{"id":3476,"date":"2017-11-08T03:00:53","date_gmt":"2017-11-08T00:00:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/?p=3476"},"modified":"2017-11-08T03:00:53","modified_gmt":"2017-11-08T00:00:53","slug":"the-problem-of-evil-where-is-atheism-when-bad-things-happen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/3476\/the-problem-of-evil-where-is-atheism-when-bad-things-happen\/","title":{"rendered":"The problem of evil: where is atheism when bad things happen?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dinesh D Souza, The Greatness of Christianity: Table of Contents<\/a><\/p>\n

Cf. Dinesh D’souza, What’s So Great About Christianity<\/a>, at Amazon<\/p>\n

If Jesus could heal a blind person he happened to meet, then why not heal blindness?” <\/em>\u2014Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great<\/em><\/p>\n

I<\/strong>N SUGGESTING THAT ATHEISM <\/strong>is often driven by base motives, I do not mean to imply that there is not sincere unbelief. In this chapter I consider a problem that has baffled believers no less than unbelievers, one that poses a serious obstacle to belief in the Christian God. Horrible things happen in this world. Millions are put to death in concentration camps. Hurricanes and tsunamis unleash their murderous fury on unsuspecting populations. A psychopath opens fire on a university campus, killing innocent students. My friend Bruce Schooley, to whom I’ve dedicated this book, is battling to survive cancer. None of this seems to have any explanation. Voltaire railed against a divine being who would permit the 1755 Lisbon earthquake and all its devastation. Darwin was struck by nature’s cruel capriciousness, a theme Richard Dawkins stresses in his more recent anti- religious polemics. “The God of birds and trees,” Steven Weinberg writes, “would also have to be the God of birth defects and cancer.” He adds that for himself as a Jew, “Remembrance of the Holocaust leaves me unsympathetic to attempts to justify the ways of God to man.” Steven Pinker poses the dilemma in its classic form, “If the world unfolds according to a wise and merciful plan, why does it contain so much suffering?” Weinberg and Pinker raise the good question: if God exists, why does He allow any of it?<\/p>\n

The problem of evil and suffering is considered by many people to be the strongest argument against the existence of God. The reasoning goes like this: If God exists, He is all-powerful. If He is all-powerful, He is in a position to stop evil and suffering. But we know from experience that evil and suffering go on, scandalously, mercilessly, without even a hint of proportion or justice. Thus there cannot be an omnipotent being capable of preventing all this from happening, because if there were, He surely would. Therefore God does not exist.<\/p>\n

I agree that evil and suffering pose a serious intellectual and moral challenge for Christians. (Interestingly, in Hinduism and Buddhism there is no such problem. Hindus believe your suffering in this life is the consequence of your actions in a previous life.Buddhism holds that suffering is the product of egocentric desire and can be overcome through a dissolution of the self that has those desires.) When terrible things happen they seem more easily explained by God’s absence in the world than by His presence. But what few have noticed is that evil and suffering also pose a formidable challenge for atheists. The reason is that suffering is not merely an intellectual and moral problem; it is also an emotional problem. Suffering doesn’t wreck minds; it wrecks hearts. When I get sick, I don’t want a theory to explain it; I want something that will make me feel better. Atheism may have a better explanation for evil and suffering, but it provides no consolation for them. Theism, which doesn’t have a good explanation, nevertheless offers a better way for people to cope with the consequences of evil and suffering.
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\nI noticed this in April 2007 when the deranged student at Virginia Tech went on a homicidal rampage, perpetrating one of the worst mass killings in American history. In the aftermath of the carnage, even on the secular campus, atheism was nowhere to be found. Every time there was a memorial ceremony or a public gathering, there was talk of God, divine mercy, and spiritual healing. Even people who were not personally religious began to use language that was drenched with Christian symbolism and meaning.<\/p>\n

The problem is not with atheists, but with atheism. Of course, atheists were present among the victims and the mourners. I am not implying that they suffered less than anyone else. What I am saying is that atheism seems to have little to offer at a time like this. Consider this manifesto by Richard Dawkins in his book River Out of Eden: <\/em>“The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference.” Jacques Monod writes that to ascribe meaning or purpose to life is a kind of “animism,” like the primitive tribes who found spirits in stones. We are here, according to Monod, purely as a result of chance: “Our number came up in the Monte Carlo game.” In the same vein, Steven Weinberg notes that “the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.”<\/p>\n

