Why?

Looking at God, Evil & Personal Suffering

Sharon Dirckx

• Publisher: IVP
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781789743548
• eBook ISBN: 9781789743555
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Why do bad things happen in our world? Why does God allow suffering? If he exists, why doesn't he do something?Of all the hurdles to faith, suffering must be the greatest. But how do we answer the question of 'Why?' in a credible, satisfying way?In this revised and updated edition of an award-winning book that has helped thousands in their journey of faith, scientist Sharon Dirckx explores some of the most agonizing and bewildering questions we all ask. With compassionate warmth and insight, she offers advice to help us cope with suffering and difficulties. Alongside, she interweaves her own experiences and the personal stories of individuals who have faced some of life's toughest challenges, showing us that it is possible to believe in a powerful loving God and acknowledge the reality of evil and suffering.Why? is a book for anyone who has questioned how suffering and a compassionate God can coexist. It will help you better understand the nature of God in Christianity, and will equip you to answer the question of 'Why?' with confidence and clarity. It is also an ideal apologetics book to give to friends and family just beginning on their faith journey or who are struggling and looking for answers.If you have ever asked or wondered why God allows suffering, Sharon Dirckx's gentle wisdom in Why? will help you see life from a new perspective - one that makes more, not less, sense of our hurting world.

1 If God exists, then why is there so much evil and suffering in the world?

‘I’m sorry, there is nothing we can do for you.’ The consultant’s words confirmed what we already knew, but still they hung in the silence. Despite huge advances in modern medicine, most neurology patients still face the harsh reality that there is no cure for their illness. For some, this brings the devastating news of the beginning of the end of life, of staring mortality square in the face, perhaps for the first time. For my husband Conrad, there was no threat to life itself, only to its quality, but this wreaks havoc enough.

Yet we know we are not alone. We all have stories to tell. As the band R.E.M. put it in one of their songs, ‘Everybody hurts sometimes’. Pain and suffering are universal. No-one is exempt. Times of trouble and pain make us cry out for answers. Why, why, why?! If God exists, then why is there so much evil and suffering in the world?

As we begin to explore suffering, I would like to suggest that we need to start not with ‘why?’ but with ‘if’. For the question of ‘if’ is crucial. In ancient Greece the Athenian king is known to have written a threatening letter to his city’s arch-enemies in Sparta, saying, ‘You are advised to submit without further delay, for if I bring my army on your land, I will destroy your farms, slay your people and raze your city.’ The Spartans, renowned for their military prowess but not their eloquence, responded with this one word: ‘If’.

For Sparta, the question of ‘if’ was the difference between life and death, a bright future or a bitter end. So it is with God and suffering. The question of ‘if’ changes everything. For ‘if’ God exists, then he has some explaining to do, but ‘if’ he does not, then suffering is not a problem as such. Suffering is inconvenient, yes, distressing, yes, but problematic, no. For if there is no higher being and we are in a closed system, then to whom is your complaint being addressed?

Our perspective on suffering is very much dependent on how we view the world. There are many different ‘lenses’ or religions available, each offering a different way to make sense of suffering. Many people think that deep down all religions are saying the same thing, even though they may appear superficially different. To help us decide, we need to dig beneath the surface and examine how the different major world religions each answer the question: ‘If God exists, then why is there so much evil and suffering?’

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‘If’ God exists, then he has some explaining to do, but ‘if’ he does not, then suffering is not a problem as such.

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Atheism

Atheism, taken from the Greek a: ‘without’, theos: ‘God’, is defined as ‘the absence of belief in gods and the supernatural’.1 It took root in revolutionary France when the middle classes rejected the oppressive state religion and it became a personally held belief in the nineteenth century. Today there are between 500 million and 750 million atheists worldwide.2

A key reason why atheists do not believe in God is the very existence of evil. If God were real, he would do something about it. Given that he has not done, then it is either certain 3 or highly probable4 that God does not exist. Atheism solves the intellectual problem of evil by concluding that a world of pain is simply the way the world is. This then raises the question of how atheists define the very evil they abhor. In other words, how does one establish moral values, good and evil, right and wrong, without God? The majority of atheists agree that ethical codes of living are essential, but that human beings themselves are capable of devising them. The different approaches can be summarized as three main theories.

