Where is God in Suffering? Sermon Notes
by Austin Merigala
We all know this is probably the most daunting question that challenges any theistic framework, but also any naturalistic framework.
Because both worldviews have the doctrine they hold to in terms of the existence of an all-powerful and all-loving God can allow the kind of evil and suffering that we experience in the world.
But from the counter-perspective, those who deny the existence of God on the basis of such suffering must now find a way to explain moral reasoning. Both of them have tried it, and I’m not sure I have found the answer from the counter perspective very convincing.
People like Daniel Dennett ( American philosopher and cognitive scientist focused on evolutionary biology) , Richard Dawkins (one of the most popular evolutionary biologists), and Sam Harris (American neuroscientist). Everyone of them publicly denies the existence of a supernatural being. Harris has recently written about this topic, and Daniel Dennett goes to great lengths in his interviews to what he calls the evidential problem with the existence of God, mainly the problem of evil, problem of pain, and the problem of suffering.
So with this background information, we can hopefully touch up on these authors as the sermon continues.
Many times as Christians are bombarded with these type of questions out of people’s desire to discredit our faith. We realize that these questions are tough to answer, and anyone who minimizes it doesn't fully understand the question.
Those who attack theism and the Christian faith seems to think we are foolish in ignoring this problem but actually, we are fully aware of it.
Daniel Dennett refers to the analytic Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga that is argument was very logical but his beliefs are preposterous.
This is very interesting. Making a valued judgment after denying the fact that values actually exist. Both sides of the argument feel the struggle, and every worldview wrestles with this question.
In fact, it has rightly been said that “Virtue in distress and Vice (wicked behavior) in triumph often make atheists of mankind”.
Andrew Fletcher, the 18th-century Scottish political activist, said this: “Let me write the songs of a nation. I don't care who writes its laws”.
The reason Fletcher said that he wanted to emphasize logic, reason, and argument may come from the front door of rationality while music and arts come from the backdoor of the imagination.
When I see how music and poetry and the arts raise the question in very thorny ways, they sometimes even hint at the answers that often times those who are given to pure reasoning do not even move in that direction to explain moral reasoning.
One famous band the Moody Blues said this: “Why do we never get an answer when we are knocking at the door with a thousand million questions about hate and death and war because when we stop and look around us there’s nothing that we need in a world of persecution that is whirling in its greed? Why do we never get an answer?”
This is the musician raising the question of morality, and anytime you see the problem raised you begin to see how easy it is to give a long list of tragedies and atrocities as if we are need of justifying that evil and suffering really exists.
What I want to do this morning is try to illustrate for you that not only do we feel it, not only do we wrestle with it, not only do we argue our way through it, and debate it in our minds, but I have come to the conclusion that the problem of evil is better stated as a mystery rather than a problem.
Why do I say that? I believe a problem is very easy to describe. Gabrielle Marcel (a French Christian philosopher) said, “a mystery is a problem that encroaches (brings emphasis) upon itself because the questioner becomes the object of the question”. So in a mystery when it encroaches upon himself and you are part of the very question being raised that becomes harder to answer, but a problem is easier to deal with. As someone said, “getting to Mars is a problem and falling in love is a mystery”.
Let me repeat what Marcel stated: “a mystery is a problem that encroaches upon itself because the questioner becomes the object of the question”. You and I are not outside of this question; we are in the question itself.
David Hume, a skeptic, put it this way: “we were a stranger to suddenly drop into this world; I would show him as a specimen of its ills. A hospital full of diseases, a prison crowded with malefactors and debtors, a field strewn with carcasses, a fleet floundering in the ocean, a nation languishing under tyranny, famine or pestilence honestly I do not see how you can possibly square with the ultimate purpose of love.”
It’s interesting that the skeptic raises the question with varieties of pain and suffering and then brings it to a closing statement on trying to square it with the ultimate purpose of love.
Another existentialist put it this way: “it is not science that has led me to doubt the purpose of God it is the state of this world it is this pitiless unending struggle for existence among the nations; it is the collapse of our idealisms before the brute facts of force and chaos that there is a radical twist in the very constitution of the universe which will always defeat man’s hopes, make havoc of his dreams, and bring his pathetic optimism crashing in disaster; purpose look at the world and that settles it for me.”
