God is With Us!

Monday, April 12, 2004

 

God is With Us

Return to Part IV: The Way of the Cross

Part Five of Seven on the Cross

"Behold, the virgin shall be with child and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel," which means "God is with us." (Mt 1:23)

Why do bad things happen to good people?

The existence of evil is probably the strongest argument against the existence of the God of Christianity. Why would a good and all powerful all knowing God create, permit, or allow suffering in the world?

In his book The Case For Faith, popular Christian author, Lee Strobel, deals almost exclusively with this subject. Strobel claims he was a one time atheist who worked as a journalist and developed the skepticism of his trade. In this book, he starts with an interview of a former Protestant evangelists who worked with Billy Graham several decades ago. The man's name is Charles Templeton. Templeton has become an agnostic, and at the beginning of Strobel's book, he is in the first stages of Alzheimer's disease.

Templeton describes his journey from apparent faith to agnosticism for Strobel, and most of the rest of the book is written as an answer to Templeton's questions. Agnostics may criticize Strobel's methodology. He stacks the deck by interviewing only one serious agnostic, and then interviews eight different believers to answer the question of why a good God permits suffering. While the agnostic has a valid philosophical point, the book is a still worthwhile, and I highly recommend it to any believer experiencing doubt during a time of trial.

Methodological critiques aside, I wish to start this meditation in the same place Strobel starts his book. Templeton describes to Strobel the exact moment he began to consciously doubt his Christian faith after his initial "born again" experience. He states that he was looking at a photograph in Life magazine:

"It was a picture of a black woman in Northern Africa," he explained. "They were experiencing a devastating drought. And she was holding her dead baby in her arms and looking up to heaven with the most forlorn expression. I looked at it and I thought, 'Is it possible to believe that there is a loving or caring Creator when all this woman needed was rain?"

"How could a loving God do this to that woman?" he implored as he got more animated, moving to the edge of his chair. "Who runs the rain? I don't; you don't. He does - or that's what I thought. But when I saw that photograph, I immediately knew it is not possible for this to happen and for there to be a loving God. There was no way. Who else but a fiend could destroy a baby and virtually kill its mother with agony - when all that was needed was rain?" (p.14 of The Case for Faith)

The agnostic reasons, if God had the power to send the rain, but chose not to send it, he is not good. If he wanted to send rain, but could not, he is not all powerful. Thus, the existence of suffering and evil is proof that an all good and all powerful God does not exist.

For the purpose of today's meditation, I only wish to focus on the first interview in Strobel's book with a believer. The first interview presented in response to Strobel was with Peter Kreeft. Many of my readers are familiar with the works of Kreeft already. Kreeft is a Catholic philosopher who has written a number of popular apologetic works. What I will present is merely a high level summary of the discussion. Strobel's journalistic style is far more lively and captures the excitement of a real discussion.

Strobel poses Templeton's challenge to Kreeft and asks how he would respond. Kreeft points out right from the start that Templeton's argument is philosophically wrong because it implies the existence of a good God. He elaborates that Templeton's sense of outrage at the apparent injustice of the suffering of the woman implies that there is a supreme good by which we can judge the scenario as evil. Since the supreme good is the definition of God, God must exist in order for us to judge that this situation is truly tragic.

Of course, such a solution is highly intellectualized, and comes across to most people as a play with words. As logical as the string of propositions may sound, we are left somewhat unsatisfied. Kreeft acknowledges this, and responds that the fundamental problem is that we are judging the event as a human being, and lack a God's eye perspective on the situation.

Kreeft creates an analogy of a bear caught in a trap. Along comes a hunter who decides out of compassion to free the bear from the trap. Because the hunter is far more intelligent than the bear, the hunter can anticipate that the bear will react in fear if he approaches it. So the hunter decides to shoot the bear with drugs that will cause the bear to sleep. From the bear's perspective, his fears are only confirmed. The hunter appears to be maliciously attacking him. The analogy is extended even further with more detail, but the point remains that the bear is completely unable to understand that the hunter is inflicting more and more pain on the bear in order to ultimately free the bear from his painful dilemma.

Getting a little more real and down to earth, Kreeft also brings in analogies of parents with children. When teaching a child to walk, we let her or him fall. We don't do their homework for them if we want them to learn to think critically for themselves.

