The Problem of Suffering
From a different angle
The tagline for this Substack is ‘diving deep to address cultural chaos’. My view is that in order to respond to the confusion in wider culture, we need to engage with the religious question.
The problem of suffering is, in my view, by far the most difficult problem for religious thinkers to respond to. One way of thinking about the problem is by considering what’s known as the inconsistent triad:
1) God is good.
2) God is all-powerful.
3) Suffering exists.
All three cannot be true, says the sceptic. If God is good, he wants to prevent suffering, and if God is all-powerful, he can prevent suffering. Suffering exists; therefore, a good and all-powerful God does not exist.
A common response to the problem puts forward reasons God may have for allowing suffering in the world. These reasons may include free will, character development, natural laws, etc. I won’t go into these reasons here. But I’m persuaded that there are good reasons for allowing suffering. So, in that sense, I don’t think the problem of suffering is insurmountable.
Yet suffering does bother me, but for a different reason.
The world we live in is brutal. Psychopaths prey on the vulnerable. Cancer cuts life short. Mental illnesses leave people in turmoil for decades. Natural disasters wipe out groups of people. Three of my friends died when I was younger: one was caught in an avalanche whilst hiking; one fell from the top of the fourth floor of a staircase whilst on a year abroad in Russia; one died of hypothermia whilst stranded in rough water without a wetsuit. Brutal.
Many of those who suffer are Christians who pray, trust in God, ask for guidance. Clearly, though, God does not always protect or guide us. Some of my friends who died were praying Christians.
I’m struck that we do not always want God to protect and guide us. If God always protected us, there’d be no need to take care crossing the road, as we’d be confident that no harm would come to us. If God always guided us, there’d be no need to take a map into the mountains, as God would direct our steps. This seems absurd; we intuit that it’s good for us to learn to protect and guide ourselves.
But if we live in a brutal world, we need to become highly skilled at protecting ourselves and making solid life decisions. We need to know when to avoid contact with aspects of the natural world, and who to trust and who to avoid.
So, what really bothers me about suffering, is not that God allows it—for I can grasp reasons why he might—but that it seems to leave redundant any talk of God protecting and guiding us.
Does the Christian faith claim that God protects people from harm and guides them towards a flourishing life? In one sense, it seems not. Jesus was crucified. Many of the apostles were martyred. And we know as a matter of fact that some people who trust God suffer, not on account of their faith (as the apostles did), but simply at the hands of evil men or natural disasters.
Yet we find in the Bible suggestions or assurances of God guiding and protecting us. Consider these passages:
Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding;
in all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight.Proverbs 3: 5 – 6
Fear of man will prove to be a snare,
but whoever trusts in the Lord is kept safe.
Proverbs 29: 25
“Because he loves me,” says the Lord, “I will rescue him;
I will protect him, for he acknowledges my name.”
Psalm 91:14
The Lord will keep you from all harm—
he will watch over your life.
Psalm 121: 7
How are we to interpret such verses, when we have ample evidence that God does not always protect or guide us? What’s more, if the world is a brutal place, are we not lulled into a false sense of security by the suggestion that God will protect and guide us? Wouldn’t we better off realising that disaster may be right around the corner—as it was for my three friends—and prepare for that, so that we might avoid it?
A friend of mine offered an interesting response to the latter question. I lock the doors of my apartment at night. To leave the doors open would be foolish. But why not put several locks on the doors and on the windows? My friend made the point that while protecting ourselves is good, over-protection is counter-productive, as it requires time and energy and it will not secure our safety; we may put six locks on the door, but if the intruder drives a car through the door, the six locks won’t help. No matter how much we protect ourselves, we cannot fully insulate ourselves against danger.
I think my friend’s point is a good one. Over-protection is counter-productive; it wastes time and cannot guarantee safety. So, obsessing over self-protection, and protection of our families, is not healthy.
Part of the issue here is that I’ve witnessed Christian environments in which people make foolish decisions because they ‘trust God’ and ‘lean not on their own understanding,’ rather than think carefully and critically about the decisions they make.
So, I’m left with two questions:
1) How do we interpret Bible verses which suggest that God will protect and guide us, when there is ample evidence that he does not always do so?
2) What does it mean to trust in God for guidance in life? And is this compatible with thinking critically and pragmatically as we navigate life, aware of the brutal conditions of the world we inhabit?
I’ll leave these puzzles here. I’ll write about this topic again, hopefully with answers in hand.