Why Does God Allow Suffering?

I was an atheist before I heard “the argument from evil,” but I have to say that this remains one of the most compelling reasons to abandon god-belief (aside from the whole lack of evidence issue). I have read many responses to this argument by various Christian theologians and philosophers but have not found one I would consider satisfactory in explaining why the Christian god allows suffering.

I don’t know if I would say that the argument from evil is a compelling argument against the existence of gods in general, but where specific theologies are concerned, not least of all Christianity, it does often leave the theists to stick a foot in their mouth when they claim omnibenevolence or what have you.

The best – and worst – response that I’ve ever heard to the argument from evil is that all the suffering in the world is a test of one’s faith. It sounds good on paper, but consider: if a husband sliced off his wife’s fingers to test her love for him, we would frown upon his actions. Just because he’s “lord and saviour” doesn’t mean that this god fellow is getting off any easier.

I don’t see a logical problem or obvious horribleness associated with the idea that “disobeying God’s will is the greatest sin of all,” which Singer cites as one of the three reasons original sin is a terrible idea. Yes, it seems ludicrous that knowledge would be an inherently evil thing. Yes, it seems ludicrous that infants would be blamed for the actions of ancestors far removed, or even that children would be blamed for the actions of their parents. But as long as you accept the premise that there is a god and that he fits the Judeo-Christian description, what is so terrible about making disobedience to God the number one sin? What should be a higher priority? (Many possible suggestions are actually covered because God did tell us not to kill people, etc.) Seriously, do any of you have a better understanding of what he’s trying to say here?

I like the overall message and clarity with which Singer goes about making his arguments. This was the one thing that stood out to me as odd, though.

Julia – I agree with you that this sort of “ultimate sin” fits in with the environment where the Judeo-Christian religions were born. The clan was very important. The individual’s obligation to the clan was the single most important thing because it ensured survival. If we accept the understanding that religion originated as a projection of clan identity onto the universe, we can see how that would translate into the individual’s obligation to the clan’s deity.

If we look at it this way, we can see how the story of Adam and Eve might have originated. It explained the beginning, certainly. It also asserts the clan as better than all others (think of the fanaticism that surrounds football teams, for example). And finally, it reinforces the importance of clan loyalty, using god as both a symbolic stand-in for the clan and as a mascot for it.

Fast forward a few thousand years and we see that our clans have mostly dissolved (they still exist in the form of nationalism or football teams, but they certainly don’t remain in the West in the same way as they once did). What we have left is the symbol that we’ve forgotten to look at as just a symbol. The mascot has become the team. So the rules that were set up for the functioning of the clan now remain only in respect to the god.

So yes, Julia, you are correct that they make sense within the community of believers. But for those of us who have shed this last remnant of clan identity, it just doesn’t make much sense. And so I agree with you that this cannot be used as an argument against Christians because, as you say, it makes no sense to them why we wouldn’t approve. We must use common language if we are to make any headway. That’s why I focused my last comment purely on the good/evil issue because that’s something a Christian can understand if she/he chooses to acknowledge that the issue exists.

Asylum Seeker – I love your point. I also wonder how the whole Jesus thing fits into that. What was the point of him being sacrificed to save us from the punishment that comes with original sin if babies are still dying by the millions of disease and natural disasters – supposedly due to the inherent evil of humanity?

Reverend – but doesn’t that, in itself, destroy the idea of god? If god is nothing but some self-obsessed, insecure little child who needs to actually go and create friends to play with him and to be cooler than (I knew kids like that in school, they’d use their stuffed animals), is he really worth worshipping? Seems to me that a more appropriate response would be to shake our heads and walk away.

Aren’t we just playing right into a sick child’s hands? Aren’t we just encouraging a frame of mind that is harmful not only to us, his victims, but also to himself?

Grimalkin,

That is the exact point I was trying to make. Sometimes my sarcasm doesn’t translate well to print.

BTW, I like your point about the sacrifice of the christ.

The Reverend

All the arguments above seem to stem from the idea that God owes you a favor – that God is responsible for providing you a problem free, suffering free, evil free life. Perhaps you have understood it wrong all your life. Could the Christians who have told you this be lying to you? If God doesn’t owe you a problem free, evil free life then all the arguments above would be moot.

Go back and read the initial post and all the comments and notice how many of them basically say “I don’t believe in God because God clearly doesn’t do me (us) enough favors.

Perhaps we should stop thinking of God as a vending machine where we can just pull the knob and get a candy bar whenever we want it.

