THE PROBLEM OF SUFFERING
Time and again, we come across this question posed by non-believers: “if God is omnibenevolent and all powerful, how come He still allows suffering to happen in this world?” As a faithful servant of Christ, our typical go-to answer for this question may be something along the lines of “because God is allowing suffering for the greater good.” Broadly speaking, that reply is logically sound. And going a step further, one may even say that God has allowed suffering so as to accentuate his glory (recall the case of the man born blind in John 9). For Christians, we may find this response acceptable because we have experienced God’s love and we have faith in His plans. For instance, because I have known reverend Andrew for some time, and if he were to ask me to do something that’s rather painstaking, even if I don’t fully follow the rationale behind it (a case in point would be writing up this column), but because I know what kind of person rev Andrew is, I will get down to it even if it’s painful (in any case, I am kidding because I actually do see the purpose of this column). However, from the perspective of a pre-believer, this explanation may not be as easy for them to stomach given that they have yet to encounter God and all His love and glory. And I say this from the perspective of a first gen Christian who used to constantly question my Christian friends about theology, and trying my best to disabuse their Christianity beliefs which I felt was misplaced back then.
In any case, I am trying to highlight that just because suffering exists, it doesn’t necessarily negate the benevolence of God, nor does it invalidate God’s existence. To better aid our pre-believing friends in reconciling the existence of God with suffering, it may be helpful to first understand psychologically what they mean by how can God exists if suffering exists, which I believe can be summarized by the following premise.
1. If God is truly good and all powerful, then God would not allow pointless suffering to exist.
2. Pointless suffering exists.
3. Given 1 + 2, God does not exist.
This logic may appear airtight in refuting the existence of an all-loving and omnipotent God. However, I would like to highlight that the above premise isn’t as irrefutable as it seems, because it is possible that no suffering is as pointless as it seems. In which case, I am actually refuting against point number 2. Attributed to the fact that we don’t have perfect knowledge and understanding of all things, we don’t know if an incident or episodes of suffering is/are indeed pointless, as much as these instances of suffering seems pointless to us.
For starters, whatever suffering God has allowed can indeed be for the greater good, even if it is incomprehensible to our finite knowledge, as compared to His infinite knowledge and wisdom. Unfortunately, many a times this failure to comprehend why God has allowed for certain things to happen (i.e. sudden disease affliction or onset, a bad breakup, losing loved ones, losing your job, being transgressed by others etc) leads us down this path of thinking that the suffering must be pointless, which eventuates into thinking that God must either be asleep or that God isn’t real. Nonetheless, just because we don’t understand why certain suffering occurs doesn’t necessarily dictate that God has allowed suffering to occur because He’s either not omnibenevolent or omniscient. One way to illustrate this is to compare it to a parent child relationship.
Consider the case of an infant who’s currently being brought for COVID vaccination by the parents. Needless to say, nobody likes receiving injection especially at such a young age. In this regard, it is impossible for the infant to understand the better good behind COVID vaccination, given that they barely even knew the world yet. Imagine then, the betrayal felt by the baby, when they see their caregiver willingly handing them over to those masked scary-looking adults carrying those sharp needles, before being pricked which sends that sensation of pain into their arm that is unlike anything they ever felt before. After which, the baby would probably cry a whole lot all the while feeling betrayed by their parents willingly allowing pain to be inflicted on them. Unbeknownst to the baby though, this entire experience is actually for the greater good. And on a tangential note, it probably hurts the parent as much as it hurts the child when they see the baby crying, and I imagine that is how God feels as well when He sees us suffer.
Going by the above illustrations, it seems then that we can now refute the aforementioned premises this way.
1. If God is truly good and all powerful, then God would not allow pointless suffering to exist.
2. Seemingly pointless suffering exists.
3. Nonetheless, we do not possess complete knowledge of everything, and there may be a reason behind this suffering.
4. Hence, seemingly pointless suffering may not actually be that pointless, we just don’t know enough to know that it is pointless.
5. Given 3+4, 2 is flawed and 1+2 no longer equates to the inexistence of God.
But then again, is that really all there is to it? If our pre-believing friends are sharp and persistent enough, they may press on with the fact that there is indeed suffering that are seemingly pointless which we just cannot make sense of, however hard we try to rationalize them. For examples, cases of rapes, infanticide, human trafficking, societal level corruption and wars and more… We balk at such atrocities, and even as Christians we may wonder why God has allowed such chaos and detestable things to happen. Indubitably, one may maintain that there is still a greater good behind all of these, say the heinous 2012 Delhi gang rape and murder case. After all, this infamous news did generate worldwide awareness, which ushered in certain progressive movements that advocates for greater gender equality in India, and greater recognition that we need to reform misogynistic ideologies in order to better ensure women’s safety. More importantly, we got a glimpse of the kind of evil acts that we are capable of if we live lives according to our own standards rather than according to His word, and the bible is no stranger to recording such acts of evil.
