Are there moments when you wonder not just why things are going badly for you, or why they are very badly for others, but more comprehensively about why there needs to be suffering at all? I certainly have, and I am now doing a thread of posts that explain some of my reflections through excerpts of the opening sections of my book God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Explain our Most Important Problem – Why We Suffer (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2008).
In my previous post I explained how these issues eventually led me to leave the faith. Now I continue by reflecting on a subsequent moment, long after I was no longer a believer, when I was particularly floored by
Is the prayer you heard that Xmas Eve available on the web or any other place?
No, I’d be surprised if it were… disabledupes{4413049a480d8cb73acf47666f00a228}disabledupes
Thanks for returning to this issue Bart.
Picking up on your specific observation: “.. some thought that suffering came from God’s cosmic enemies, who inflicted suffering precisely because people tried to do what was right before God; “. Would you see this as supported by Jon. D. Levenson; ‘Creation and the Persistence of Evil; the Jewish Drama of Divine Omnipotence’?
Personally, I find Levenson very helpful, as a study of how the Hebrew Bible may conceptualize some (though not all) persistent suffering and evil as due the the continuing, malevolent, power of primordial Chaos. An omnipotent God is necessarily the Lord of Creation; but cannot be the Lord of Uncreation. Rather, Uncreation (the Nihil, the Chaos) remains an active force for destruction and unreason against which the Creator God, and the creatures of that God, must continually contend.
Creation then contends Uncreation in which God’s people are partners through ““the emergence of a stable community in a benevolent and life-sustaining order”. God must eventually triumph; but not fully yet; ” “YHWH is not altogether YHWH, and his regal power is not yet fully actualized. Rather he is the omnipotent cosmocrater only in potential”.
If we were indeed created in the image of God, how do we become such a creation except through challenges and hardships? Wouldn’t we be as hothouse plants, blown over by the first little wind or
incapable of surviving a drought?
With two and a half billion Christians in a world of eight billion, we need to do more and better instead of letting ourselves be caught up in the world instead of fulfilling God’s plan for us.
How I wish your wonderful Sarah could reply here to these questions. She would be able to answer
much better than I!
Suffering is necessary then to prepare us for……. suffering? There seems to me to be a problem with that logic.
Bart,
I would like to know if you at all looked into other forms of spirituality during or after your departure from Christianity. The Buddhist answer to why suffering exists and how it is “defeated”, seems to atleast enrich this particular question.
Well, I didn’t look at all the world’s religions, no. But I have long been aware of the Buddhist view and will agree it is very different from the Christian. For one thing, it doesn’t require an explanation for suffering in a world created by an all-powerful and loving God!
In April 1975 a C-5 Galaxy took off from Tan San Nhut air base in Viet Nam evacuating Vietnamese orphans as part of Operation Babylift. The North Vietnamese army was closing in on Saigon. The aircraft experienced a severe mechanical malfunction inflight which made it near-impossible to control. The crew did their best, but the plane broke apart during a crash landing back at the airport. Half of the 300-plus people onboard, most of whom were children were killed. In a television interview shortly after the crash, a woman who had helped organize the operation said angrily through tears “It doesn’t make sense!” Although she didn’t say so, it was quite clear what she was thinking; something to the effect of: “A mission of mercy! How could God let this happen??” Fair question.
On my blog (TheBibleUndressed.blog) my latest article looks at some of the strange laws in the Bible. A question I pose is why the God of the Universe is concerned about things like what we eat, what we wear, how we trim our beards and various other trivialities while there is so much cruelty and suffering in the world. Surely He has bigger fish to fry! (Well, not catfish…)
I’m a new subscriber who signed on after reading yesterday’s post, and eagerly awaits tomorrow’s.
Personally, the most annoying theodicy to explain suffering with regard to children is the “they go straight to heaven” (lucky them!!) BS platitude. Oh my God, does that annoy me! I think it’s the pinnacle of the completely-renouncing-my-cognitive-abilities-to-salvage-my-faith kind of thinking-arguing. It just frustrates me so much; it makes me feel so desperate on an intellectual level. It feels so cheap, so devoid of reason and dignity. It feels to me so wild to really believe a random 4-year old who was born in a village of Cameroon only to suffer from hunger and an array of diseases until death had to experience all this for some pedagogical reason or whatever else, and, in reality, it was lucky! Deep down, I despise people who marshall this kind of argument. Like William Lane Graig saying these Amalekite or Midianite children were actually lucky to be slaughtered! I feel it’s such a travesty to deem people claiming this horshes?@:t “intellectuals”.