If you don’t want to believe in God, that’s fine but shouldn’t you have a better reason than saying its because he doesn’t do you enough favors?

God is basically a sadistic child with a magnafying glass and a watering hose. He uses the magnifying glass to burn the ants, then he uses the watering hose to drown them. God takes great delight in the death and suffering of the world. It makes god feel strong and powerful. Any time god starts to feel insecure god tortures and kills tens or hundreds of thousands or millions.

Julia,

I don’t see a logical problem or obvious horribleness associated with the idea that “disobeying God’s will is the greatest sin of all,” which Singer cites as one of the three reasons original sin is a terrible idea. Yes, it seems ludicrous that knowledge would be an inherently evil thing. Yes, it seems ludicrous that infants would be blamed for the actions of ancestors far removed, or even that children would be blamed for the actions of their parents. But as long as you accept the premise that there is a god and that he fits the Judeo-Christian description, what is so terrible about making disobedience to God the number one sin? What should be a higher priority? (Many possible suggestions are actually covered because God did tell us not to kill people, etc.) Seriously, do any of you have a better understanding of what he’s trying to say here?

a) It does away with the free will defence and sets up God as a divine dictator. God doesn’t want you to be good, he wants you to bend to his will, that sounds repellent to me. Singer is a strong advocate of liberty.

b) God has never told me not to kill anyone, I haven’t been contacted. Religions rely on the revelation of others with no rational basis to choose between one prophet or another. That’s a problem for religious belief, but it’s also a problem because it would seem as if God expects people to follow rules that they were not given.

c) The many suggestions are not covered. If God tells you to kill is it the right thing to do? There’s an obvious disconnect between what’s right and what God tells you to do. Authority, even the highest, is not justification.

Mark,

All the arguments above seem to stem from the idea that God owes you a favor – that God is responsible for providing you a problem free, suffering free, evil free life.

That’s what Singer is responding to, he makes it quite clear in the first paragraph.

If you don’t want to believe in God, that’s fine but shouldn’t you have a better reason than saying its because he doesn’t do you enough favors?

This is only meant to refute one type of God, put forth by Christians. We don’t have to have a better reason to not believe in God, because there is no reason to believe in God. We’re just pointing out that this type of God isn’t logically consistant, or that the God Christians love so much is a jerk.

It is possible to be some kind of deist, I suppose, and deal with the problem of evil that way: God exists, but he doesn’t give a shit about what we think of as suffering. The only remaining problem is our discontent with what we think to be injustice. Such a god doesn’t care about our sentiments or categories; this is how things are, and we had better just resign ourselves to it.

To Natalie I would say that the passage you quoted from Paul raises more questions that it answers. What is the “frustration” of the Creation, and does that include our suffering? Why did god subject the Creation to this frustration–was that necessary, and why? How can it be that the Creation was subjected to this frustration “. . . in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage . . “? Who is doing the hoping here? God? If god is hoping, then it’s not controlling. If it is not god that is hoping, then the syntax makes no sense.

“Julia: But as long as you accept the premise that there is a god and that he fits the Judeo-Christian description, what is so terrible about making disobedience to God the number one sin?”

Because it doesn’t really mean anything. An ethical reason would state why something is wrong, not cite merely who said it was wrong. Disobedience is one of those sort of “immoral by proxy” things that implies that there is some other, yet unstated reason why something is wrong. It can’t sensibly stand alone as a moral wrong in and of itself.

“Mark: “If God doesn’t owe you a problem free, evil free life then all the arguments above would be moot.”

This basically dodges the whole question. It’s not simply that life isn’t perfect, but that if God created the world, then there are a lot of very specific decisions made not only to cause suffering, but to cause a very particular amount of it, often in absurd degrees, and often intricately designed. If we have to explain the existence of malaria, for instance, in terms of the design of a creator, then that creator seems to have very specifically crafted an engine of torture: not merely failed to make everything “perfect.”

Furthermore, we are told that God is all powerful and all benevolent. Like it or not, that puts significantly higher burden on what we’d expect God to be like, and what we’d expect his creation to be like, than the sort of “well you can’t help or improve everything” attitude you describe.

One of the points I always bring up in this discussion is the difference between impoverished civilizations ravaged by disease and famine vs. ones that, while they have their problems, are not. A hypothetical God has choices to make as to where he wants any given person to be born into. If he wanted, no one would be born into the former type of civilization. So why is that not the case?