Regardless, a plausible counterargument may be that there are still other forms of pointless suffering that did not end up bringing about a greater good. A case in point would be acts of evil carried out amongst fellow human beings, such as human trafficking, unsolved and unreported crimes in some remote areas etc. If we think about this issue deeply enough, we come to realize that there may indeed be acts of evil that ends up unnoticed at all – if we are going by the principle that witnessing other forms of evil sometimes allows good to come out of it – where the victim suffers an injustice committed by another human and no good comes out of it essentially. If so, how do we really reconcile God’s omniscient and benevolent nature with the existence of such evil acts that ostensibly does not bring about any greater good?
Germane to the current argument is that it is logically implausible for evil to not exist given the gift of freewill. In other words, I am arguing that freewill is such an inherent good that God would allow us to carry out evil deeds because He does not want to rob us of our freewill. Stated differently, we will be essentially robbed of our freewill, if at every juncture of our lives where we have the potential to do something bad, God just simply blocks us from doing so every single time. For instance, consider that if at every single instance where we are about to exercise our freewill to commit a sin, i.e. road raging at someone, cheating, stealing, slacking on the job, God just controls our body and stops us from doing these things. In other words, our freewill would be impinged if God were to block every single instances of evil acts that we willingly choose to execute.
Nonetheless, one may wonder if freewill is really such an inherent good that God would allow freewill at the expense of plausible evil. The long answer short is, yes freewill is really so inherently good that without it, all our loving relationships may as well be void. Imagine being created without freewill, but running on autopilot mode to forever love someone because you have been programmed to do so, not because you willingly chose it. If this is how all our loving relationships are like, then we might as well be robots. Because God desires a relationship with living hearts made of flesh rather than with robots, it is necessary for us to be created and bestowed with freewill. To summarize, sufferings that arises from acts of evil carried out by other humans does not contradict the goodness of God for two reasons, namely that we really do not know enough whether no good will come out of it eventually, and the fact that freewill is such an inherently good thing that to allow us to have freewill, it is inevitable that we may carry out acts of evil because freewill entails choices both good and bad.
Having established that the possibility of acts of evil occurring is an inadvertent consequence that naturally extends from having been given freewill, one may then question why God doesn’t mitigate the intensity of suffering, such as by putting a limiter to it something, even if it’s to allow freewill. Ostensibly, the fact that this isn’t the case seems to suggest that God is ignorant to our suffering. However, an argument could be made that given our lack of infinite knowledge, we can’t truly tell that God hasn’t already put a limit to it, even if it does feel like He didn’t. For instance, if the worst of the worst outcomes that we could arrive at in a particular situation A is Y, and God has already prevented Y from happening, such that we arrive at a X outcome completely without knowledge of Y, it may seem like God is not doing anything to mitigate our suffering. When in truth, X could already be the most optimal outcome, just that we don’t know about it.
Furthermore, because suffering is quite subjective and we have free thoughts and tend to make comparisons with how things can be better, it is just impossible for us to - for lack of a better word –not experience suffering. To elaborate on this point further, let us imagine that our world is suddenly struck by a weird plague such that all our meats are contaminated with no chance of ever, for lack of a better word, “uncontaminate” them back to when they were safe to be consumed. All us meat eaters would feel that this is indeed a form of suffering, because we are all forced to become vegans, and we have had experienced a better or more perfect state of life before (i.e. the delight of eating meat). Now, suppose we have a child who is born into this world after the entire meat plague saga. This child will grow up not having ever tasted meat in his/her (I refuse to use the pronouns they/them/their) entire life. In which case, it is likely that they would not find being a vegan as tormenting an experience as compared to us. Put another way, because our minds have the ability to perceive and compare different states as relatively good or relatively bad, our mind naturally perceive certain states as suffering.