The existentialist says how can there be any purpose in life if all that we see around us in this pitiless, unending struggle for existence, so it is not science that was knocking him off any belief it was just the fact that there was such despair and meaninglessness in the world that he saw around him.
Gautama Buddha in moving away from being born a Hindu and in search of answers looking at suffering, looking at old age, looking at death, looking at these sites as he was raised in a palace left the palatial precincts and the comfort of it. Ironically on the night that his first child was born, he left the palace and went away in search of answers to the problem of suffering.
And by the way, the word he uses is the word “dukkha” which is much more than the idea of pain or discomfort. “Duhkka” can best be described as an anguish that is so overwhelming to you almost in the essential nature of who you are, so it is not mere philosophy; it's a struggle within the soul that is you which is what Buddha was talking about. So he gave up his upbringing in Hinduism, renounced some of the teachings of the Vedas, and the whole idea of the caste system, and he went in search of enlightenment. He then came up with his Eightfold path and the Four Noble Truths.
The first one of which was: “all life is suffering”. And his conclusion was if you cease to desire if you stop wanting you will eliminate any suffering whatsoever. So Buddha went along that path which tells you there’s a universality to it.
One thing I find fascinating about the land of India is it is so intensely religious. But it also a country that has lived with a lot of suffering and a lot of deprivation. The songs that they sing, the music that is often present in their movies, will often talk about the pain and suffering and yet with that pain and suffering is that intense sense of religiosity. As you then move west passing by Europe and other continents you arrive at the United States. In this country with all the prosperity and comforts, we are gradually becoming more atheistic all the time.
There is a fascinating difference where cultures in the midst of pain have sought answers for their spirit, whereas those in the midst of greater comforts are walking away from belief in God. Is it because we are more intelligent than them? Are we better qualified with more degrees? Do we understand reality better than the great philosophers that have come from the east and continue to look at this as a struggle for the soul?
So first is the reality, second is the universality, and the third is the complexity of the problem. You’ve got the metaphysical aspect of it (what is the source of it), the physical aspect of it (natural disasters), and the moral aspect of it- how can an all-powerful and all-loving God allow this. So metaphysically, physically, and morally we struggle to find answers.
As we look at this, I want you to understand right from the beginning there has to be a framework from which we answer this question. However you answer it, there has to be a framework. And the framework is this-this is just one question that tries to define what ultimate reality is all about, but the question hinges on too many others.
The moment you move in the direction of coming to a conclusion on this for example the staunch atheist who says there is no way to acknowledge the existence of an all-powerful, all-loving God, therefore, this world is really godless.We have to find meaning and purpose in this world; there is no way to sustain the existence of God
The question arises for the person: “How is this (problem of suffering) then not joined to the question of meaning.” I’ll tell you why.
In saying that we experience suffering and evil, we are looking for a purpose to explain it, but then the skeptic concludes that there is no purpose to life itself. It actually creates a bigger conundrum when there is no ultimate purpose why we need to find tiny little purposes other than the justification of being purely pragmatic (practical and makes sense) .
C.S. Lewis put it in these words: “when a ship goes on to the high seas, it has to answer three questions: 1) how to keep that ship from sinking that's personal ethics, 2) How to keep your ship from bumping into other ships which are social ethics, and the most important question is 3) why the ship is out there in the first place which is essential ethics.
Do you realize for the skeptic the most important question is unanswered? They can come up with social ethics sort of construct we can create, or personal ethics why is it not good for me to cheat you or lie to you if the species is to survive with the proposed process of natural selection. But they still, to this day, are unable to give us what the purpose of life is all about. According to them, we are just here due to time+matter+chance.
So as we tackle this question, I want to take on three challenges that come to the Christian theist or to the theist in general and then give you what I believe the Judeo-Christian answer in a series of steps.
1) The evidential challenge basically says that I cannot believe in God because of the presence of evil. There is too much evil and therefore cannot be an ultimate all-powerful being.
Many of the skeptics from today’s society originate from the collegiate population. I watched a apologetics debate, and in the middle of the event a college student yelled: “there is too much evil in this world; there simply cannot be God”.
Many skeptics are guilty of self-contradiction but confuse their audience by using complicating terminology which essentially has no meaning. Here is how we answer this question. “When you say there is such a thing as evil, aren't you assuming there is such a thing as good? When you say there is such a thing as good, aren't you assuming there is such a thing as a moral law on the basis which to differentiate between good and evil?
