For example, it remains somehow eternally true, does it not, that raping a woman, torturing a child, or enslaving another human being, are evil acts deserving punishment. And this is the case whether we are rich or poor, alive or dead, and regardless of where we come from and what culture we are part of.
And this brings me to the final step in my argument from morality to God, from atheistic indignation to religious and in my case, Christian faith. Given that fact, it seems reasonable to conclude that the apparently divine character and status of the moral law is also related in some sense to an eternal divine intelligence. In other words, truth and goodness are rooted in God and express his essential and changeless nature. God is not just our creator, he is the eternal and objective source of all that is precious in the world and in human existence.
In the end, then, we discover the wonderful and liberating truth that we need not despair when our minds are overwhelmed, and our hearts sickened, by the sight of all the evil and suffering there is in the world.
The very fact that we react so strongly against cruelty, lies, and injustice, and wish to heal the sick, protect the innocent, and comfort the bereaved, is powerful evidence that we are not, after all, biological robots adrift without hope in a meaningless universe. Rather, the certainty of our convictions and the intensity of our feelings reveal the presence within us of an inner light that not only illuminates our minds and softens our hearts, but also challenges us to acknowledge its divine source and co-operate in the struggle to put our world to rights, starting with our own selves.
The defiance of the good atheist hurled at an apparently ruthless and idiotic cosmos is really an unconscious homage to something in or behind that cosmos which he recognizes as infinitely valuable and authoritative: for if mercy and justice were really only private whims of his own with no objective and impersonal roots, and if he realized this, he could not go on being indignant.
The fact that he arraigns heaven itself for disregarding them means that at some level of his mind he knows they are enthroned in a higher heaven still. Reading the works of C. Lewis not only revealed to me the shallowness and superficiality of atheism as a response to the problem of evil. It also removed the blind spot that had previously prevented me from properly appreciating the strength and validity of the argument for God from intelligent design. Influenced by Bertrand Russell, I too readily assumed that the existence of evil and suffering simply cancelled out the evidence for intelligent and benevolent design commonly presented by Christian philosophers.
But why should it? Does the fact that badly-designed buildings exist prove that there are no good architects, or that the materials from which such buildings are made self-assembled? Does the presence of cruelty and hate in our world suggest the non-existence of kindness and love, somehow nullifying its reality?
Of course not. How, then, should we view the apparent conflict between two apparently equally compelling sets of evidence about the possible relationship between God and our universe? Does the presence of cruelty and hate suggest the non-existence of kindness and love?
Before trying to answer that question, it is worth noting just how extensive and compelling the evidence of intelligent and benevolent design in nature is.
It is in fact everywhere if we care to look at what is under our very noses. Bees making honey, the organisational activity of ants, birds building nests, sexual reproduction, the immune systems of human beings and animals, our digestive systems, the biological information software of DNA, the incredibly complex structure of even the simplest cell — the list is endless.
Something has gone wrong. In any case I disliked the message the Genesis narrative seemed to convey. That, at any rate, was the picture presented to my mind and imagination by my reading of atheist thinkers like Ayn Rand and Bertrand Russell. Such thinking erected a wall of prejudice against Christianity in my heart. Reading C. Lewis, by contrast, soon brought that wall of incomprehension and prejudice crashing down. As he pointed out in The Problem of Pain , because prehistoric man is only known to us by the crude material objects he made, people too readily and falsely assume that our earliest ancestors were intellectually and morally inferior to us, and for that reason alone we ought to reject the biblical explanation of the origin of evil.
But this makes the mistake of confusing technological advance with moral and intellectual progress, when there is no necessary connection between them. Nazi Germany, after all, was a more technologically advanced society than nineteenth-century Britain, but nobody would suggest that it was a freer or more civilised one. Lewis writes:. The whole modern estimate of primitive man is based upon that idolatry of artefacts which is a great corporate sin of our own civilisation.
