Human Suffering and the Evil of Religion

The Greatest Problems for Belief in God

Jensen

• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781532643453
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Dennis Jensen looks at two very important problems that have led many to reject religious belief generally and Christianity in particular: Why has God allowed the extreme suffering we find in our world? And Can religion be blamed for much of this suffering? He looks at not only the evil so often associated with religions--inquisitions, holy wars, pograms, witch hunts--but also some of the difficulties found specifically in the Bible. Did the God of the Bible command or advocate mass murder, homophobia, slavery? Is the New Testament anti-Semitic?Jensen argues persuasively that a fully biblical teaching does not advocate subservience of women in today's society, church, or family. It does not condemn all same gender sexual relations or transgender identity. It does not teach an eternal hell.As just one of the many fascinating topics he tackles, one of the more important biblical reasons suggested for the existence of evil is that God wants to know whether we will seek to stop or alleviate the suffering we see, whether we will learn to have God's heart, whether we will hate evil and anguish over the hurting as God does.

Part I

Human Suffering, The Greatest Problem for Belief in God

1

Plantinga’s Insight

Probably the most important objection to belief in God historically, on both a scholarly and a popular level, is the Problem of Evil. If there is an all good, powerful, and intelligent God, why is there so much suffering in the world? Many believe that there is so much evil that this would not be expected from a good creator.

Perhaps the best answer to this expectation can be arrived at through merely thinking through the logic of the claim. With Alvin Plantinga’s work in the mid-1970s and earlier, I think that the basic Problem of Evil as a rational philosophical problem has essentially been answered.1 I would want to focus on one of his more important arguments. If there is a God who is all knowing and all good, and since our knowledge is very limited, we should not expect to know what such a God’s reason may be for allowing evil to allow a greater good to occur. There is no good reason to say that such a God would have no such reason. This type of approach is called skeptical theism. If this God is omniscient, all knowing, my knowledge compared to God’s would be closer to that of my cat’s knowledge to my own. (Similar analogies will appear in the course of our discussions.) Clearly one would not have good reason to think God does not have good reason for allowing the evils which occur.

Plantinga was not the first to see this, of course. Indeed, it is often pointed out that this is the response or defense we find near the close of the book of Job in the Bible (Job 38–41). Here God speaks to Job but does not tell him why he is given so much undeserved suffering. Yet God does demonstrate to Job that he should expect that God does have good reason for allowing it.

Many people look at God’s speech at the end of Job as a tyrant’s demand for complete obedience no matter what his reason for allowing this suffering. They hear him say, “I’m God, how dare you question my actions!” But God is here constantly referring to his wisdom, pointing out that Job did not and does not experience or know all that God knows or experiences. So the more likely understanding of God’s speech is simply that we should not expect to know God’s reasons for allowing suffering but we should expect that God does have morally justifying reason.

Suppose we attempt to assess two events G and E which have moral content. With our limited understanding we see that G only produces much good while E only produces much evil. If we had a choice as to which should occur, we should seek for G to occur and not E. We should act according to the limited knowledge we possess. But if God decides E should occur rather than G, this should not be considered questionable since God would know that a full outcome of good would be produced by E which would be greater than any evil it produces and any good G produces.

As an analogy we might think of the child who must undergo a painful medical procedure fully awake and without anesthesia. This is sometimes necessary to correct an injury or disease which would otherwise produce far greater suffering. Let’s assume that the child is not old enough intellectually or emotionally to understand its necessity. Imagine the parents holding the child down as the physician works and the child looking into their eyes in unbelief. The parents can say nothing to bring the child to understand. You know what is going through her mind: “You of all people say you love me and yet you let this man do this to me?!” If our intelligence compared to God’s is like the child’s to her parents’, might we think the same when in fact God has good reason for allowing pain? The child can only see that G, being free of the painful surgery, only produces good while E, enduring the scalpel, only produces evil. She is not aware of the greater good that will come if E occurs.

As a biblical example, Caiaphas, the high priest at the time of Jesus’ death, made the first legal decision to condemn Jesus. This ostensively produced more evil than good and, if Caiaphas had knowledge of Jesus’ claims as the Gospels say, he will not be guiltless for his decision. Nevertheless, if the Christian view is correct that Jesus’ death provided salvation for humanity, then in the long run Caiaphas’s decision produced more good than had he not condemned Jesus.

Another example, this time from the Hebrew scripture, would be the story of Joseph (Gen 37, 39–47). Joseph and his bothers were the sons of Jacob and the great grandsons of Abraham. Joseph’s brothers hated him because of the special favor their father showed him and because he had dreams suggesting his brothers would submit to him. Without his father’s knowledge, they sold him into slavery and let Jacob think he was killed by a wild animal.