Sorry for the rant. Beatiful writing by the way.
Thank you Dr Ehrman. I read God’s problem maybe 9/10 years ago and found it very stimulating. I happened to be reading it in a hospital waiting room while my mother was seriously ill, so that gave your book a certain immediate relevance. I am curious to know what you personally consider to be the best Christian justification/argument for why we suffer or do you feel that all of them are inherently weak?
The best view among the Christians I know is “I don’t know the answer.”
An exercise of imagination: let’s pretend that tomorrow God reveals himself by bringing his kingdom on earth. Let’s pretend also that all the promises in the scriptures come true.
So all of a sudden we see the dead people of all ages up to now resurrected (among other things). Question: how do you imagine the problem of human suffering and God we have at present could change? Or would it change?
For me personally, if i fantasize of an event like that happening, i feel like the joy of such a thing and its consequences, would totally and definitively chase away the horrors of the past life as we have known them during human history.
That is to say that despite i haven’t got a clue of how to reconcile human suffering with the idea of a loving God that is active in human history, at least in my imagination, in the fantasy scenario of God actually returning to chase away the darkness, i can easily see how that problem would completely disappear
Is it unreasonable to hope that that day eventually will come? Should we dispense with this hope? Do we have a solid and conclusive argument to dispense with that hope?
I can’t think of any good reason why you should dispense with your hope: of itself there is no harm in hoping for a joyful afterlife.
Here’s my sorry non-inclusive language poem I heard somewhere: “It rains on both the just and unjust fellow, but more on the just ‘cuz the unjust stole his umbrella.” Isn’t the problem of suffering similar to Plato’s discussion (I don’t remember where) about the problem of unjust behavior seeming to bring personal rewards in this life to those who behave unjustly? The problem of suffering is not just a problem for those who are Christians. It is a problem for everyone. If there is any possibility of the affirmation of life, how is it possible to affirm in the midst of suffering?
Ah, nice poem! Yes, Plato does deal with it, but from different premises; among other things he insists that it is “better to suffer than to do what is evil.” (E.g., in the Gorgias and other places)
For me, the answer is there is no loving God. A non-loving god actually seems more reasonable. Obviously, just speaking for myself. The suffering from “acts of God” was one the things that dissuaded me from believing in a loving God.
I certainly do not intend to demean or disparage the very real suffering that multitudes undergo, and I am not trying to convert or deconvert anyone, but I think there are limitations to the logic of proofs that god(s) either exist or do not exist.
As I understand it, the current argument under discussion goes:
1) There is at least one god.
2) there is at most one god.
3) God is all knowing.
4) God is all powerful.
5) God is all compassionate.
6) Such a god would not allow suffering in the world.
7) There is suffering in the world.
This is a contradiction, so at least one of these premises must be incorrect, but, just from a logical perspective, it could be any one of the seven. Is there any logical reason why it must be premise one? Of course, anyone raised in a Christian tradition would accept premises one through five, but there are other religions that do not.
A second difficulty is that there is an underlying assumption here that god’s sense of suffering is constrained to match one’s own. This is not unreasonable, but it would also mean that god’s sense of suffering is also constrained to match mine, and yours, and Bin Laden’s,
Yes, for a Christian who assumes 1-5 and sees 7, it must come down to premise 6 and finding a way for God to allow (or create) suffering, as we define it.
One reason the argument fails is because compassion is a human concept, and assertions 5 and 6 both amount to setting human rules that constrain God’s actions; in other words, they are a denial of God’s sovereignty. In his commentary about the Book Of Job, J.J.Collins puts it this way “God does not comply with human conceptions of justice, and is under no obligation to do so”
I think an honest, thoughtful, literalist Christian or Jew must accept that in the old testament God does things that we consider horrific and even many that we consider crimes against humanity. I think for many people this so radically goes against their conscience that they cannot accept it.
It was this kind of reasoning that led Christopher Hitchens to call at least some fundamentalist interpretations of God ‘a celestial dictatorship, a divine North Korea’. Of course we think this is an abominable and outlandish characterisation, but if God did the things they do in North Korea, we would say ‘who are we to judge, that’s God’s sovereignty’.
and Xi’s, and Kim’s, and the list goes on. Aside from these extreme cases, I gather that most, if not all, of the members of this blog have grown up in the Western Tradition and have mostly similar senses of suffering, but even there there will be some disagreements. As a very real example, I would say that a compassionate god would not permit abortion to exist. I suspect many on this blog would disagree, but, if a compassionate god were to eliminate starvation (which presumably all of us consider to be a very good idea), would he not also have to eliminate abortion (which at least some of us consider to also be a very good idea)?
