What's the Alternative to the Problem of Suffering?

One of the biggest challenges Christians face from nonbelievers is why God allows innocent people to suffer. The question is key, especially since it holds a specific emotional impact in its posing. People have an intuitive understanding that the suffering of others seems out of sorts with the way things should be. If a loving parent wouldn't want his or her children to suffer and would do whatever is possible to help those children avoid suffering, wouldn't an all loving, all-powerful God act similarly?

Christians in conversations about the problem of evil have traditionally pointed to the fact that as free beings, human beings are themselves the reason for a lot of suffering others experience. Most evil is the result of people sinning, and one consequence of sinning is that other people get hurt. I once had a philosophy professor who conceded that the majority of human suffering was caused by other humans. He didn't think that answer solved the problem of evil, though. He said that even if one was to conclude that the free will of human beings is of enough value for God to allow evil to exist, it wouldn't explain the instances of natural evil in the world.

Real Natural Evils Do Exist

Moral philosophers draw a distinction between evils caused by the moral failings of people and those completely out of human control. Killings, rape, suffering from neglect, etc. are categorized as effects of moral evil while injury or death from natural disasters, infection, genetic diseases, and such are categorized as effects of natural evil1. My professor held that even if God allowed moral evils to facilitate free will, God was still directly culpable for allowing natural evils to cause so much pain and suffering.

Before we go too far, it's important to note that even much of what we may consider "natural evil" can actually be moral evil unknown. Take the uptick in birth defects and epilepsy inflicted on babies in the Upper New York state in the 1970s and 80s. It was the sinful actions of people years before who ultimately were to blame. Classifying earthquake deaths as natural evil when the death toll is really due to shoddy building structure construction is questionable at best. However, people really from suffer from maladies or conditions over which they have no control. Some people die in earthquakes even though there is nothing more one can do to reinforce their homes. Is God accountable for the suffering of these people?

The only way to avoid suffering

The challenge of natural evil sounds difficult to overcome. Why would God allow a world where tsunamis or infections can ravage people? Why would he allow droughts that make people starve? These are tough questions, but if you reflect upon the problem, you need to ask yourself what alternatives are there? I can think of only one way where the present world could exist with no natural evil; all people would need to be Superman by necessity. I don't mean they'd need to have costumes and x-ray vision. They would, however, need to be indestructible. They would need to be impervious to any natural calamity, simply shaking off the effects of the necessary plate tectonics 2. They would need to somehow have their biology not have food as a necessity for gaining energy. They would also need that biology to be impervious to any disease while still capable of maintaining those cellular functions required for growing or sustaining their organs. They would need to be supermen.

Here's the question, though. If you have such a race of supermen and that race is capable of moral evil, then how does one vanquish that evil? How do you punish others who are impervious to pain but delight in wickedness? How do parents teach their children about the consequences of wrong and the value of right? How does this world work where no one dies but they can still inflict the villainy of emotional torture on others?

Genesis and General Zod

These ideas are really not new. In fact, the Bible starts off with them right up front with the sin of Adam and Eve. Once humanity was infected by sin, God ejects them from Eden and guards the Tree of Life so human beings wouldn't be able to live forever in their fallen state. God was making sure that a race of indestructible sinful human beings wouldn't come about, because he knew that such a scenario wouldn't create a race of supermen, but a race of General Zods, bent on having their own way because they cannot be crushed by others. Such a world could easily result in more pain and suffering rather than less. In this sense, even the natural evil we experience is ultimately rooted in a moral failing.

Like a Monday morning quarterback, it's easy to object to the problem of suffering. Tougher is to think about what kinds of alternatives one may offer that would remove such suffering. A world without any suffering would mean a world of isolation, where one couldn't hurt others. It would mean a world where one wouldn't be able to punish evildoers. How does this make the human condition better? Only if the stain of sin is removed from the human heart would such a world be feasible. Until then, what we have is better than any alternatives I can imagine.

References

1. Calder, Todd. "The Concept of Evil." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford University, 26 Nov. 2013. Web. 09 Jan. 2017. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/concept-evil/.
2. Broad, William J. "Deadly and Yet Necessary, Quakes Renew the Planet." The New York Times. The New York Times, 11 Jan. 2005. Web. 9 Jan. 2017. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/11/science/deadly-and-yet-necessary-quakes-renew-the-planet.html.