We forget that our prehistoric ancestors made all the useful discoveries, except that of chloroform, which have ever been made. To them we owe language, the family, clothing, the use of fire, the domestication of animals, the wheel, the ship, poetry and agriculture. Science, then, has nothing to say for or against the doctrine of the Fall.
Not only, then, has science nothing to say for or against the biblical story of the Fall, but there are also at least two good reasons for taking it seriously and believing in its veracity. The first reason is the curious fact that we human beings appear to possess an inner moral code we cannot shake off, yet seem strangely unable to obey.
We denounce evil and complain passionately about its existence, yet we too are stained by it. Worst of all, the better we are, the more we feel the moral law pressing down upon our consciences, making us aware of our continual failure to live up to its demands.
Does all this not suggest that some process of deterioration has taken place within the minds and hearts of humankind? What better explanation is there of this strange dichotomy? The second reason not to dismiss the biblical account of the origin of evil is an anthropological one.
It is surely significant that a number of ancient peoples and cultures, including the Greeks, Romans, Scandinavians and Chinese, have some kind of tradition of a lost Paradise in the dim and distant past.
The great Roman historian, Tacitus c. Is this not remarkable? Is it just a coincidence that we find traditions of a lost Paradise outside the Bible? Having made the journey from atheism to Christianity, and become convinced by a great deal of evidence of the historical truthfulness of the Bible, [15] I see no reason to disbelieve in the existence of Adam and Eve or to doubt the details of the story of their disobedience and expulsion from the Garden of Eden. I do not claim that my approach is the best one but I can assure you it has been effective.
The materialist and the atheist, the y who would deny God, believe that at death all is over. Life is finished, it is done and complete ; we are dust, mere food for worms. To these people, pain has no meaning at all other than what it is : pure, unadulterated suffering , without any redeeming purpose.
There may to the atheist be a certain formless heroism attached to the person who faces suffering with courage and without complaining , but if we are all body and flesh, and no soul and spirit, if we are mere products of a selfish gene and nothing more, one wonders why this heroism would in any way be significant. There is, though, a greater point, and that is that the atheist is convinced that these years we spend on Earth — perhaps 80 or 90 if we are lucky, and only a handful if we are not — are e very thing we have, and constitute the total human experience.
Christians, on the other hand, believe that these years on Earth, while important and to be used wisely and also to be enjoyed, are a preparation for a far greater life to come. The y are, in effect, a thin ray of light from the great sunshine that is eternity and life in heaven with God. My end, as Mar y Queen of Scots had it, is my beg inning.
And her end was at the sharp point of an axe, as she was beheaded on the orders of Queen Elizabeth. Queen Mar y was certain that there was an existence beyond that on earth, as have been myriad Christians since the time of Christ. While it is neurotic rather than Christian to welcome suffering , and no intelligent and comprehending Christian would welcome suffering for its own sake, the Bible actually makes it quite clear that faith in Jesus Christ and in Christianity does not guarantee a good life but a perfect eternity.
Indeed there is more prediction in Scripture of a struggle and perhaps a valley of fear on Earth for the believer than there is of gain and success.
There may be Christian sects that promise material wealth and all sorts of triumphs in exchange for faith but this is a non- Christian, even an anti- Christian bargain, and has never been something that mainstream and orthodox Christianity would affirm.
Christians believe that this life on earth is only the land of shadows and that real life has not yet begun. So yes, bad thing s happen to good people. Some might argue that Christian belief is merely an excuse to escape the harshness of reality, but that is no more reasonable than arguing that atheism is a mere excuse to escape the harsh reality of judgment, and the thought of an eternity spent without and away from God.
The more important point, though, is that the oft-repeated criticism that bad thing s happen to good people says nothing at all about God, but every thing about human being s. Pain may not be desirable, but it is only a feeling , as is joy. Yet pain is not mere suffering , but also a warning sign and a way to protect us against dang er.
