No One Cares About Your Damn Religion

[Fortinbras Armstrong]

56. The Problem of Evil is easy to answer.

The standard explanation of evil is that we have free will, so that we should choose the good of our own accord, thus furthering God’s glory. That there are those who do not choose to do good is their fault, not God's.

No, the actual question is the "Problem of Pain". Evil is those things which people do which are wrong: Pride, anger, envy, greed, lust, sloth, gluttony, etc. Pain is "the thousand natural shocks our flesh is heir to": Disease, tornadoes, man-eating-sharks. we have no real answer to the Problem of Pain. Some have said that God allows suffering to teach us lessons and make us better. Thus, we have disappointment to teach us perseverance, pain so we learn to keep our hands out of the fire, unkindness from others to help us grow in charity, and so on.

The problem here is the "and so on." Famine, to teach us what? Earthquakes, for what reason? Cancer, to improve us how? The whole bleeding, dying, screaming, lying, cheating, rotting carcass of the world to uplift us to what end?

This simply does not work. For a few great souls, poverty may be a blessing; for everyone else, it is a curse. Now and then, a terminal disease ennobles, most of the time, it is just rotten. God as a teacher who uses such methods makes him the warden of the worst run penitentiary of all. T S Eliot described this in his poem "East Coker":

The whole earth is our hospital
Endowed by the ruined millionaire,
Wherein, if we do well, we shall
Die of the absolute paternal care
Which does pursue us everywhere.

For Christians, suffering remains impenetrable and incomprehensible, and provokes rebellion. Nor will the Christian blasphemously claim that God himself required Jesus' death as compensation for what we make of ourselves. Suffering may be intrinsic to the human condition; but it is not inherent in the grand design God has for the universe. Given God as creator and shepherd, and given the divine presence in the world in the person of Christ, suffering of the innocent is unfathomable.

Even in their denials, skeptics sometimes show a better appreciation for the idea of God than do believers. They take seriously the contradiction between a loving God and the reality of evil and pain. Believers do not always face the gulf between evil and pain and an all-powerful God who opposes them. Reason fails before suffering and evil. All attempts to explain and interpret their existence, even in the context of Jesus’ saving work, seem to treat evil on the same level as good, as if it had a right to exist. The proper reaction to suffering and evil is to offer resistance, to act in a way meant to turn history to good effect. The Scriptures do not explain suffering and evil, but call on Christians to resist it and eradicate its causes.

Just as an aside, one of my favorite science fiction stories is Poul Anderson's "The Problem of Pain." In it, Anderson posits a monotheistic alien race with a concept of God that answers the problem of pain, but cannot explain why there is evil.