Anyone who sincerely desires to have faith must confront an overpowering obstacle: there is so much in our experience that seems to teach us that faith is groundless.
Spiritually sensitive souls have always tried to reconcile their belief in God with the existence of suffering. The Psalmist cries: "Why, O Lord, do you stand far off? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble? In arrogance the wicked persecute the poor... all their thoughts are, 'There is no God'" (Psalm 10:1-2, 4). The prophet Habakkuk questions: "Your eyes are too pure to behold evil, and you cannot look on wrongdoing; why do you look on the treacherous, and are silent when the wicked swallow those more righteous than they?" (Habakkuk 1:13). Job, himself the symbol of this problem, laments: "It is all one; therefore I say, he destroys both the blameless and the wicked.... if it is not he, who then is it?" (Job 9:22, 24).
Such questions are no mere intellectual exercise. How we deal with them profoundly affects our faith, our attitude towards life, and even at times our ability to perform our daily tasks. Those totally without faith live in despair, "without hope." They lack the energy, which faith provides, to effect any meaningful change in their lives. Faith is energy: to feel that life has no meaning, that nothing makes sense, can sap our strength and make even the trivial chores of daily life seem overwhelming. Perhaps the most concrete sign of an absence of faith is simply the inability to get out of bed in the morning and face the day.
This is why the question of God and suffering is so important. It actually affects the energy we need for daily living. To lack faith is to lack a connection to life.
To be precise, we really should speak of the problem of the suffering of the innocent. This is a generalization of the philosophical question of the problem of evil. Innocent people may suffer from evil actions resulting from immoral choices made by human beings, or from events in nature such as diseases, storms, and earthquakes. Sometimes these natural occurrences are also considered "evil," and so the term "problem of evil" is often used. It is also called the problem of theodicy, a term coined by Leibniz meaning "divine justice." The question is often expressed in this classic form: To preserve our belief in God while remaining true to our experience, we want to say three things. These are:
Any two of these three statements will fit together. The problems come once we add the third. A tough contradiction arises: How can a God who is good and who has the power to do something about it, allow suffering and evil to exist in the world?
Most attempts to confront this problem have tried to solve it by denying one of the three propositions. Let's see what happens when we try it.
Throughout history there were a number of ways in which the first proposition, that God is good, has been denied. In Zoroastrianism and other forms of dualism, there is not simply one supreme deity who is good, but a good god and an evil god competing with each other. It is hard to see how this type of theology can lead to faith. It would seem to foster insecurity, since we can have no assurance about which god will eventually prevail.
The modern version of denying that God is good is to consider God, if you can still even call it God, as some kind of morally indifferent natural life force. Nature doesn't care about good and evil. If nature cares about anything at all, it can only be the struggle for survival. Moral values do not govern in the animal world, nor in ours, which is part of it.
This way of viewing God is not implausible given our scientific world view and what we observe in our experience. It also is not a very good foundation for faith. Just like dualism, it holds no hope of God's being involved in our lives in any meaningful way. It would be hard to know how to pray to such a God. Nature moves inexorably, discarding the weak at the side of the road, just as it always has.
Of course, just because a certain view of God may not give us the results we want doesn't make it false. Far too much theology works on the basis of wishful thinking: we want to believe something, therefore we assume it to be true. Theology must be more than just saying things about God because they make us feel better. Perhaps we really can't expect any more of God than this morally neutral life force. If that is the truth, then we must confront it. But Judeochristian tradition has always considered such a view of God limited and false. God must be in some way actively involved in our lives; otherwise faith is meaningless. We will have to consider whether, on the basis of our actual experience and not just our theological wish list, it is possible to go beyond an amoral God. But for the time being we can observe that this view of God can only create insecurity in one who takes it with the seriousness it deserves.
There are of course other ways of denying or at least modifying God's goodness that are common in religion. Sometimes we say that God's ways are inscrutable: everything that happens is good and is also the will of God; it just does not conform to human standards of goodness. But God has not given us a sense of morality for nothing. It makes no sense to say, on the one hand, that morality is divine and Godlike, and on the other, that God can behave immorally as a matter of whim. If God's permitting the most radical, brutal evil is somehow "good," then concepts of good and evil must be so abstract as to lose all meaning. God actually becomes the devil, sending tragedy and destruction to people according to God's will, and the most natural and understandable response to such a God is rage and resentment.
The classical way of getting around this problem has been to say that since God is just, God punishes only sinners. But this is the answer of the friends of Job. The Bible emphatically denounces it. It is the least compassionate response of all, blaming those who suffer for their own suffering, and it encourages a harsh judgmentalism. From an existentialist perspective, the problem with this approach is that it denies the tragic aspect of life: often people do suffer unjustly, and life does contain real tragedies. (The Eastern response of the theory of reincarnation, maintaining that all suffering is earned even though it may have been in a past life, equally denies the tragic and has very similar moral ambiguities.) It is only through acceptance and confrontation with the tragic aspect of life that we develop true compassion. Only the ability to see that people do suffer innocently and unjustly truly opens the heart.
