SOUL FOOD:

The first time I remember being confronted with incomprehensible suffering I was about 4 years old. A friend who shared my name died in a fire inadvertently caused by her father.

Her fiery death was tragedy enough without the unintentional yet fatal actions of her father.

“What kind of God could allow something like this to happen?” I remember hearing adults around me ask.

It’s a thorny question that philosophers and theologians have been taking on for centuries. Bart Ehrman, a biblical scholar at the University of North Carolina, abandoned his evangelical Christian faith a number of years ago when he took it on.

Recently he has written a book titled, “God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question — Why We Suffer.” He has said he takes comfort only in the book of Ecclesiastes, believing its message that life is short and all we have so we should take all the pleasure possible from it while we can.

But the book is about how flawed that idea is. Ehrman seems to have skipped the last chapter. The chapter that begins, “Remember now your Creator in the days of your youth, before the difficult days come.”

The chapter that shouts “Meaningless! Meaningless! Everything is meaningless!” Meaningless, it means, apart from God.

“Here is the conclusion of the matter,” the book ends, “Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every deed into judgment, including every hidden thing, whether it is good or evil.”

God, says the author, is just. His laws teach us what is good and what is evil.

Nevertheless, faced with the suffering or death of a child or catastrophes like the recent earthquake in China or the cyclone in Myanmar, theodicy — the defense of God against charges that he either created or causes evil in the world — leaves many unconvinced and doubting.

Two weeks ago when I offered the views of some local clergy on the topic, a number of readers wrote to me criticizing those views or offering their own. I suspect some, like Ehrman, would find fault with any answer.

One reader copied me on an e-mail he apparently sent to like-minded friends, one of whom responded to him and also copied me.

The original writer complained that the explanation of evil and its subsequent pain and suffering entering the world when Adam and Eve rebelled against God “requires God to be an unforgiving vindictive bully who resorts to mass punishment.”

He expressed the objection of others in the strongest words.

His conclusion, though, rejects without argument the scriptural context of the rebellion of Adam and Eve.

In a world God created, a world Genesis says again and again “was good,” God created Adam and Eve. He created them in his image, with moral free will, the ability to do that which is godly and right and good or to do that which is ungodly and wrong and evil.

We often fail to envision the repercussion of our actions. I imagine Adam and Eve did.

Their choice corrupted their human nature spiritually, morally and physically.

It was so contrary to good, the image of God in them and in all creation was shattered.

The Gospel is the story of a God who “so loved the world,” that he acted to restore this shattered image, though suffering is clearly part of the restoration.

The Son of God himself had to become a man and be crucified.

He tells his followers, “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.”

He warned them they would be persecuted until he returns to judge the world and make all things new. Paul, who endured all manner of maltreatment and suffering, counseled, “In all things God works for the good of those who love him.”

However bad things look now, in the end it will make for the greater good.

My reader chalks it up to hogwash. The notion that God is a man-made concept explains things better for him.

Why do we suffer? He says — I’ll paraphrase — stuff happens. Find comfort in that.

His friend answered his objections to the scriptural perspective by explaining, “That’s why it’s called ‘faith;’ there [are] no requirements for reason, rationality, facts, logic or truth.” Perhaps he’s been reading a book or two by the “new atheists,” like Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens.

Like them, he simply attacks religion, without arguing for his premise. Faith can be blind or irrational, but it doesn’t have to be.

Convinced by scientific evidence of a designer of the universe, for example, the once atheist philosopher Antony Flew embraced theism. Belief in God can be rational even if not utterly certain.

In the current issue of a newsletter called “Solid Ground,” published by Stand to Reason, founder Gregory Koukl offers as an argument for God the self-evident principle that every effect requires an adequate cause and nothing can cause itself.

To this he adds cosmological, teleological and moral arguments: “A Big Bang (effect) needs a Big Banger (cause); design (effect) needs a designer (cause); moral law (effect) needs a moral law giver (cause).”

More arguments and resources on the problem of evil and whether God is good can be found on the Stand to Reason website, www.str.org.

Bart Ehrman abandoned his Christian faith contemplating theodicy, yet Oxford scholar C.S. Lewis — best known at the moment as the author of “The Chronicles of Narnia” — became a Christian because of it.

“My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust,” Lewis wrote in “Mere Christianity,” his defense of the Christian faith and its good God. “But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call something crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line.”

I found his reasoning stronger than “stuff happens.”

MICHÈLE MARR is a freelance writer from Huntington Beach. She can be reached at [email protected].