Perhaps Christ used parental images of God so often precisely because he saw that this image can most adequately convey the notion of trusting a person who does not wish you harm, but may allow short term pains for your benefit. The Gospels invite us to see all suffering in an eternal perspective and look beyond the immediate moment.

Kreeft argues that when we are faced with suffering, a person of faith is not being irrational, but is acting on a belief that somehow short term suffering has long term benefits that only an all knowing God can fully understand. At one point in the interview, he alludes to a saying by a Saint Teresa (which one is not specified): "In light of heaven, the worst suffering on earth, a life full of the most atrocious tortures on earth, will be seen to be no more serious than one night in an inconvenient hotel."

Kreeft makes an astonishing claim that faith is "prejudiced". He argues by analogy that if the police came to his house and told him his own wife was guilty of a gruesome murder, he would not believe them, no matter what evidence they presented. He knows his wife better than the police could possibly know her. His faith in his wife is not purely irrational or without evidence, but his faith in his wife would completely ignore the evidence of the police in such a way that the police would call it an irrational faith.

This is how faith in God works for those who believe. Faith is not simply knowledge. We do not have faith that two plus two equals four or that the sun will rise. We have faith in persons. The person who believes in God through suffering is not simply denying reality. Rather, such a person has reason to believe in God that enables them believe even when the evidence sometimes seems contrary to their belief.

Where the unbeliever asks "Why is there so much suffering in the world?", the believer might counter, "Why is there also so much good in the world?" Faith in God is "prejudiced", but not wholly irrational.

As a further argument, Kreeft suggests that many people find that their faith is strengthened in suffering. Indeed, there is an old saying that there are no atheists in fox-holes, and study after study shows that nine out of ten people believe in God despite all evidence to the contrary. What interests Kreeft in such studies is that the strongest faith is often found among those with the most suffering.

The agnostic may counter that this is more a wish than a reality. When suffering, we wish it would end, and our pain is made more bearable by hoping a good God will come along and save us. However, such a faith is just a childish illusion, like Santa Clause. Furthermore, Kreeft's answer still doesn't explain why a good God permits any suffering whatsoever.

Kreeft points out an argument I have used when trying to explain why I think hell must remain a real possibility. A world without any pain and suffering, and an eternity where we can never choose between good and evil and never even know of evil is a world without freedom. In some sense, the mystery of suffering is tied to the mystery of freedom, and without freedom, there is not love. Yet, freedom means the possibility of sin exists, and in some way, suffering is bound up with the mystery of sin. Kreeft invites anyone who doubts this to simply try the imaginative exercise of creating a detailed world in their own mind that would be free of pain and suffering, and decide if their own creation is truly better than reality as we know it.

This is an abstract exercise, and a very abstract argument. While I understand Kreeft's point, and have made the same sort of argument myself in essays on my homepage, not everyone can except the argument at face value. Strobel tries to pin Kreeft down to the concrete. He wants to get past the abstracts of such philosophical wrangling. So Strobel asks Kreeft to consider the woman in the Life magazine photograph, and the following dialogue takes place:

"If she were here right now," I said to Kreeft, "what would you say to her?"

Kreeft didn't hesitate. "Nothing," he said simply.

I blinked in disbelief. "Nothing?"

"Not at first, anyway," he said. "I'd let her talk to me....,the first thing we need to do with this woman is to listen to her. To be aware of her. To see her pain. To feel her pain. We live in a relative bubble of comfort, and we look at pain as an observer, as a philosophical puzzle or theological problem. That's the wrong way to look at pain. The thing to do with pain is to enter it, be one with her, and then you learn something from it." (p. 48-49)

Pain and suffering are not an abstract exercise. We can and should certainly try to mitigate natural risks that cause suffering. Knowing that sin has consequences, avoiding evil is a good way to avoid unnecessary suffering. When confronted with any kind of suffering, we can and should do everything in our power that is not sinful to alleviate suffering. After all of our best efforts, the reality of suffering remains, and abstract philosophical reasoning means far less than compassion - being present to and one with the suffering. When we are suffering, if the suffering cannot be removed, we want someone to be with us.

For some readers who have followed along so far, what I am about to say will seem too abstract - a dodge to the problem of evil. Others will burst into tears at the total concrete and perfect beauty of the reality and truth of what I am saying.

On the cross, God is with you in your suffering!

Return to Part VI: God's Apology

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Readers may contact me at jcecil3@attglobal.net
posted by Jcecil3 4:00 PM