1. ‘Each to their own’

The first theory deals with egoism, in which each person’s own internal moral code determines what is right and wrong. We often hear this expressed in contemporary culture as, ‘That’s true for you but not true for me’, or ‘Each to their own’, or ‘You need to look out for number one’. The good is whatever is right for the individual, and the bad is whatever is not in his or her best interests. This is not just a recent phenomenon. The ancient Greek philosopher Protagoras claimed that ‘Man is the measure of all things’.5 On one level this is reasonable, and may work in the day-to-day decisions of, for example, what washing machine to buy or where to shop for our children’s shoes. However, with more serious moral decision-making, we run into problems. What happens if an action taken in one person’s interests harms another? Can you guarantee that people will always draw from their internal moral good? We cannot. A mere glance at the newspaper shows that we cannot guarantee that, in serving their own interests, people will also consider the interests of others.

Many will remember the riots that took place in London and other UK cities in the summer of 2011. The nation looked on, stunned, as anarchy descended on major cities. Shops were ransacked and looted, cars set alight and people were afraid to leave their home s for fear of attack or being robbed. Opportunists cashed in. Thousands were doing it and the police were powerless to stop it for a time. The cause of the riots was complex and involved more than just individuals acting selfishly. Nevertheless, it gave a glimpse of what could happen if the opportunity to create one’s own morality is opened up. We saw communities of individuals each living by their own moral code. Making their own rules. The result? Chaos.

A looter was interviewed shortly afterwards 6 and asked why he was stealing and looting. His reply was that there was an opportunity to get possessions free of charge and he wasn’t going to miss it. It was as though he was perfectly justified in his actions. Yet when asked whether it would be acceptable for his own home to be looted, his response was one of outrage. That would be utterly unacceptable. This response to egoism is common. Whatever is right for us is fine until it literally ‘comes knocking on our own door’, and then (and sometimes only then) we are outraged and caused to invoke a higher moral standard that states that some things are universally wrong. The real world is clear that ethics centred on personal preference are simply unlivable, and those living in areas affected by the rioting would be the first to admit this.

2. The greater good

The second theory for establishing moral values is utilitarianism. In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the philosophers and economists Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill developed the theory that right actions are those that result in the greatest good for the greatest number of people, whereas wrong actions are those that tend to promote pain and harm. Actions are deemed right or wrong based on their consequences in the community, regardless of the initial motives or any good or bad within the act itself. In other words, the ends justify the means.

For example, the trafficking of African slaves to North America in the seventeenth century or indeed of young women to Europe in the twenty-first century would not necessarily be wrong according to utilitarianism. By the mid-nineteenth century, slavery was a thriving industry that bolstered the economy and crop production of fifteen states in the southern USA. Likewise, many profit financially and physically from the modern-day sex industry. Utilitarianism would assess whether human trafficking is right or wrong, based on outcomes. The process of assessing consequences is complex. Some utilitarians such as Peter Singer 7 would say that some ‘rights’ take precedence over others, for example the right to live overrides the right to business success. Many checks and balances are included and may generate a number of possible scenarios. The suffering of the slaves would certainly be taken into account, but if the benefits outweigh the harm of slavery itself, then an honest utilitarian would not have had grounds for the abolition that Wilberforce and others secured in 1807 or that anti-trafficking campaigners are pushing for today.