When Bertrand Russel (a British philosopher and mathematician) was debating with the (Jesuit priest and philosopher) Frederick Kapilstone. At one point Coplestone looked at Russell and said to him, “do you believe there is such a thing as good and bad? He said yes. Coplestone asked him, “how do you differentiate between the two”? Bertrand Russell said the same way I differentiate between blue and green. Coplestome said you differentiate between blue and green by seeing, don't you? He then asked Russel once again how he differentiated between good and bad.
This great mathematician and philosopher gave this answer “on the basis of feeling what else”. In the world, there are populations in the world that love on another, and others that eat one another. If morality was based on preference, then the act of cannibals could never be reprimanded or considered evil. Being an intellectual this was the best answer he could give.
“When you say there is such a thing as evil, aren't you assuming there is such a thing as good? When you say there is such a thing as good, aren't you assuming there is such a thing as a moral law on the basis which to differentiate between good and evil? If they grant you a moral law, you must assign a moral lawgiver because that’s who you are trying to disprove instead prove. Because if there is no moral lawgiver, then there is no moral law. If there no moral law, there is no good. If there is no good, there is evil.
Now, if you are talking about this topic. He/she might agree there is such a thing as good and evil. The individual might even stretch it and acknowledge that moral standards exist not as absolutes like Dennett and Harris states, but something that can used for moral justification. But, they might ask: “why must there be a moral Lawgiver”. And my answer to that is this all questions about evil are either raised by a person or about a person. Which means the questioner is making an incredible assumption that human beings have intrinsic value and that’s what makes their question justifiable.
Because I am human as a questioner, my question is valuable because I'm a person of value and have the right to raise it, or the one I am talking about to defend I am raising this because that person has essential value. Why do we argue for justice? Why do we come to the defense of the innocent? Because deep within us, we believe that a person of value and worth ought not to be sacrificed at a whim.
The essential value of human life is assumed in raising the question and so the moral lawgiver has to be within the paradigm if there no moral lawgiver, then I don't see how there is a moral law. If there no moral law, there is no good. If there is no good, evil ultimately self-destructs. Ironically, this is where some atheistic philosophers are being forced to get off people such as Dawkins.
But at the same time, the tension and struggle remain. When we acknowledge, the inescapability of moral reasoning that comes around from the human heart. You and I have to ask ourselves the question: “if that is true, what type of personal responsibility must we take on in a world such as this.
With the mention of morality, one case worth mentioning is the Holocaust. Now when the Germans commenced with their plan of extermination there were concentration camps and death camps. Both of them are presented with the same type of connotation, but death camps were much more extreme. If you walk through the rooms, you will see what humanity had done to its fellow human being. At the time Germany being the most educated nation in the world was inflicted by the power and rhetoric of one man who seemed to think there was a super race, and a better race that could eliminate all the weak ones in the world and make this a better world who whoever survived.
The most infamous death camp is Auschwitz. Right now the camp is converted into a museum and in one room there was 14,000 pounds of women’s hair stashed behind glass. Women were scalped before they were taken into the gas rooms. The gas rooms were where poison gas was just released through the jets, and victims suffered an excruciating death. If you look up pictures of the gas chambers, finger marks are etched in stone as victims grabbed on for dear life. People were obliterated in Auschwitz alone at a rate of 12,000 souls per day.
On one of the signs near the gas chambers, is a sign by Adolf Hitler: “I want to raise a generation of young people devoid of a conscience, imperious, relentless, and cruel.” Here is the conundrum people like Dennet and Harris can pontificate on these ideas how we can arrive at values. This is the whole search of Harris in his book The Moral Landscape that we have to solve this issue of value.
Jale Macke, the Australian atheist, says “we might as well argue that objective, intrinsically prescriptive features its most unlikely to have arisen in the ordinary course of events without an all-powerful God to create them”. Hence the atheist Michael Ruse talking about the kind of answers Harrison and Dennett give is all illusionary answers. “There is no way to get away from the fact we have struggled to explain moral reasoning.
Now where do we go next. Richard Dawkins. He says: “in a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication some people are going to get hurt and other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it nor any justice. The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is at the bottom no design, no purpose, no evil, and no good nothing but a blob of pitiless indifference DNA neither knows nor cares DNA just is, and we dance to its music.”
