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Mine eyes do fail with tears-Roy Williams on the answers in the Bible to the problem of evil

6:45am Sunday, 30th October 2011

Roy Williams on the answers in the Bible to the problem of evil
Bad things happen in the world. Ghastly, terrible things, like genocide, paedophilia and the carnage of war. There are shocking natural calamities and the countless daily travails of individual human beings.
Perhaps worst of all is the creeping evil of apathy. According to the World Hunger Education Service, the human race produces enough food to feed everyone on the planet, but 925 million people are undernourished. Poor nutrition causes 5-6 million child deaths each year.
For many affluent people in the West today such stark facts are sufficient proof of the non-existence of God. Any God who allows such suffering, so the argument goes, must be malevolent, or at best indifferent; it’s preferable to believe that there is no God at all.
This gut-level objection to religious belief is, of course, not new. It gained currency during the Enlightenment, especially in the aftermath of the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, which killed over 60,000 people.
The horrors of World War I brought on another crisis of faith in the West. Writing in 1927, in his influential monograph Why I Am Not a Christian, Bertrand Russell mockingly proposed that “this world … with all its defects … [is] the best that omnipotence has been able to produce in millions of years”.
Most of the truly serious attempts to grapple with suffering and evil have been made, down the centuries, by believers in God.
The list includes St Augustine (354-430), Leibniz (1646-1716), Kant (1724-1804), Hegel (1770-1831), Kierkegaard (1813-55) and Karl Barth (1886-1968).
Henri Blocher’s Evil and the Cross (Kregel, 1994) is a supurb contemporary discussion. But one does not have to turn to such forbidding texts.
There’s a much more popular and accessible book. It’s the best-seller of all time by a country mile, and was authored in large part by people who experienced dire suffering themselves. The Bible.
What does it say?
For a start, it doesn’t skirt reality. It describes every kind of disaster and atrocity, both natural and man-made. It explicitly declares, time and again, that injustice is the lot of many:
There are righteous men who get what the wicked deserve, and wicked men who get what the righteous deserve. (Ecclesiastes 8:14)
Think of Jesus, who died on the cross, and Stalin, who died in his bed. The author of Ecclesiastes pronounced this state of affairs “meaningless”, and so it would be if the universe consists only of matter – atoms moved around by mindless natural forces. Then the fate of a human being can be of little if any consequence.
But the theistic worldview is radically different, and the Bible tells us how.
A basic starting point is that human beings really are special (see Psalm 8). But why are we special? Putting to one side the ultimate Christian answer – that we are made in the image of God – our specialness is derived from our self-consciousness, and, in particular, our moral freedom.
In the words of the greatest Old Testament prophet, God says:
You did evil in my sight, and chose what displeases me. (Isaiah 65:12, my emphasis).
The evil committed by humans is meaningful if, and only if, we genuinely possess free will. If free will is an illusion, i.e. if our conduct is the outcome of accidental laws of physics, chemistry and biology, then no one ‘deserves’ blame or credit for anything. We are, in effect, robots.
A second key consideration is the inevitability of physical death. Everything written in the Bible is undergirded by this brute fact: each of us must live knowing that death will certainly come one day (see 1 Samuel 20:3).
Basic stuff, yes. But its centrality to the problem of suffering can easily be overlooked. The flipside of death is life as we know it: joy, despair, fear, courage, love.
As Kierkegaard explained – the positive (i.e. life) is meaningful and comprehensible only because we are aware of the existence of the negative (death). Otherwise we go back to a world of robots.
Suffering, then, is necessary. But, more than that, it can also be desirable. In Shakespeare’s immortal words, “Sweet are the uses of adversity”.
What are some of these uses?
For one, suffering begets wisdom. It builds character and averts future evil – a point made again and again in the Bible. Jesus himself underwent rigorous ‘testing’ in preparation for his mission – the 40-day trial in the desert. “He learned obedience from what he suffered” (Hebrews 5:8).
The Apostles, also, regarded their many ordeals as beneficial. St Paul wrote quite directly on the point:
We also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. (Romans 5:3)
Suffering also produces thankfulness.
We’ve all experienced ‘near misses’.
Have you ever, for instance, dozed momentarily at the wheel of a car, and awoken just in time to avoid a collision? Have you witnessed a beloved child’s close escape – from a fall, say, or drowning or electrocution? These sorts of near misses occur routinely. Very rarely does the worst actually happen – but we’re aware that it could have. We are all mortal and we are all morally flawed. Just occasionally, our realisation of the fact gives us pause.
So, suffering has its uses. But why, in so many cases, must suffering be so horrible?
How can we comprehend the Holocaust, the kinds of horrors described by concentration camp survivors like Elie Wiesel?
In an atheist’s world, there are simply no answers, no grounds for consolation. Atheists respond by claiming to be hard-headed realists, but are they?
Their argument – expressed or implied – is that a loving God should and would “step in” from time to time to prevent such things happening. If there must be underwater earthquakes, God should ensure there are no tsunamis. Because suffering is often not averted in such situations, the reasoning goes, God cannot exist.
But, as the American writer John Blanchard has pointed out (in Where Was God on September 11?), things are not so simple:
Do we really want God to prevent things happening (or cause other things to happen) by manipulating the laws of physics in such a way that we would never know from one moment to another which were working and which had been suspended? … [At] what level should God intervene?
The author of the Book of Job tackled this vexing subject not by providing explicit answers, but by asking further questions.