Bioethics in the 21st Century (podcast)

We live in a confusing time. Sex is seen as recreational, while pregnancies are disposable. Then, infertile women will pay thousands of dollars for the latest treatments just to have a child. How should Christians make sense of all the new technologies out there? In this four-part series, Lenny reviews the various challenges in this Brave New World of bioethics.

• Bioethics in the 21st Century (Part 1)
• Bioethics in the 21st Century (Part 2)
• Bioethics in the 21st Century (Part 3)
• Bioethics in the 21st Century (Part 4)

You can subscribe to the Come Reason podcast via iTunes or through our RSS feed.

Testing for God with Invisible Dragons

In a recent debate between David Wood and Michael Shermer, Shermer put forth Carl Sagan's invisible dragon analogy to try and claim that the idea of an immaterial being is nonsensical. You can read the entire analogy here, but the basic rundown is Sagan proposes that he hears a dragon in his garage that is invisible so you can't see it, it is incorporeal so you can't spray paint it, it is cold-blooded and spews heartless fire, so you can't detect it thermodynamically, and so on. Sagan ends his analogy by asking "Now, what's the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all?"

Sagan and Shermer both think this is some kind of killer analogy. In the debate, Shermer asks, "If it's supernatural, if it's not measurable, then how do you know it's there? You can't just say 'I feel it in my heart' or 'it seems like it should be' or one of these logical sequences of infinite regress. No, no. We need actual empirical evidence." But it's Shermer's last statement that gives him and his position away. Why must the evidence be empirical?

By claiming something must be empirically measurable, Shermer stacks the deck. Only material things can be measured in this way. But there are a lot of things we know that exist that are completely incapable of being empirically measured. The concept of the color yellow, for instance. If I ask you to think about the color yellow, you have a real thought. That thought isn't material, though. It doesn't live in my brain. If one were to be placed in an fMRI machine, the machine may give a very coarse picture of the physical result of thinking of the color yellow, but the thought itself is immaterial.

Love, right and wrong, the number 2, and the laws of logic are all immaterial, but does that mean they are the same, as Sagan would put it, as nothing at all? Of course not! These are real concepts that cannot be measured materially.

However, there exist even certain material entities that cannot be measured empirically. Take electrons or quarks for instance. These are thought to be the fundamental particles of matter, but they are invisible by definition. Similarly, no microscope no matter how powerful will ever be able to photograph an electron, since to "see" one, it must give off a photon, which causes the electron itself to move to a different orbital. Physicists infer electrons and quarks from other observable effects.

But this is exactly what Christians do with respect to God. They don't just say "there's a God" like Sagan claims of his dragon. They recognize the fact that anything exists at all needs an explanation. (And for Shermer to really avoid an infinite regress, that something must necessarily be eternal by nature.  Dragons don't fit here.) They understand that quantum vacuums are not nothing and these vacuums themselves need an explanation. They see the emergence of consciousness accidentally from non-conscious material as inexplicable. They understand concepts like love and right and wrong are real and in order to be real they need to be grounded in something that transcends people's personal opinion. They know moral laws must come from a moral lawgiver to be prescriptive. Basically, they infer God from the creation He has made and the rational working out of ideas that they recognize.

While God may not be empirically directly measurable, it doesn't mean he isn't detectable. Anyone who is open to the evidence of reason and the created cosmos can see the evidence for God. Shermer would rather build straw men out of invisible dragons. Frankly, I can't see the difference between that and him offering no reasons at all.

The Need for Justice and the Problem of Evil

The search for justice runs through all of storytelling. We watch some nefarious villain executing his evil ploy and we hang on the edge of our seats hoping our hero will be victorious. There's something fundamental in the human spirit that wants to see good triumph.

This desire for justice is what attracts us to the adventure quest, like Peter Jackson's adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. There, Frodo Baggins is given a ring that holds the power of the evil Sauron, who seeks to wield it and rule Middle Earth. Because he bears this ring, Frodo assumes the dangerous responsibility of finding the path to destroy it. Frodo never asked for this assignment; circumstances thrust it upon him. Yet, he knows the quest is vital even if he may lose his life in the process.