Pretty much all the objections to the problem of evil fail against this comparison. I think that, for instance, “free will” is a nonsensical concept and meaningless in this context. But it doesn’t matter if it is or if it isn’t: people in the “ok” civilization live and grow and die just fine without famine and disease, and without that lack of extreme misery in some way restricting their free will. In fact, there seems to be a lot MORE potential for whatever free will is in the “ok” society than in the famine and disease ravaged one, mostly because people have some time to think about things other than merely starving to death. And so we already know that the “ok” society can fulfill whatever mysterious theological particulars God wants from lives lived, since plenty of Christians live and die and are accounted good believers in those societies. People there aren’t perfect, but they also seem to get along just fine without abject misery. So why do the former, miserable civilizations societies even exist? Why have a world in which those conditions can and do exist?

One of the more reasonable reasons I’ve heard for the existence of suffering is that suffering causes people to learn and grow, and without suffering humans wouldn’t actually get very far. My response to this is that if this is the case, then the question is why God would create a world in which we have to suffer to learn. I haven’t gotten an answer to this one.

One of the funniest explanations for god creating evil is in this video by catholic crackpot Father Corapi.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2PsB5T5Ndo

According to him, evil exists to bring about a greater good.

OK, I have to wade into this one. Let’s play the devil’s advocate if I can by presenting a Christian viewpoint.

There is something in Christian theology sometimes called the Angelic Conflict. (I know that any time I bring this up, some Christians start yelling that its non-sense or they never heard of it – well, I can’t help what is taught church to church) The short and dirty explanation of this theological concept is this:
Sometime in an unknown eternal past, god created angels. The highest ranking and closest to God, Satan, rebelled because he wanted to be like god himself. (According to this theory, the original sin was pride.) Satan rebelled and 1/3 of the angels followed him into rebellion. God defeated them and threw them out of heaven and condemned them to eternal separation. Satan basically appealed his sentence and God created mankind as the appeal trial. Satan won round 1 when he caused the fall in the garden and even since he has been in charge of the world, trying to make it into a place as perfect as God could but without God’s help.
So according to this theory, evil exists in the world not by Satan’s intention but because of his inability to match God. Basically, this theology says that the thousands of free wills and the forces of nature work as they work and the land lord can’t handle it.
This is the Christian viewpoint I was raised with and though I don’t like it very much (I don’t like being a pawn in anyone’s game) it at least takes into account most of the aspect of reality.

One thing that I have a problem with in all of the counter or not Christian arguments is that there seems to be an assumption that god/God/any god is obligated to alter weather patterns or interfere with free will. What I mean is that someone always brings up something like the floods in Bangladesh, the Typhoon in Myanmar or the earth quake in China as examples of evil. How is this evil? These are acts of nature. Because people suffer as the result of living in a poorly built shack in a flood zone or from a lack of re-bar in a earthquake zone or in a poorly built shack in the beach in a typhoon prone area is not the fault of any deity. Perhaps you can’t expect people to be able to move or build a better houses but you can and should expect them to learn. They don’t. I see this a failure of societies and governments not gods. The government repress the people and the economies for their own power madness. The people can’t afford to build better, safer buildings and the governments fail to impose proper building codes and standards.
I know this is a divergence but I don’t think that suffering and evil are related. Evil is the willful intent to do harm or even (can’t leave my ex out) the persistent self-deluded attempts to do good that cause harm in the end.
I find the idea of an involved god inadequate to reality. The things people claim to be the positive answering of prayer, a 60 year old cancer patient being put into remission, and the failure of a god to free a 15 year old Vietnamese sex slave from her torments… well you get the idea.

Escualidus Arrechus said,

If you don’t want to believe in God, that’s fine but shouldn’t you have a better reason than saying its because he doesn’t do you enough favors?

And if Christians want me to worship their god, shouldn’t they have a better reason than “he gave you this half-baked, shitty life”?

… and that he will torture you for eternity if you don’t?

~David D.G.

Interrobang,

I was not defending the stance, I was just putting it out there as one perspective. I am familiar with this mind set and I can tell you that those who believe this do not see it as a violation of the “all-knowing God”. The theology separates the omniscience of god form the fore-knowledge of god. They say that god knows all that is potential and what will be without conflict.
I know that this makes your head hurt but there it is.

As for the “all-powerful god”, it is seen as a test of man’s free will. Satan won because man chose him.

Once again, not defending it – just throwing it out there.