While a compassionate god is busy eliminating starvation and human-caused abortion, perhaps he could also eliminate all natural abortions (stillbirths) caused by defects that he could have prevented. God could make sure that all eggs and sperm are good genetically and that the resulting life will thrive. In addition, he could prevent the suffering and deaths of all young people below the age of responsibility (whatever that may be.) None of these fetuses or children have done anything deserving of death or suffering.
The single thing that “convinced “ me of the impossibility of the existence of of the biblical divinity that I grew up believing in was and is the horror of suffering of the innocent – most especially the children. Your words and anguish call out to me as my own experience.
In reference to what appears to a non-intervening God, I am shocked almost to the point of becoming numb(which will never happen) at our lack of action in regard to school shootings. The government is obviously made up of our fellow human beings but, like the once powerful God, it now appears powerless.
“Thoughts and prayers” don’t prevent or solve anything.
“different biblical authors had different solutions to the question of why God’s people suffer: some …. thought that suffering came from”….
And perhaps “some” thought suffering was a natural condition which offered the opportunity to explain it in a way that brought them influence, power, and (particularly more recently) wealth….
While reading your reflections, I was thinking of how the philosophy of John Caputo (wrote a great book called the Weakness of God: A Theology of Event) and Richard Kearney (wrote a seminal work called, A God Who May Be: A Hermeneutics of Religion) might help answer these questions.
Each author talks about a god who gives over god’s power so that we can collaborators in god’s creation. God gives us the power to change the world, and in changing the world, god’s presence breaks into our world.
Interesting stuff. You might want to check them out!
Yup, I’m familiar with that view. I would call it hopeful! I’d say it can make sense for those already standing in the CHristian religion trying to figure it out. But I can’t think of arguments for it (that is, why it seems likely). For all these views of suffering, I always ask, “What are the good reasons for thinking so…” (Other than that it resonates with me or not…)
“But I can’t think of arguments for it (that is, why it seems likely).”
Quite so. Would this not also mean there would equally be arguments for suffering in heaven? All of the arguments that, from a Christian perspective, would seem to also apply to heaven, yet there is supposed to be no suffering in heaven. So what, from this standpoint, is the difference between heaven and earth?
Eric Clapton appears to think so (“Tears in Heaven”)! But I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone posit heavenly suffering.
The way I think of it is akin to a park ranger responsible for a wildlife park in Africa. They might manage a disease set to wipe out the cheetahs, they might clean the water from toxins not meant to be there. But too much interference impedes the nature of the animals. And though we are sad to see a lion eat a baby gazelle, we understand that’s just the way lions and gazelles are.
Of course the nature of humans is far more complicated than animals, and park rangers are neither omnipotent nor omniscient. I think that kind of framework is necessary, but not sufficient.
Ray
God is active within the mind of everyone. God suffers with us and when God is no longer active in the mind, we die.
I ve been involved at grass roots in medical humanitarian work here in Honduras. (NOT a missionary.) As I’d prepare joyfully to go to attend at clinic at 5.30a.m., I realized that I cared MORE about these people than thr Hebrew god did. I tried so very hard to “square that circle.” It’s been such a relief to know that NO “good god” is arranging all this suffering “for our own good.”
NO religion I’ve heard of is not based on unverifiable “beliefs.” If perchance a belief is verified, it is no longer considered a tenet of that religion,. It becomes Science.
As LaPlace told Napoleonn”God is not necessary in this hypothesis”
I discussed the issue of God’s salvation and people’s suffering in the book “Doomsday for Jesus: True Messiah Judges Scammer Jesus” and came to the conclusion that God is inactive and that He does basically not save us while we are alive, so we must save ourselves.
Bart…I love you. Lol…
To me.. if you are going to believe in Christianity, you have to be a universalist. And as a Christian I was OK with the suffering that I endured, but then why would the Bible tell you to pray to end the suffering? heal the sick ,raise the dead, etc. And then say you will suffer. That didn’t make sense and wasn’t univocal. Such good topics I wish I would have questioned 50 years ago. My life would have been a lot better.