Here we see the underlying horror of materialism: everything becomes dark and meaningless. We also see the materialist solution to the problem of evil: evil is not a problem, because evil does not exist. Life in this view is indeed a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. And if a crying mother asks what the purpose of it all is, Dawkins and Weinberg have no better answer than, “Sorry, there is no purpose for any of it. Life happens, and then it stops. That’s all there is to it.” I can see why my friend Bruce cannot bring himself to embrace atheism. Only God offers Bruce the promise of a life to come, of a soul that outlasts death. Atheism offers only extinction.<\/p>\n

When I wrote an article noting the absence of atheist sermons at the Virginia Tech ceremonies, I received a torrent of abusive e-mails from atheists. I was a jerk. I was a cretin. I should seek mental counseling. I was exploiting the tragedy in a deeply cynical way. Interestingly, few questioned my point that atheism provides neither consolation nor understanding in the face of evil or tragedy. One atheist conceded atheism’s limitations in this respect, but then angrily asked me if I preferred consoling lies and fairy tales to hard truths that we must learn to face.<\/p>\n

No, I don’t. But this presumes that the existence of evil and suffering has established that God does not exist. In reality, all it has shown is that evil and suffering have no explanation that we can figure out. Still, it’s possible that they serve a higher purpose not evident to us. Consequently we cannot treat atheism as an established truth. Not even modern science can claim such a secure status. One of the best arguments for modernscience is that it works, which is to say that it delivers the goods and meets our wants and needs. But this is precisely what I am claiming for religion in a time of evil and suffering. Religion works, which is to say it speaks to human longings and needs in a way that no secular language can. Just as science seems indispensable to make modern life go well, God seems indispensable when life goes badly or when we are staring death in the face.
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\nPragmatist William James put the matter with characteristic realism: Atheists are like people who live on a frozen lake surrounded by cliffs that offer no means of escape. They know that the ice is melting and the inevitable day is coming when they must plunge ignominiously into the water. This prospect is as meaningless as it is horrifying. The Christian too must endure the chill and the inevitability of death, but his faith enables him to endure them much better. When it comes to suffering, James writes, “Religion makes easy and felicitous what is in any case necessary.” When it comes to death, he adds, Chris- tianity offers at least the prospect of the afterlife and the chance of salvation. “No fact in human nature is more characteristic than its willingness to live on a chance. The existence of chance makes the difference … between a life of which the keynote is resignation and a life of which the keynote is hope.”<\/p>\n

While the argument from evil is often used to challenge God’s existence, in a strange way the same argument can be used as evidence for that existence. Consider this: why do we experience suffering and evil as unjust? If we are purely material beings, then we should no more object to mass murder than a river objects to drying up in a drought. Nevertheless we are not like rivers. We know that evil is real, and we know that it is wrong. But if evil is real, then good must be real as well. How else would we know the difference between the two? Our ability to distinguish between good and evil, and to recognize these as real, means that there is a moral standard in the universe that provides the basis for this distinction. And what is the source of that moral standard if not God?<\/p>\n

Even so, evil remains rationally inexplicable on any human account. Believers can appeal to the consolations of religion, but they are not spared the conundrum of why God.permits evil and suffering to occur at all. In the Bible, this is the question that Job boldly, angrily, and eloquently poses to God. Job’s point is that he is a good man, so why should he suffer? Why are his possessions taken from him? Why would God treat anyone this way, let alone one of His devoted servants?<\/p>\n

Rather than reply directly to Job, God asks what gives the creature the right to question its creator. Did Job make the universe? Did he give himself life? God seems to be pulling rank on Job here, and Job finally acquiesces, surrendering to God without having his questions fully answered. Thus Job becomes a biblical hero not of understanding, but of faith.<\/p>\n

We must press on, however, because Job’s question remains a valid one: why do evil things happen to good people? One answer is free will. God does not want to reign over an empire of automatons. Freedom of choice means that we are free to do good and we are also free to do evil. Man can be a saint only in a world where he can also be a devil. Thus the existence of evil in the world is entirely consistent with a God who despises evil but values freedom.<\/p>\n