The all-knowing , all-powerful, all- good God allows us to suffer, just as he allows us all sorts of thing s, because we have the freedom to behave as we will. But he has also provided a place with the greatest contentment we can imagine if only we listen to him, listen to his Son, and listen to his church.
As to the specific issue of pain and suffering , C. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains : it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world. A needle may be necessary to prevent disease or infection ; nobody welcomes or enjoys the injection, but it prevents a far greater suffering , just as what may seem like even intolerable pain now will lead to far greater happiness later. By the goodness of God we mean nowadays almost exclusively His lovingness.
Today this applies far more obviously even than when Lewis was working and writing — he died in If I want something , runs the modern idiom — and I experience this reaction almost every time I speak or write — I need something; and if I need something , thus I must have something.
To the Christian, however, God knows our needs better than we do, and also knows that our wants and our needs are distinctly different phenomena. Which leads to the challenge of why God would allow us to g o and do wrong , and to want something that is not necessarily to our eternal advantage, or even to our immediate good.
We have freedom, and we have free will. We have that free will because God, according to the Christian, is love, and no lover would allow any thing else. A man who locks his wife away in a room, even if he does so for what he believes to be motives of kindness and devotion, is not a lover but an abuser, and a parent who is so protective of a child that the youngster is never allowed to leave the house will, even for what the y consider the best of reasons, cause untold psychological damage to that young person.
Four years ago I lost my faith. I grew up a passionate Christian, and this lasted most of the way through college. Although I was no longer as religious, it was still important to me to find a partner with faith. When I met my now-husband, one of the qualities that I admired was his devotion to his Lutheran church. Then, when I was in my mid-twenties, I spent several months abroad volunteering in Central America. The sticking point for me was that I could not reconcile how a higher power could allow for so many people to suffer so greatly when s he had the power to alleviate suffering, which is so vast and unending in the world.
I also saw how religion could be used to manipulate people by those in power, and while I recognized that it was a source of much good in the world, it could also be used to create drifts between people and distract from real issues.
Growing up I always assumed non-religious people looked down on people of faith. However, rather than having contempt for the faithful, I find that I still have great respect for many people of faith. I never thought that I could be with someone who has a different belief system than I do, but our religious differences have never been a point of contention in my marriage because, at the end of the day, we both love and respect each other.
I could very well become religious again, but the last few years as an atheist has taught me that the absence of religion does not mean the absence of morality. This does not deny suffering, or its hideous injustices, or the fact that so many in the animal world suffer without any such relief or transcendence.
This Christian response to suffering merely offers a way in which to transcend this veil of tears a little. My God! Why have you forsaken me? And resolution. My own reconciliation with this came not from authority, but from experience. I lived through a plague which killed my dearest friend and countless others I knew and loved.
I was brought at one point to total collapse and a moment of such profound doubt in the goodness of God that it makes me shudder still. But God lifted me into a new life in a way I still do not understand but that I know as deeply and as irrevocably as I know anything. If this testimony is infuriating to anyone with a brain, then I am sorry. It is the truth as I experienced it. It is the truth as I experience it still. If any other readers want to share their own experience with theodicy, especially if it let to a major religious choice, let us know.
The above video, by the way, was featured by our video team earlier this year:. Update from a reader, Peter, who has some really eloquent thoughts on the subject:. Thank you for the opportunity to discuss theodicy. I am not an active member of any church, but I feel that religion is a honest response to the world.
It is also a tool of political power to keep people thinking that way. The ultimate pain is the argument that suffering is the price of our free will. Again, the only honest response is that it was very bad of God to have forced such a choice upon us. If that honesty means that you have to call something out as irredeemably bad, then at least you can do that.
You can curse God for having put you in such a position, but you can also thank God for the fact that there is one part of you, your honesty, that is indestructible. Christ on the cross is meant as a statement that in the end we can always at least serve as a testament to suffering.
