THEODICY: THE PROBLEM OF PAIN AND SUFFERING

Q: Theodicy is the Christian apologetic defense of the seeming contradiction between the belief that God is omnibenevolent, and yet he created a world with a surfeit of pain and suffering.  This seeming contradiction has been one of the primary reasons why individuals turn away from belief in a theistic god.

A: In my case my apostasy was the result of an irreconcilable conflict between the evidence of science, on the one hand, and the fundamentalism of the Seventh-day Adventist church in which I was raised, on the other.  It was only later that I came to think about and to understand the logic problems inherent in theodicy.

Q: You have stated that the problems with theodicy largely arise from the New Testament description of God as omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent.

A: Right.  Christians essentially painted themselves into a corner when they converted God from an Old Testament deity with a complex personality that could include jealousy, petulance, vindictiveness, and bloodlust to one that became synonymous with love.  Indeed, some of my Christian friends are fond of reciting that “God is love.”

Q: Which means what?

A: Frankly, I’m not sure what that’s supposed to mean, and I’m not sure that Christians have thought through its meaning either.  They seem to repeat the statement as some sort of mantra, as if its meaning—and truth—are self-evident.

Taken literally, the statement draws an equivalence between a deity and a human emotion.  Are they saying that God is an emotion?  Are they saying that love is some sort of thing that God puts into us rather than simply being a name for a complex emotion that originates in our humanity?  Maybe I’m lacking in poetic sensibility or maybe it’s another example of very imprecise thinking.

Q: OK, let’s get back to the theodicy problem.

A: Right.  So the problem, stated simply, is why an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving deity, who presumably could have designed creation in any manner imaginable, would choose to create a world that allowed for pain and suffering.  Why wouldn’t such a deity create a world in which pain and suffering simply do not exist?

As I said, this wouldn’t have been as much of a problem for the Old Testament God who wasn’t necessarily all-powerful or all-knowing and clearly was not all-loving.  And one could imagine a deity who might be all-powerful, or at least powerful enough to have created the world, but who simply is not all-loving or, worse, is malevolent.  Christians, however, have cast their lot with an all-loving New Testament God, and now they have to defend him against the pain and suffering that we witness daily.

Q: So let’s look at some of the defenses of theodicy.  One argument is that the human condition is really a battleground between God and Satan and it is Satan and the forces of evil that are responsible for all of the misfortune, pain, and suffering that occur in the world.

A: Well, I suppose that that argument conceivably could work for some manmade disasters, such as wars, car accidents, and chemical spills, but I don’t think it works for natural disasters.  Consider, for example, the 2004 Southeast Asian tsunami that took the lives of over 200,000 people.  No one is saying that tsunamis—or tornadoes, hurricanes, or earthquakes—are contrary to the laws of nature.  Rather, they are simply the natural result of the operation of those fundamental laws, the very laws of physics that supposedly God designed and that are built into the very fabric of our physical world.  Perhaps even more poignant, the same is true for health disasters, such as childhood leukemia, pancreatic cancer, and Alzheimer’s disease.  And earlier the same could be said for pandemics such as bubonic plague and smallpox.  So if God is responsible for creating the world, then presumably he is responsible for setting up these natural and health disasters, unless one were to make the absurd argument that for some reason God permitted Satan to modify the laws of nature.

Q: Probably the most prominent Christian defense is what could be called the free will argument.  This defense states that God could have created a world without suffering but this would have required that we not have free will.

A: Right.  In effect, this defense argues, God could have created us simply as automatons--robots or computer programs--that would carry out whatever instructions we were coded to perform.  Presumably, we as robots would remain sinless, and therefore suffering would not need to be a part of that world.  Instead, God chose to give us free will.  Unfortunately, the argument goes, humans used their free will to sin and thereby brought pain and suffering into the world and upon themselves.

Q: Of course, you don’t believe that we have free will.

A: Correct.  But setting that issue aside for the moment, I think there are other problems with this defense.  First, if God were truly omniscient, then he would have known that we would fail the free will test.  Why would he engineer an experiment that he knew was doomed to failure?  Moreover, this argument seems to sell God short on his ability to devise a world that includes free will but that avoids suffering.  Correlative to that, for those who believe in heaven, aren’t they saying that in heaven we will presumably continue to have free will but without any suffering?  So if God could do it for heaven then, why couldn’t he do it for earth now?  This defense also runs into the problem mentioned above that pain and suffering as a result of natural disasters and disease are simply part and parcel of the universe that God supposedly set up.


Q: Then there’s the defense of theodicy set up in the Old Testament book of Job.  Job is in good health, righteous, and highly successful.  But God, pursuant to a bet with Satan, allows Job’s life to come to ruin.  Job’s health is destroyed, his family are killed, and his fortune is lost.  When Job complains, God points out that he, God, as well as the nature and purpose of his creation, are beyond Job’s or humanity’s understanding.  In other words, humans simply don’t have the intelligence to understand the nature of God’s creation or the reasons why pain and suffering form part of that creation.

A: I find this defense to represent both the best and the worst of arguments.  On the one hand, it appeals to my sense that, while we have come to understand a lot of things through the application of reason and science, there will always remain a great deal that we do not know and perhaps will never know.  We are, after all, only human.

On the other hand, it is an example of the old cop-out: We don’t know of a good reason for pain and suffering, so let’s just say that God must have a great plan for us and in the end the plan will work out for the best.  We simply don’t have the understanding or intelligence to comprehend it.  Sometimes bad things have to occur for even better things to happen down the road.  We need to trust God on this, etc., etc.  This is essentially the defense that Voltaire satirized through the character of Dr. Pangloss in Candide.

In one sense this argument is irrefutable.  It is saying that we don’t know and we aren’t smart enough to figure it out.  All I can say is that some arguments are simply not logical. In my view it just is not logical to claim the God is both omnipotent and omnibenevolent.  The New Testament theistic God is a contradictory construct.

Q: So what is your bottom line?

A: My view on pain and suffering is that it is simply part of the natural world.  Pain is the way that our bodies signal that something is wrong and that we need to take action to correct the situation.  An example is touching something that is hot enough to burn us.  By registering pain, our bodies are telling us to do something--stop touching the hot object--to avoid injury or further injury.  We evolved the ability to experience pain because that ability gave us an evolutionary advantage over our competitors.  Our ancestors who could experience pain were more likely to do whatever was needed to eliminate the pain and to stay healthy.  As a result, they were able to have more offspring carrying that genetic trait who, in turn, perpetuated the ability to feel pain through genetic transmission.

In sum, if God designed and created the world and is in fact omnibenevolent,  omnipotent, and omniscient, then, virtually by definition, he would not have created a world filled with pain and suffering.  Couldn’t he have used his omniscience to foresee how his world would turn out and do what needed to be done from the outset to avoid pain and suffering?  Alternatively, assuming God can see down the road, why doesn’t he intervene as needed to prevent suffering on an ongoing basis?  Indeed, anyone who believes in miracles is asserting that God does in fact intervene from time to time to avert such suffering.  In a sense, that is the essence of a miracle.  So why doesn’t God just routinely intervene to eliminate suffering?


© 2018 John M. Phillips