God didn’t kill all those people at Virginia Tech, the shooter did. Why, however, didn’t God intervene and stop it? This is a deep question about God’s role in the world. Why doesn’t God make Himself manifest, especially when there are tragedies to be averted? Here’s one possible reason. Imagine if God had intervened to prevent the homicidal maniac fromdoing what he did. Leave aside the violation of free will. Just focus on the consequences. The shooter would be\u2014by miraculous intrusion\u2014disarmed, the shootings would have been prevented, and life would go on.
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\nIn other words, life would proceed as if God had not intervened in the first place. So God in this view becomes a kind of cosmic errand boy, who is supposed to do our chores and clean up our messes and we then wish Him a very good day and return to our everyday lives. But perhaps God’s purpose in the world is to draw His creatures to Him, and the empirical evidence is that tragedies like the one at Virginia Tech help to do that.<\/p>\n

At this point I can imagine the indignant outburst, “Are you saying that God causes horrible massacres to occur just so that people can turn to Him?” To repeat: God didn’t cause this to happen. Blame guns, blame the school’s security system, most of all blame the killer himself. But don’t blame God. As C. S. Lewis points out, most of the evil and suffering in the world has been produced by human beings with whips, guns, bayonets, gas chambers, and bombs. These crimes are not divinely inflicted but man-made. Even so, it is not unreasonable to suppose that there is a providential purpose behind history, and if human horrors show us our dependence on God’s love and restorative powers, that’s not such a bad thing. In no way is God responsible for evil; He is responsible only for using evil to bring forth good.<\/p>\n

Christians can point to the example of Christ to show that their God, far from being indifferent to evil and suffering, became man precisely for the purpose of enduring and overcoming it. In Christian theology God became man in order to take upon himself the sins of the world. Christ suffered unjustly in the same way that humans suffer unjustly, but to a much higher degree. For the Christian, therefore, to endure evil and suffering is somehow to share the passion of Christ. Ultimately Christ prevailed over evil and this is what the Christian also seeks to do, at least in his own life.<\/p>\n

So far this account has largely focused on moral evil. It does not account for “natural evil,” which is evil produced not by human beings but by nature itself. Here I am thinking of such things as hurricanes and cancer. So we must ask one more time: why do bad things happen to good people? The Christian answer is that there are no good people. None of us deserves the life that we have, which is a gratuitous gift from God. Bruce is dying, and in the process he is returning to God the life God gave to him. In this Bruce is not alone. As philosopher Peter Kreeft points out in his book Making Sense Out of Suffering, <\/em>we are all dying, relinquishing little bits of life every day, and while medical technologies can win us a short delay, they cannot prevent us from moving steadily, inexorably to our graves.<\/p>\n

I pray every day that God will cure Bruce. I realize, however, that even if this happens Bruce will not be spared death. He will live longer, but death will still catch up with him eventually, as it will with me and you and all of us. For this reason we all need a deeper kind of healing, which is the healing of the soul. The unbeliever will say that we must learn to face death, and in a natural sense that’s true. Death is the one certainty of life, and Bruce and you and I must all learn to accept that. The real question is whether death is the final chapter. The unbeliever insists that the promise of eternal life is a false one, but he does not know that.<\/p>\n

All I am trying to show here is that the only way for us to really triumph over evil and suffering is to live forever in a place where those things do not exist. It is the claim of Christianity that there is such a place and that it is available to all who seek it. No one can deny that, if this claim is true, then evil and suffering are exposed as temporary hardshipsand injustices. They are as transient as our brief, mortallives. In that case God has shown us a way to prevail over evil and suffering, which are finally overcome in the life to come.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dinesh D Souza, The Greatness of Christianity: Table of Contents Cf. Dinesh D’souza, What’s So Great About Christianity, at Amazon If Jesus could heal a blind person he happened to meet, then why not heal blindness?” \u2014Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great IN SUGGESTING THAT ATHEISM is often driven by base motives, I do not […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_disable_autopaging":false},"categories":[6702,6707],"tags":[7506,7470,7507,3086,7284,7508,6772,7509,7510,4902,693,7378,909],"class_list":["post-3476","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-thechrist","category-studies-thechristcontents","tag-capriciousness","tag-christian-god","tag-christopher-hitchens","tag-concentration-camps","tag-dinesh-d-souza","tag-evil-and-suffering","tag-existence-of-god","tag-friend-bruce","tag-religious-polemics","tag-richard-dawkins","tag-steven-pinker","tag-steven-weinberg","tag-unbelievers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3476","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3476"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3476\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3476"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3476"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3476"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}