In Egypt Joseph was eventually imprisoned but, as the story goes, through a connection with Pharaoh he later was able to give the interpretation of a dream which saved the country from famine. He was given a high position in the government and was able to have his family come to Egypt and escape the famine. Joseph later told his brothers who sold him into slavery that they intended their actions for evil, but God intended them for good (Gen 50:20). With these examples it is not difficult to imagine that some great evil might be needed to produce a greater good.

The brothers were still guilty of selling Joseph into slavery. Only if they had had the full knowledge God had of his plan to save Israel through this act would they have been innocent of selling Joseph into slavery. We are responsible to do good only given our limited awareness of the final good or evil which results. If G appears to us to produce more good and less evil than E, our moral obligation is to do G and not to do E. This is so even if it turns out that God intends E to occur in order to produce a greater good.

Charitable organizations are aware that attempts to help impoverished areas of the world sometimes result in new socially harmful conditions. There are cases in which they have introduced new technologies (drought resistant crops, better wells, etc.) thus increasing the people’s standard of living. Sometimes these changes have resulted in new problems such as increased alcoholism, gambling, prostitution, drug abuse, new diseases, etc. This certainly should not stop these organizations and those who support them from continuing to help these depressed areas to develop economically even if they cannot find ways to alleviate the new problems.

But God may see the final amount of good or evil which would result and determine that the greater good would be that the changes the charity would like to implement should not occur. So God might hinder or stop them from doing a particular work. Yet without having God’s full knowledge, we should always seek to support such economic development in depressed parts of the world. We should do so even if we can foresee that some of the new problems will likely result.

It might appear that skeptical theism would say that whenever any evil occurs, no matter how bad it is, it must be better than had it not occurred at all. Would it not follow that the skeptical theist should not oppose or seek to remove any evil they know of? No. God may have a reason for allowing a certain evil but that reason may be contingent upon the choices and actions of others. I will suggest some such reasons later. So God may allow some evils and also want to either remove them or reduce their force. We should seek to remove almost any suffering or oppression we know of. Only if we are absolutely sure that God is allowing some suffering which God wants to remain undiminished should we refrain from seeking to end it or diminish its force.

Before going much further, I would like to offer some basic terms in order to understand the kinds of approaches one may take to look at the problem of suffering generally. A theistic defense is an argument that God has reasons for allowing evil but it is also an argument which may be given with or without offering such possible reasons. One need not give or even have any idea what those reasons might be. Plantinga’s skeptical theistic approach is thus a theistic defense. In contrast to a theistic defense, a theodicy is an answer to the Problem of Evil given by seeking to explain God’s actual reason or reasons for allowing evil. So the last two biblical examples we have just looked at are, strictly speaking, theodicies for specific evils. We will look at some more theodicies shortly. Some theistic defenses, like a free will defense, will offer possible reasons God allows evil without claiming these reasons are necessarily the actual reasons God has for doing so. If it is merely a possible and reasonable explanation, this should be sufficient to show that the Problem of Evil has no force. Theodicies, on the other hand, claim that this “real possibility is God’s actual justification for permitting evil.”2

Once skeptical theism is understood, it should be clear that the critic also has no good reason to claim that God probably does not have good reason for allowing the amount and kind of horrendous evil that is present in our world.3 Isn’t it at least more likely, they may say, that God does not have good reason for letting an innocent child suffer a long, agonizing, gruesome death by hanging in a Nazi concentration camp? Well, no it isn’t. Probability just does not apply if we cannot know God’s mind since God’s intelligence is enormously greater than ours.

God may not be able to share his reasons for human pain and suffering because the human mind would not be able to comprehend the explanations. When we look at the specific theodicies we will consider shortly, it will become acutely obvious that simply because we are not now able to think of a reason God may have allowed a certain kind of suffering does not give us reason to think that there likely is no such reason.

It is not difficult to imagine certain conditions under which a creator of the universe could be rightly judged to be evil. Suppose, for example, we imagine God effecting very great, unending, undiminishing torment of someone who does not deserve it. (Of course, if by definition God must be absolutely good, as must be the case if this God is deserving of our worship, God could not do such a thing.) But notice first of all that no such suffering can occur in any person’s lifetime. Not only must all suffering end with death, even with the most painful earthly suffering imaginable, it appears likely that the human body engages a natural self-anesthetization system utilizing endorphins, serotonin, or possibly other pain inhibiters. Nevertheless, even if very great but temporary undeserved suffering is allowed, on the possibility that it is recompensed and that God has good reason for allowing it, God cannot be judged to be evil. With one qualification I will note below, we cannot say that any given suffering in this life, no matter how horrible it may be, cannot result in a greater good if caused or allowed by an all...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: Human Suffering, The Greatest Problem for Belief in God
• Part II: Bad Religion?
• Bibliography