The Problem of Suffering

This month I have been reading the Book of Job.  The dating of Job is unclear, but it is often called one of the oldest books of the Bible. Job responds to the question of how, if God is both good and omnipotent, can he allow suffering in the world?  Or, if there is suffering in the world then a good, omniscient, omnipotent God can’t exist. Many people have struggled with this problem. For instance, David Hulme writes about Samuel Beckett, the Irish writer of absurdist plays such as Waiting for Godot. In 1954 Beckett spent three and a half months with his brother Frank, who was dying of lung cancer. The experience was harrowing, the passage of time endless, the grief acute, the depression profound. Another biographer, Samuel Cronin writes, “[Beckett] spoke of his brother’s sufferings and the cruelty of a god, if there was a god, who could preside over such a world.”

Philosophers and theologians have pondered this question deeply.  Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) is a good example.  He was a prodigious polymath, a mathematician who (along with Newton), invented calculus. He was “a historian, a poet, a legal theorist, a diplomat, a cryptographer, and a philosopher who thought it possible to reconcile theology with metaphysics and science.

A preeminent man of letters, he was also a cosmopolitan writer of letters, exchanging about fifteen thousand of them with more than a thousand correspondents in French, German, and Latin.”  Leibniz’ philosophical optimism is defined by his phrase “This is the best of all possible worlds,” found in his book Theodicy, and thoroughly pilloried in Voltaire’s Candide. Leibniz argued that because God is benevolent, all-knowing, and all-powerful, this MUST be the best of all possible worlds, and evidence to the contrary only reveals our ignorance.  For example bee stings create pain, but bees are necessary to agriculture and their stingers protect them.

I found a number of interesting mini-lectures on Youtube that present the philosophical arguments, which are mostly arguments in logic. Start with the following argument.

1. God exists and is wholly good, omnipotent and omniscient
2. Suffering exists
3. There are no non-logical limits to what an omniscient, omnipotent being can do (He cannot, for example, create a rock so big that he cannot lift if)
4. A wholly good being always eliminates suffering as far as he can unless he has a good reason to allow it (for example, a parent might give her child an injection which causes suffering to the child at the time but is ultimately good).
5. Therefore, God will eliminate all suffering that can be eliminated (is logically possible) unless he has a good reason.

What suffering can God not eliminate?

1. Suffering deriving from the sins of others or from our own sin, because he has given us free will.  So if we smoke in bed, fall asleep and burn down the house around us, God cannot protect us from our own mistakes. On a larger scale, God cannot eliminate the suffering caused by Hitler and Stalin and Pol Pot, for the same reason.
2. Suffering that comes from the regularity of his creation (the fact the creation is based on a regular set of cause and effect rules).  For example, life requires water and water is wet and if we are submerged in it for a sufficient time we will drown.

But in the end, we are left with God’s explanation to Job in chapters 40 and 41.  This explanation is simple: “I am God; you are not.”  Or as Paul says in Romans 11:33 “Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God!  How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out!”

This can be put in a more formal logical argument, concluding that the evidence for unjustifiable suffering is weak, thus leading us to conclude that an omniscient, omnipotent, benevolent God cannot probably be discounted by the suffering in this world. This is because we cannot know whether any suffering is unjustifiable, since we do not know the mind of God.  (For a detailed discussion of this philosophical conclusion see Nick Trakakis).

In a later post, I will turn to the question of why the Bible says suffering produces perfection.  As Paul writes in Romans 5:

Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, ² through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we boast in the hope of the glory of God. ³ Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; ⁴ perseverance, character; and character, hope. ⁵ And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.