Why Suffering? The Case Against God

Natural tragedies naturally elicit religious questions. If there is a God, what kind of God permits death by earthquake, as we have seen recently in such catastrophic proportions in India?

This question also arose in the 18th century after Europe’s greatest modern earthquake. In 1755 the beautiful Portugal port city of Lisbon collapsed into flotsam and flames atop two colliding continental plates. Sixty thousand died. And all over Europe and America people wondered about a benevolent, all-powerful God.

This wonderment found theoretical expression in philosophical theology as the problem of evil or the problem of the suffering of the innocent. The problem lies in the apparent incompatibility between an all-good, all-powerful God on the one hand, and the existence of human and animal suffering on the other.

Presumably a good and powerful God would not create or allow suffering. In the face of this problem, philosophical theology devised defenses of God. The trouble is, the defenses weren’t all that convincing.

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But maybe that doesn’t matter. Let’s have a look at them and see. I am going to explain the defenses and their weaknesses with a little courtroom theater. Suppose that God is the defendant here, on trial for the suffering of humanity. You are the jury.

Prosecutor: Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the defendant is purported to be benevolent and all-powerful. If this is so, why would the defendant allow such human suffering as is occasioned by the earthquake in India, to mention just one of the natural media of sorrow that afflicts humanity? I suggest to you that the defendant is not what the defendant is purported to be.

Defense: My client does indeed possess the attributes of benevolence and power. However, there is another force at work here, a force of evil, which seeks at every turn to thwart the good intentions of my client.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, it is that force, that entity, and not my client, who has performed the actionable offense here.

Prosecutor: Is this evil force as powerful as the defendant’s?

Defense: Of course not. But my client allows suffering to take place for various reasons. Suffering builds character and educates by inculcating empathy.

Prosecutor: Perhaps a little suffering builds character, but why so much suffering? We can learn everything we need to know about pain from a paper cut. Why an earthquake? And by the way, why does suffering fall so disproportionately upon the world’s poor? Does their suffering educate and edify us?

Defense: I’m afraid it’s a matter of just desserts. Suffering is deserved. It is a punishment traceable to a primordial calamity, an indictable offense, perpetrated by our first parents.

Prosecutor: Is there any existing system of jurisprudence that indicts children for the offenses of the parents? The grandparents? The great grandparents? To do so would be to call injustice justice. Moreover, the punishment is indiscriminately meted out: not all have suffered equally.

Defense: Suffering is a result of free will. People choose it.

Prosecutor: Who chooses an earthquake? Or schizophrenia? Or fetal deformation? And by the way, animals don’t choose suffering, and yet they suffer greatly too. Is their pain simply gratuitous?

Defense: The best defense of my client is the fact that the end will justify the means. That is, my client has in mind for us a future so disproportionately euphoric compared to that of our present state that the sufferings of our present state will pale in comparison.

Prosecutor: But not every person who suffers and no animal will enjoy that future euphoric state, will they? Furthermore, who of us would create that future if we knew beforehand that getting there would entail small children being crushed to death?

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You are supposed to get the feeling that the defenses are not airtight. But do believers really need airtight defenses for suffering? Do any of us need theories that make other people’s suffering more palatable to us?

Any absolutely compelling answer to the problem of suffering risks producing moral inactivity. When hurt happens, these defenses, by making hurt meaningful, risk cutting the nerve of a moral responsibility to ease that hurt.

I have heard a preacher say that an earthquake was a punishment for immorality. How could anyone think this without falling into smug indifference to suffering?

Deadly earthquakes, diseases, and other natural disasters will always test faith in God. But the answers to the test bring their own problems. Perhaps the believer is better off simply living with the dissonance of two apparently contradictory realities: God is and suffering is.

Better to ignore the theoretical problem of suffering and join the struggle to ameliorate its concrete effects.

On Faith is a forum for Orange County clergy and others to offer their views on religious topics of general interest. Submissions, which will be published at the discretion of The Times and are subject to editing, should be delivered to Orange County religion page editor William Lobdell.