Regardless, a plausible counterargument that a pre-believer might give is that “why must I suffer even if it’s for the greater good? What if I don’t want optimal, I just want what I want?” i.e. I am happy being where I am and I don’t want to go through anything at all. I am happy being stagnant where I am. I believe many of us are able to recall instances where our parents nudged us into activities that felt arduous at the time, and we just were not able to understand the goodness behind it even if it’s indeed actually for our own good (i.e. being forced to learning the multiplication table instead of having our playtime activities, being sent for tuition/swimming classes during holidays). Looking back in retrospect, despite our parents’ good intentions, we often struggled to grasp the underlying benefits, such as prioritizing learning multiplication tables over play or enrolling in extracurricular classes during semester breaks. Our limited perspective, lacking the foresight and wisdom of adulthood, obscured the potential long-term benefits that outweighs the momentary pain of carrying out our parents’ instructions. Had we not gone through that gruesome process of learning the multiplication table, we would have denied our brains the important stimulation needed during that sensitive age of development. In this sense, most of us would even agree that it is a good thing that our parents coerced certain decisions onto us when we were younger. Suppose that we ourselves are parenting a kid who is destined for something greater, but the kid is just wasting his/her potential away by being stagnant, wouldn’t we feel the urge to do something about it too? i.e. nagging at them or confiscating their toys to make them work harder. Another example could be a friend who has a lot of potential but is addicted to drugs, and as friends wouldn’t we want to force our friend into rehab (which I presume is painful beyond what I can imagine) so that they don’t waste their life away?
Why then do we do these things that are seemingly insufferable for them then? It’s because we love them and we do not want them to squander their life and potential away. Likewise, and all the more, consider a God who knows about all our potential and loves each of us more than even ourselves, He would certainly want us to be the as best the versions of ourselves as possible. Having said that, one may counter argue that there have been times where our parents forced us to do certain things which brings about pains for us and which they honestly think it’s for our own good (i.e. forcing us to pursue a science course when we are genuinely more artistically inclined). Of course, our earthly parents, given their finite knowledge, may indeed get things wrong sometimes. But then, if we are talking about a God Whose knowledge is the highest here, this God would not get it wrong. And because He knows the greatness that we are destined for, He would want us to be as close to realizing that potential as possible even if it means we have to be put under the mill to experience certain hardships prior to getting there.
On a related note, a possible counter that we can anticipate is “why would God allow Christians to suffer? Surely there is no God if He allows even His followers to suffer (be it man-made suffering such as facing persecution for being Christian, or being struck by sickness)”. Recall my previous point about how suffering can bring about greater glory to God. Of course, I would not explain it to pre-believers this way because they would not be able to grasp this point as quickly. But long story short, when a Christian continues to worship God even in times of suffering, it all the more shows how great their love and faith towards God is, as well as further demonstrating that that is something greater beyond what we have on Earth right now. Consider this analogy, imagine a spouse who is only there for their partner in good times, but the moment their partner falls on bad times or sickness the spouse leaves them, versus another who sticks through with the spouse be it in sickness or in health/wealth. In all common sense, we would say that the love from the latter is greater and worthier of commendation. Last but not least, the people who still lift God’s name in high and sing praise to God despite all the suffering that they are going through, serves as a great testimony that there must be more to life than just whatever is tangible to us during this short few decades that we have on Earth.
Finally, I just want to end off by highlighting that all these above arguments if we really think deeply about them, does not help to prove the existence of God. At the very best, it helps to refute the arguments that contends for the non-existence of God. Put another way, these above refutations don’t help in proving to someone that God exists. Rather, they only help them to see how illogical it may be to reject the existence of God, simply because we see suffering and evil around us. In fact, I am a firm believer that you can’t argue someone into the faith. After all, it is not our job, but the work of the Spirit that convicts and points us all to Christ. Nonetheless, that does not mean that there’s no point in buffing up our apologetics, or that apologetics isn’t profitable at all. After all, 1 Peter 3:15 did ask us to give them a reasonable defence of our faith. And, apologetics is most certainly useful in helping our pre-believing friends to bridge that cognitive gap, and bring them closer to the starting line to take that first step of faith in their walk with God.
Finally, to conclude and summarize a TLDR
1) Freewill is inherently good and God allowed people to choose (to be good or to be evil)
2) Suffering happens because of i) Freewill of man ii) Gods intention for greater good.
3) Because we lack perfect knowledge, just because suffering that are seemingly pointless exist, it does not immediately disprove the existence of God.
P.S: This article only provides a broad and general view of how one can reconcile the plausibility of God existing despite suffering existing. Of course, there are other more nuanced questions related to sufferings such as “how is it fair that God sends someone to eternal damnation” and “why can’t I do what I want? Why must I give up certain things in my life (i.e. love for money, LGBT practices, other lustful practices, being lazy) just because God says so even when it doesn’t bring about harm to others or myself?”, which I think would be too ambitious for me to cover within this article alone, and I would be glad to further expound on them in other articles.