace and fall silent, or you fall into unbelief. But the texts themselves do not require that. They give the complaint room. They give it words. They put it in the mouth of the man God calls right, and they keep a prayer that never finds its way back to the light.
The book of Job testifies to the perennial cry of the human heart in the face of a callous and merciless cosmos. Whether or not we consider the great vision Job receives of God at the end of the book adequate justification is debatable. Judaism, to its credit, certainly had a space in its theological wonderings for debate and argument -even with the Ancient of Days. The ultimate weakness of Christianity is that if offers us a definite final solution, subject only to affirmation or denial. It makes too many specific claims to ever get off the hook.
Judith said
2380: “Faith for some is a gift.”
Faith for some is the greatest gift.
A gift not bestowed on everyone. And if this is true and we can only be given faith as a gift doesn’t this free us from responsibility? And from threats?
Judith, I tried. I really did. In the end I took the silence of Heaven for what it seems to really mean.
Stephen: “A Gift not bestowed on everyone.”
It’s a mystery.
John 6:44: No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him.
John 14:6: “no one comes to the Father, but through Me.”
Is there a glitch there for those who did not grow up in a family and community where faith was ingrained?
Stephen,
I believe you deeply when you say “I tried. I really did.” I would never dare to turn that into a failure on your part. When someone prays, searches, waits, and meets silence, that has to be allowed to stand as part of the evidence of his own life. I will not explain it away, and I will not set my own life against it as if it settled anything.
I think you are right about something that many Christians are too quick to dodge. Christianity does make stronger and more specific claims than an open-ended wrestling with God. It does not leave us only with argument, lament, and mystery. It says something happened: that God came near, suffered, died, was raised, and that this is the beginning of a final setting-right. That puts Christianity more on the hook, exactly as you say. It cannot get off it, and I do not think it should try.
Where I hesitate is with the words “final solution,” because I do not find that neat closure in the texts themselves. They give promises, yes, and specific claims, yes. But they also give delay, hiddenness, groaning, unanswered prayer, people living in the long gap between what they were promised and what they can actually see. Paul says the whole creation groans. Jesus on the cross asks why he has been forsaken, and no explanation comes before he dies. The New Testament does not erase the middle. It keeps the wound in the center of the picture, not at the edge.
I should be honest about why I came to this forum at all. I did not come to win anything. I came to test whether my faith could hold, to bring it up against the hardest things I could find and see whether it would still stand. I read Ehrman. I read the books that have cost many people their faith. I go looking for the strongest case against what I believe, not to defeat it, but because I wanted to know whether my faith can survive it honestly. And what I keep finding is not that the objections are weak. They are not. It is that they do not close the question for me. However hard I read, it does not make me able to let go.
I cannot hand you that as an argument. The wonder that stays with me is not the kind that wins debates: that there is anything at all rather than nothing, that there is life, that there is a mind able to sit here and ask these very questions and grieve over a dying child. Historical method can tell me a great deal, but it cannot exhaust that question for me. Where it falls silent, something in me does not.
And there is one more thing, which I offer not as proof and not as a card to play against your silence. Three times in my life, prayer was answered: specific, powerfully, immediately, in ways that felt unmistakable to me, and that I have never forgotten. I cannot demonstrate that to you and I will not try. But I also cannot reason it away. It leaves me with a question I genuinely cannot answer: why me and not you? You tried, and met silence. I tried to doubt, and met something I could not dismiss. I do not understand the difference, and I will not pretend that I do. I will not turn my experience into your failure, and I will not turn your silence into yours.
That is also why your question to Judith stays with me: if faith is a gift not given to everyone, does that not free us from responsibility, and from threats? It is a real question. But look at how the gift is actually pictured. Luke 15 does not give us a judge with threats. It gives us a shepherd going after the one sheep that wandered off, maybe through its own straying, maybe left behind by the flock; the story does not stop to blame it. It gives us a woman turning the whole house upside down for a coin that simply rolled away and could do nothing for itself. It gives us a father who sees the son while he is still far off, and runs. The lost one is not the written-off one. It is the sought one. That is not a courtroom. It is a search.
I am not promising you anything. I cannot, and it would be cheap to try. The bruised reed he will not break, but I will not turn that into a guarantee with your name on it. I only want to say that the picture of a closed door, a verdict, a yes or no, is not the picture the texts actually give me. There is a broken middle in them, and a God who moves toward it.
I think this may be where I step back, at least for now. Not because the questions have gone, and not as some grand departure, but because I came to see whether my faith could hold, and it has: not because I defeated the objections, but because they could not close the question. I leave your silence standing, Stephen, exactly as you described it. I do not explain it away. I only set beside it the wonder I have not been able to lose. And I am grateful to you, and to BJH1960, for taking the hard things seriously enough to make this worth doing.
Tjalling said
Jill, the line you quote from Job 9 is one of the hardest lines in the book, and because you quoted it without adding much comment, I am not entirely sure how you mean it.
Oh, nothing cold toward faith. I have a kind of faith and I am never disturbed by occurrences outside of my control or influence. I’m fairly ducky so to speak. I was just sort of saying that the stuff I stated in my previous comment (below) has been around since at least the time of when Job was written. And most likely, it always will be.
I think you’re on to something Judith. I think a huge problem, say, with climate change theory is that there are those, more importantly, those in power, particularly, corporate power, oh, to name names, Monsanto, Dupont; what about Reynolds tobacco, who plow forward in the name of profit. And unfortunately many go along because of a lack of power, or, in some cases, a belief that no matter, we’re living ‘in the end-times’ so there will be a new earth anyway. And now, look at what is happening here in the U.S. with foreign aid going away and now this huge Ebola outbreak! So many of these are simply criminal and just float along going unnoticed. Big bucks.
I feel like I’m ranting. . pointlessly. It’s just too much, really.
I apologize if I sounded flippant.
Judith said
Stephen: “A Gift not bestowed on everyone.”
It’s a mystery.
John 6:44: No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him.
John 14:6: “no one comes to the Father, but through Me.”
Is there a glitch there for those who did not grow up in a family and community where faith was ingrained?
Two from William Blake-
BDEhrman
FreedomBen
evgendob
Robert