In practice, a number of problems arise. For how can people assess outcomes when we have such a limited perspective on life, may be biased about what is ‘good’ and cannot see very far into the future? Firstly, what is meant by a ‘good’ outcome? Bentham and Mill defined happiness as being intrinsically good, against which all other values were to be compared. Others have said our common sense would make the best outcome obvious. Therefore the definition of ‘good’ varies. Secondly, how does one define ‘community’ or ‘the greatest number’? Thirdly, this ethic takes a diminished view of individuals. While communities are vital, does not the welfare of the individual matter too? Fourthly, how does one decide that the outcome of an action has run its course? To assess outcomes properly, a far bigger perspective is needed, arguably one that is outside of time and space itself. Fifthly, finally and most importantly, who should bear the responsibility for these decisions? For humans to evaluate outcomes that involve the lives and livelihoods of fellow human beings surely places undue pressure where it was never supposed to be.

3. Moral values have evolved

A third theory is that moral values have emerged through evolutionary mechanisms. J. H. Huxley and T. H. Huxley developed Darwin’s biological theory of evolution into an ethic, stating that whatever aids the evolutionary process is right and whatever hinders it is wrong.8 Over time, the environment, genetics and culture have shaped and refined social instincts such that the morally superior traits are those that enable the survival of the species.

There are some problems with this approach. Firstly, who or what decides what aids or hinders evolution? Some standard outside of the evolutionary process must be assumed, with the end-point in sight, as otherwise it would be impossible to define what progress actually is. Secondly, since there is no ultimate standard by which to measure progress, this quickly becomes a matter of subjective preference and switches into egoistic ethics. Even rape and murder could be justified in some circumstances, since they may help a person’s own genes survive. Thirdly, sometimes conflicting instincts arise, and the prevailing one does not promote survival of the fittest. Take for example a mother who rescues her drowning baby, at great risk to her own life. The evolutionary ‘good’ would have been to save herself, for even a rescued baby with no mother to care for it would eventually die. Why then did another instinct overrule? Are all instincts equally valid? Or do humans behave as though some are more valid than others?

Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene sails evolutionary ethics full into the wind. Humans are mere pawns in the evolutionary process, whose sole function in life is to pass on their genetic material to the next generation. Jeffrey Skilling, the former CEO in the Enron scandal, was inspired by Dawkins and, in the words of one magazine, ‘sought to apply nature’s lessons to the energy industry’. The working environment was brutal. ‘Skilling . . . implemented a system known as “rank and yank” that . . . had all employees in the company ranked every six months. Then he offered lavish bonuses to the top 5 percent while the bottom 15 percent were relocated or fired.’ 9 On hearing this, Dawkins was said to have been appalled, commenting that the emphasis of his book was intended to be upon ‘gene’ rather than ‘selfish’, and translating genetic behaviour into business ethics was a step too far. Yet in the absence of a transcendent standard, who decides? How ironic that Enron is now extinct.

This outworking of evolutionary ethics is dark, but it gets darker still. The Nazi leader Adolf Hitler in his book Mein Kampf (1925) worked out a form of social Darwinism. He extrapolated the principles of natural selection and survival of the fittest to ethnic groups, in order to preserve what he viewed as ‘stronger’ (Aryan) races, and remove ‘weaker’ (Jewish and other non-Aryan) ones. Of course, it is essential to add here that the vast majority of people who would claim their morality has evolved would not dream of taking things to such extremes. The morality of many who do not believe in God can often put to shame that of those of us who do. However, a crucial question to ask is: ‘What sorts of things become permissible if God does not exist and human beings are at the helm?’ If the only moral law is the internal ...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Frances’s story
• 1 If God exists, then why is there so much evil and suffering in the world?
• 2 If God knew the world would be a place of suffering, then why did he create it?
• Will’s story
• 3 If God is so powerful, then why doesn’t he stop evil before it happens?
• 4 Surely religion is the cause of so much suffering?
• Grace’s story
• 5 If God exists, then does he care about my suffering?
• 6 Am I responsible for anyone else’s suffering?
• Charles’s story
• 7 Why does God allow natural disasters and diseases?
• Rachel’s story
• 8 Can a broken story be fixed?
• 9 How do I move forward from here?
• Notes