When I say that we can expect people to learn I was leading into the thing about the failure of governments and societies. I don’t think that you can escape the weather. If a hurricane hits southern California it may kill 5 or 6 people and do a lot of damage but the same storm hitting Myanmar will kill 10s of thousands. This is a failure of that society and government to create the infrastructure that the people need to live safely. We can argue endlessly about why it is as it is, that’s not my point. I was trying to draw a distinction between suffering and evil. The evil may be the motives of an oppressive government that fails its people. The suffering is the result of the weather.
I would love to see the people throw off the oppressors and build a better nation – it can be done, look at Singapore or Taiwan.

Concerning theodicy, lit. “divine justice”, which is the notion of trying to explain the existence of evil (including suffering from natural causes) with the existence of a benevolent deity, I consider only two philosophical arguments to be somewhat compelling in anyway (though as an atheist, I don’t accept either).

The first is that the “inconsistent triad” describing the Christian God; ie, that God is all-powerful, all-knowing and all-benevolent, is exactly that, and God cannot be omniscient or omnipotent. The second is Leibniz’s argument that we live in the “best of all possible worlds”, and God’s perfection and benevolence manifest in that he chose the best possible world for us instead of a far worse one.

Most other arguments for theodicy have pretty much been discussed by Singer’s article or other commentors, and rightly dismissed.

John McLeod, don’t you realize that you are reasoning and arguing in a box? You throw out terms like “God,” “man,” “nature,” “free will of man,” “free will of nature,” “evil,” “omnipotent,” and ideas like the autonomy of God, of man, of nature, the incarnation, vicarious suffering, salvation, grace, sins, and the kingdom of heaven. These are just metaphors of a myth. None of these has any meaning for me; none of them can be demonstrated. You have adopted a system of invented ideas, and are building logical arguments from them, and since the ideas are meaningless, so are the conclusions you make from them. It’s self-evident that if people can invent an omnipotent and good God, and other such things, they can surely concoct arguments to counter any logical inconsistencies arising from them.

“. . . a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

Darryl

well than why not look past the terms, and look at what I’m saying about the arguments being made. I did’nt mean to offend you by using terms, but I saw others using terms like God and angels to describe versions of christian theology and I thought that it would be ok for me to use terms that I use to describe my beliefs too. If you want fact in a religious disscussion you wont find it. Faith is necessary for any belief involving the existence of God, since he cannot be proven or disproven, and faith in the end is illogical and devoid of fact. I don’t see the harm in believing in god if he cannot be proven or dissproven. There is an old hebrew saying that says “it is better to believe in a god and find out that there isn’t one than to not believe in a god and find out that there is one.”

about my last comment. It may seem like I’m implying that god is a constant and I know you don’t recognize that and that you don’t recognize sin. I don’t mean to offend anyone or force my beliefs on anyone I just wanted to state how I see the existance of god.

Cipher

How does he hold us accountable if he dosen’t cause our suffering? I don’t think that innaction and action are the same thing. If you are dealing with a friend who is a drug addict, you may allow him to suffer when you practice the necessary type of “tough love”, which many people have to practice. Only his choices can save him from the addiction, in the end he has to choose to get help, whether you try to help him with an intervention or not it is still his choice in the end. If you want to bring other people into the picture too, say your friend then goes out and stabs someone in a drugged craze, or in trying to get money to feed their addiction, then are you responsible for that persons death, because you didn’t let your friend live in your appartment and snort cocaine all day. I think you also imply that the death of Jesus ties in with original sin, but not all christians believe in original sin. there are two lines of thought that I have heard of for such christians, the first is that Jesus’ death was neccessary to save people who are sinners, and that people become sinners later on in life. The second is the one that I think is holds more water and that is that the death of jesus was not necessary, but innevitable, as his teachings were against those of the time and challenged the power structure. In a sense jesus was going to die, but it is not his death, but his life that saves us. What he teaches us that is more important, then that his blood was ever spilt.

well I think that Jesus did save us from sin in the sense that if we follow his teachings and form a relationship with god, then we will not lead a life that is sinful. As far as its conventionality is concerned that may define on what you consider conventional. there are many brands of christianity, and I tend to follow Arminian (Jacobus Arminius) and Weslyan (John Wesley) theology more closely because they are what I find makes sense to me. My pastor also espouses this theology and some people at my church do too. anyway I really am enjoying this conversation, but i am worried about how off topic this discussion is going, should we look for another place to discuss it, or just keep going on this page?