GK Chesterton said: “all denunciation implies a moral doctrine of some kind. A modern skeptic doubts not only the institution he denounces, but the doctrine by which he denounced it. As a politician, he cried out that war is a waste of life then as a philosopher says life itself is a waste of time. A russian pessimist will denounce a policemen for killing a peasant then proved by the highest philosophical principles that the peasant ought to have killed himself. In short the modern revolution in being an infinite skeptic is forever engaged and undermining his own minds in his book on politics he attacks men for trampling on morality in his book of ethics he attacks morality for trampling on men. Therefore the modern man in revolt becomes practically useless for all purposes ruled by rebelling against everything he’s lost his right to rebel against anything.”
When you talk about the evidential problem, you have to end up as Dawkins with the conclusion that there is no such thing as evil. (killing child example). When you think of the real-world implications, can you live existentially with the philosophy that there is no such thing as moral evil?
Second attack: we can find biological reasons or sociological reasons why we can arrive in disbelief in God.
Here are two counter responses to that:
If it only physical or only biological, how do we explain supererogatory (more than enough) acts as acts of nobility? How do we explain supererogatory acts? What is a supererogatory act?
There is a city called Molokai in Hawaii. Father Joseph Damien (a Belguin priest) focused his humanitarian efforts with people with leprosy. It's a beautiful island but plagued by leprosy for many years, and Damian came from Belgium and took care of them. When Damien himself contracted leprosy and died, the Belgian government asked for his body to be flow back, and the people of Molokai said please don't take his body away. We want him to be buried here; he loved us; he took care of us, and the stories are amazing of what Damien did for them. Finally, the Belgian government wrote and said he was one of their heroes. Molokai requested to have his right arm to keep the hand that touched and embraced them. Currently, this appendage is now buried in Hawaii in order to commemorate his sacrifice and service to people who were deemed untouchable.
This is a supererogatory act. When Jesus was asked about the laws that was supreme, Moses had given 613 laws, David reduced it to fifteen, Isaiah brought to eleven, Micah brings it down to three to do justice, love mercy, and to walk humbly before you God. When Jesus was asked what is the greatest commandment I find it fascinating that he did not answer it with one. He could have done it. He said you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength and your neighbor as yourself.
He said on these two laws hang all of the prophets and all the other laws. Because of the first, the second follows. Without the first, the second is with its feet firmly planted in mid air.
I am obligated to love my neighbor even with their disagreements of my worldview. I have no right to violate the sacredness of your life, your property, your marriage, and that which you treasure. Neither have you have the right to violate the sacredness of my life.
He said you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength and your neighbor as yourself. He said on these two laws hang all of the prophets and all the other laws. Because of the first, the second follows. Without the first, the second is with its feet firmly planted in mid air. When we talk about something biochemically or psychologically, we are ignoring a critical aspect of humanity
Victor Franki (Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist as well as a Holocaust survivor) was in Auschwitz said this: “if we present man as an automaton (robot) of reflexes, as a mind machine, as a bundle of instincts, as a pawn of drives and reactions, as a mere product of heredity and environment, we then feed into the nihilism (rejection of moral and religious principles) to which modern man is in any case prone, I became acquainted with the last stage of corruption in my second concentration camp Auschwitz. The gas chambers of Auschwitz were the ultimate consequence of the theory that man is nothing, but the production of heredity and environment or as the Nazis like to say blood and soil. I'm absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz were not prepared in some ministry but rather at the desks and in the lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers.
This is the deciding point for many atheists when they lose the essential value of human life in the transcendent moral order.
Bertrand paid the Christian worldview the ultimate compliment without even thinking about it. His quotation stands outside Mahatma Gandhi’s home, and Gadhi (India’s hero) who emphasized civil disobedience and carried the New Testament everywhere he goes. He quoted from the Sermon on the Mount repeatedly as he fought for the freedom of his own people. Bertrand Russel states something incredible. “It is doubtful that the Mahatma would have succeeded except that he was appealing to the conscience of a Christianized people.” He is an atheist complimenting the success of a panthiest because of the moral values of the theist.
Now, where do we go from the Christian point of view. I will give you few thoughts.
1. God is the author of life.
We can spend all of our time trying to rationalize our intrinsic worth, and the origin of morality.
But the source of our value will ultimately rest in God.
There is that mystery of life. There is an author.
If there is an author, then there is a script, and there is a story
2. There is a storyline, and once you understand the storyline, it explains the contingencies (events in the future that are not easy to predict).