The more popular alternative in our time is to put limits on God's power. There is some ambiguity here: Is God actually unable to restrain the expression of evil, or does God choose not to do so? Those who speak of a limited God are not always clear. But they do like to say that while God can do nothing to help us, at least God cries with us and "feels our pain." While this may appeal to sentimentality, it is a completely unbiblical picture of God, who is "a very present help in trouble" (Psalm 46:1) and whose involvement in human life is definite and decisive.
If God really cannot conquer evil, then evil is stronger than God. That would mean evil, not God, is the real God. One shudders to contemplate it, and so the more popular alternative is to claim that God's power is limited by choice.
Why would God impose such self-restraint in the face of evil and the terrible suffering it causes? The answer that is almost always given is: human free will. God so respects human free will that God will not intervene in human affairs under any circumstances; such is God's love for us. After all, it is often said, good parents do not overprotect their children but respect their independence and allow them to make their own mistakes.
There are several problems with this response. The argument from free will fails to explain why God allows innocent people to suffer intensely from disease or natural catastrophes, which have nothing to do with the human will. But there is an even deeper problem. Let us grant that we possess free will, although it is limited by forces acting within us of which we are not aware. We are responsible for our decisions. That is not the issue. The issue is whether preserving this freedom at all costs can serve as a justification for divine inactivity in the face of radical evil.
Those who hold that preserving human freedom justifies God's failure to intervene maintain that allowing the exercise of our will is an act of love, even if it results in the commission of atrocities. Even though this idea is popular, it is insane. Never mind the free will of the perpetrator: what about love for the victim? Would any parents in their right mind allow their children to maim, rape, torture, and kill each other just for the sake of respecting their free will? The "free will" solution sets up a false dichotomy: that either we allow human free will or we don't. The obvious answer is that we allow free will to operate but within limits. Is that not why we have laws?
Thus far the solutions we have seen to the problem of God and evil portray God as either immoral, irrelevant, or stupid. What else is left?
A final possibility, which would preserve both God's goodness and power, is to deny the reality of evil. This option is taken by metaphysical approaches to spirituality. They maintain that the world we experience with the senses is an illusion. It is a product or projection of thought, and as such has no more reality than a dream. Therefore it has nothing to do with God, who did not create it and is not involved with it.
And so to overcome suffering we need to change our thinking, to see the perfect world that "really" exists in place of the painful one we experience. Often this means turning our attention away from, or tuning out, the "erroneous" thoughts that manifest as unpleasant experiences. If we can see God's perfect world, we will experience it in all its glory. Our suffering will come to an end.
This theory has certain obvious contradictions. If God is the only Mind, as metaphysics likes to claim, then how could erroneous thoughts even exist? "But they don't exist," is the usual answer, "they aren't real" - a disingenuous response, to say the least. Someone or something is conscious of these erroneous thoughts, or else we could not even talk about them. God certainly can't entertain them: God is Perfect Mind, and also the only creator. So there seems to be no possible way the illusions that create so much strife could even have arisen.
But the real problem with this approach is more psychological than philosophical. It encourages a life based on denial. People do have experiences and emotional reactions. One cannot make them go away simply by declaring them to be illusions. If we try to abolish the world we experience without honestly confronting it, we risk creating a false reality in which we are unaware of our true concerns and those of other people. We become distant both from our own suffering and the suffering of others. We may neglect physical and emotional problems instead of attending to them and treating them as "real." The problems do not disappear; they just go into hiding, to come crashing down on us later when we can no longer avoid them.
If the world that "carnal" or "mortal" mind creates is not real, then God has no connection to it. Once again we cannot expect God's involvement in our lives, unless we can manage to believe that we see a perfection way beyond this human existence. If we can't see it, then we are lost. God cannot help us in a dream that God did not create. Ironically, in searching for a perfect spiritual world, followers of metaphysical theologies only create a deeper separation between themselves and the world of ordinary human beings.
So it seems that none of these options will allow for belief in a God who is not only good but who remains actively involved in our lives. The problem of suffering, in its customary form, cannot be solved. One might as well try to divide by zero. The problem of suffering, when taken seriously, destroys faith in its traditional forms.
But:
What those who pose the question of evil or of suffering in its classic form usually fail to consider is that something may be wrong with the question itself. Questions are not neutral; they carry assumptions. We need to look at the assumptions behind the question: "How can a good and all-powerful God permit the existence of evil?"
One cannot ask this question without thinking of God as a self-conscious being, with a separate autonomous will and set of reactions. In other words the question itself implies that God is a person just like ourselves, differing from us only in not having a body but having unlimited power. In spite of these differences God is a creature, albeit one who may have total control over our lives. It is hardly possible not to resent another creature in such a position of power over us.
The problem of suffering is not really a theological problem. It is an existential one. We may try to reduce it to an abstract speculation about God, but this only trivializes it and leaves the real question behind. The theological question is relevant only in its impact on the existential question, which has to do with our lives as we must actually live them. Those who ask the question of suffering with true sincerity and from a broken heart are driven to ask it not by theological curiosity but by both compassion and fear. They feel compassion for those who suffer, and experience the fear of living in an uncertain world where a tragic accident can knock one down at any moment.
And so the real question becomes: How can we make sense out of such a world? How can we live our lives with confidence when terrible things happen with little predictability? And if we phrase our beliefs in terms of God, the question becomes: What can be the source of our faith? How can we maintain trust in God in the face of fear?