In one poignant scene, Frodo is feeling the weight of his choice and laments to Gandalf about the evil Gollum, who is threatening their quest:

Frodo:	It's a pity Bilbo didn't kill him when he had the chance!
Gandalf:	Pity? It was pity that stayed Bilbo's hand. Many that live deserve death, and some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them, Frodo? Do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. Even the very wise cannot see all ends. My heart tells me that Gollum has some part to play yet, for good or ill before this is over. The pity of Bilbo may rule the fate of many.
Frodo:	I wish the Ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened.
Gandalf:	So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us. There are other forces at work in this world, Frodo, besides the will of evil. Bilbo was meant to find the Ring, in which case you also were meant to have it. And that is an encouraging thought.

In Frodo's complaint, we see a particular instance of the problem of evil. You may have heard someone complain about how a loving God could allow so much evil in the world. Frodo believes the world would be better if Gollum had been killed. It's easy to make the charge that there's too much evil in the world, but we don't know how the story of this world plays out. However, fans know that Gandalf is right; Gollum's existence does figure into the ultimate salvation of the Middle Earth.

Evil Gollum must exist in order for Frodo's quest to succeed and a greater evil vanquished. The Roman executioner's cruelty must also exist for the sacrifice of Jesus to succeed. It isn't a contradiction to say God exists and is in control even if evil hasn't been eliminated. We just haven't gotten to the end of the story.

*This article comes from my chapter entitled "Using Hollywood Blockbusters to Share Your Faith" in Sean McDowell's A New Kind of Apologist. You may purchase a copy here.

Image courtesy bandita and licensed via the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0) license

The silliness of claiming we were all atheists at birth

There has been a lot of talk in the past few months about "fake news." Fake news stories are those purported by some web site as real and shared by people who want them to be true, but have no basis in fact. They simply help confirm the bias of some group. Usually, the story gets repeated and simply because it appeared "in print" or from a semi-authoritative site it is accepted without question.

But, the phenomenon of believing outlandish claims because they conform to what we want to be true is not new. The Internet just helps to spread them more quickly. For example, take the idea that all people are born atheist. I saw a meme recently picturing a group of babies and a caption that reads "Atheists. Can't you just feel the evil of their ways?" Several show a baby being baptized while exclaiming, "Stop, I'm an atheist!" EvolveFish offers a bumper sticker for sale reading, "You don't become an atheist. You go back to being one." The most popular version takes a more negative tone in claiming "We are all born atheist until someone starts telling us lies."

With all their talk of being rational and "brights," I wonder how anyone in the atheist movement could buy into such a silly charge. No, we are not all atheists at birth. Newborns haven't yet developed the rational capacity for abstract belief. They are only concerned with their immediate needs: eating, discomfort, feeling safe, and the like. To claim that because they lack the capacity to understand the idea of God somehow makes them an atheist is akin to saying because they cannot yet understand the concept of round they must be considered flat-earthers. After all, flat earth believers only reject what they cannot see.

Desperately trying to bear no burden

Of course, one reason for the recent popularity of the claim that babies are born atheist is the desire by a lot of atheists to redefine the term atheism as something that is neutral; a term that makes no claims. But atheism does make claims, just as one who holds to a flat earth is making a claim. The earth must have some shape to it and as a person becomes aware of shapes he or she will no longer be neutral as to what they believe the shape of the earth is. They hold a position.

Similarly, as one becomes aware of the concepts like other minds exist, effects have causes, things that show evidence of design will have a designer, we must be able to explain our own origin, etc., then one will no longer be neutral as to the question of God. The person may not be "all in," that is 100% certain either for or against God's existence, but that doesn't mean he or she isn't making a judgment.

That's why it's impossible to take a position that says "We aren't going to teach our kids about any religion, but we'll let them make up their own minds." By modeling a life where God is meaningless, they are taking a position and they're teaching it to their kids. By claiming all children are atheists "until someone starts telling us lies," one is making a truth claim about God. It isn't neutral!

Atheism makes a knowledge claim about God's existence; therefore, one must teach his or her children there is no God. If atheism were the default position, then history would be littered with civilizations and cultures that were atheistic. But those don't exist. The entire record of human existence clearly shows that human beings have held to the belief there is some kind of divine power to which we owe our ultimate origin. Certainly, many have gotten things wrong—that's another argument. But to claim that all babies are atheists is silly and actually embarrassing for the movement.