Once you understand the storyline, you will understand how God brings everything together in our lives in order to strengthen and give us purpose.
"Where there is freedom, there is the possibility of love.
Where there is love, there is the possibility of pain.
Where there is pain, there is the possibility of a savior.
Where there is a savior, there is the possibility of redemption.
Where there is redemption, there is the possibility of restoration."
Each one of them causes each other
3. Life is sacred
The problem of the Christian life in the gospel is not that we are not moral it is because we are dead to God.
Jesus did not come into this world to turn bad people into good people, but he came to make dead people live.
The grace of Christ brings you to worship.
When we talk about the purpose of life as worship and as intrinsically sacred, one of the biggest question raised by three of greatest philosophers Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle was “How can we find unity in diversity?”
This is why we created universities to find unity in diversity.
Archbishop William Temple in England said: “worship is the submission of all of our nature to God. It's the quickening of conscience by his Holiness, nourishment of mind by his truth, purifying of the imagination by his beauty, opening of the heart by his love, and submission of will to his purpose.
All of this gathered together is the greatest expression that we all are capable of
You and I will never be able to be unified in diversity on the outside unless you are unified in diversity in the inside.
The reason you honor your vows is the same reason you pay your taxes.
You don't violate the sacred trust God has given to you and to me. Imagine how the world would be if everyone valued the sacredness of one's life.
Think of all the battles we have in violating each other’s sacred rights, and ultimately we stand before God with the right that he gave to us come to him, to worship him, and to serve him.
Jean-Paul Sarte (20th century French philosopher) : “the man who does not want to be loved does not desire the enslavement of the beloved he’s not bent on becoming the object of passion that flows forth mechanically; he does not want to possess an automaton, and if we want to humiliate him, we need try to only persuade him that the beloved’s passion is the result of a psychological determinism (belief in no free will). The lover will feel that both is love and his being are cheapened. If the beloved is transformed into an automaton, the lover finds himself alone.”
Love has to have the freedom of the will.
C.S. Lewis says this: “to love it all is to vulnerable love anything and your heart will certainly be wrong and possible be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to nobody not even to an animal. Wrap it around with little hobbies and little luxuries, avoid all entanglements, lock it up safe in the casket of your selfishness but in that casket safe, dark, motionless, airless; it will change and not be broken. It will become impenetrable, irredeemable; the alternative to tragedy or at the risk of tragedy is damnation. The only place outside of heaven where you can be perfectly safe from the dangers and perturbations of love is hell.
One philosopher said hell is the inability to love.
This all leads to the Christian answer in the cross of Christ. The answer in the cross is Father, forgive them for they don't know what they are doing and the transformation of the heart.
There is a prison in Baton Rouge, Louisiana called the Angola Prison. There are 5300 prisoners, and 85% must spend their entire life there without parole. 45 of them are on death row. It called the bloodiest prison in America. When a prisoner was checked in, he was given a knife to defend himself. Blood on the carpets; blood on the walls; This is where all the hardcore criminals are. The warden decided to take initiative by placing Bibles in each prison cell. The prison opened up a Bible study where some of the inmates started leading and cooking the meals. One Christian media group interviewed one of the converts in the prison. He was a young man. The reporter asked him how he felt of his sentence. He said that if they knew the type of person he was before knowing the gospel, you wouldn't be able to recognize me. He said that if it took prison for me to heart the truth, then living in his new life in Christ here was the greatest thing that has happened. But he said that someone should tell his parents the gospel because they think they are free but in reality they are not.
Why do we never get an answer knocking at the door? Why do we never get an answer when we are knocking at the door with a thousand million questions about hate and death and war because when we stop and look around us there’s nothing that we need in a world of persecution that is whirling in its greed? Why do we never get an answer?”
The song ends with “I’m looking for a miracle in my life and looking for someone to change my life”. That is the Christian answer. The transformation of the heart, and the change God bring to you and me.
If pain is the only problem to meaning, then the problem becomes more complex even more than we think it is.
But meaninglessness does not come from being weary of pain but ultimately comes from being weary from pleasure. The loneliest people in the world are those who have exhausted pleasure and have come up empty. Sacredness is at the core, and worship is the ultimate glue that brings life together that's our mission. Once you study the implications of what God has established, every source of truth leads to his existence and his grace and love for you.
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