God’s famous monologue challenges Man’s ignorance:
Who is this that darkens my counsel with words without knowledge? Brace yourself like a man; I will question you, and you shall answer me. Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? … Who endowed the heart with wisdom or gave understanding to the mind? (See Job 38:2-4, 36).
In other words, Man is in no position to talk back to God, about suffering or anything else. To do so is akin to a toddler who has learnt how to count to ten challenging Einstein on the laws of physics.
Cold comfort, perhaps? Not if you believe – as the Bible teaches – that physical death isn’t the end of everything. And that God, who alone knows the whole truth of every situation, will always be there as a ‘backstop’.
On that premise, it follows that the long-term fate of victims of suffering hinges on the notion of divine justice.
This was one of Jesus’ main themes in the Beatitudes (Matthew 5:1-12). The poor in spirit, those who mourn, the meek, the persecuted – none of them need despair of relying upon the roll of a cosmic dice.
God will impose justice here or in the next world.
But, I can hear plenty of people screaming: “You are assuming that God exists and that the afterlife is real!” True. And ‘proving’ those things is way beyond my humble powers.
Nevertheless, I want to end this piece by making one, tentative, suggestion. The very existence of suffering – and the human response to it – may be another pointer to the existence of God.
Throughout my life, on the occasions when I felt most intensely afraid for my health or safety, or that of a relative or friend, my first thought was to pray. Tellingly, this happened even when I was not a believer (I was converted in my thirties).
Prayer is the natural response of most people in extremis. As it is baldly put in Psalm 56:3: “When I am afraid, I will trust in God.” Now, if God does not exist, then why and how – even in our most unguarded state – are we drawn towards him? It is hard to think of any good reason.
If God is a figment of your imagination, then praying to him in crisis situations will not merely be unavailing; it is a waste of precious time and positively dangerous. Why would evolution select such a trait?
The fact that we ask God for help in hard times seems to be further evidence that he is there.
It is critical to note why we are drawn toward God in hard times. The answer lies in Psalm 121:2: “My help comes from the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth”.
The assumption implicit in any appeal to God for help is that God is capable of giving help. Why? Because he controls everything. Thus, the desperate person’s unguarded cry for help is really an unstated acknowledgment that God is his or her Creator.
Could this be the most important of adversity’s uses?

Roy Williams is a writer for the Bible Society Australia’s King James Version 400th Anniversary celebrations, and the author of ‘God, Actually’ (ABC Books, 2008; Monarch Books, 2009).