At the end of the novel , the ultimate failure of the protagonist is that his honesty is beaten out of him. The purpose of religion is to help us not loose that one thing that we should have left. You damn sure would have hoped so. If you think this world is heaven, then it is shocking to find how hellish it can be.
But how come no one asks the opposite question? It would certainly explain a lot. But if it is, then the devil did a very bad job. It is the opposite of the theodicy question.
The failure of the devil is that I still have my hope. The devil may run the world, but I still have my heart. And I can be thankful for that, even if having hope makes it worse. It is not a nice view of the world, but it is one that fits the facts. My wife and children, however, are still active, believing members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, otherwise known as the Mormon Church. This authoritarian, patriarchal religious organization was at the center of my life from the time I was a child.
Beginning in my adolescence, I felt a growing tension between what others told me was true and what my mind and heart was telling me. Nevertheless, I lived up to the expectations of my parents, my church leaders, and other role models in my religious tradition: I graduated from seminary a four-year high school program for LDS youth ; I earned an Eagle Scout award; I went to Brigham Young University on scholarship; I served a two-year mission for the Church in France and Switzerland; I married my wife in the temple in a private ceremony for only faithful members; I served in many volunteer capacities in my local congregations; I even made my professional career as a faculty member at BYU for five years.
In my confusion and loneliness, I reached out online to various communities of Mormons going through similar faith and cultural struggles as I was. Over the course of seven years I deconstructed most of my faith in the Church, as well as my belief in God or any kind of theology. I was angry and hurting and depressed, which affected all aspects of my life. My choice to leave the Church necessitated a career change and required that I go back to school for additional training in order to be marketable outside higher education.
It took two years to process through the stages of grief for this loss of faith. Along the way I had to learn again how to trust other human organizations and how to have the courage to apply that trust in meaningful, purposeful, and productive ways again. Along the way I found a way to honor my religious upbringing without feeling constrained by dogma or social expectation for my belief and behavior.
We serve at our local soup kitchen. These have been great sources of spiritual renewal to me. I acknowledge, of course, that the LDS Church also does many good things for people in the world. My wife, children, parents, and many of my extended family are all still heavily involved in doing good through that organization.
Compared to the agnostic ex-Mormon above, this reader went through the LDS door in the opposite direction:. Two years ago, I decided to become a Mormon. First, I went to a professional conference in college that had nothing to with religion, but I met some girls from a Catholic school and we stayed up talking all night about faith, politics, and the universe. Two weeks later, my father passed away suddenly and unexpectedly—an event which plunged my whole family into emotional and financial despair.
The second turning point, years later: I had visited the churches of my friends—nondenominational, Protestant, Catholic, and more. Yet I always got into passionate arguments with my peers and once, even the pastor over doctrine. Due to a job falling through unexpectedly and needing to find a place to live right away, I moved into a house with five roommates I found on Facebook.
They happened to be Mormon. I visited their church and asked them frequently about their beliefs, which resonated with me so much that I hunted down the local missionaries and asked them to teach me. I was amazed when I told them some of the things that I believed—things that people in my previous churches said were crazy and that nobody agreed with—and they told me they believed in them, too.
Without having any Mormon friends or knowing anything about Mormon doctrine, I had still been prepared for my conversion. A final note confirming how crazy my whole experience was: When I looked up my Family History which the Mormon church is very involved with , I discovered that some of my ancestors had immigrated to the U. I had no idea. Like our previous reader Jon , this next reader Joshua struggled between his sexuality and his church. But he, unlike Jon, left one of those things behind:.
I grew up very, very Mormon. My parents are devout people, and raised me to be devout as well. I loved the Mormon Church and believed in its teachings. On some level I always knew I was queer but I lied to everyone about it, including myself. Towards the end of high school I fell in love with my best friend, who was also very devoutly Mormon.
I felt a sense of doom, feeling that there was no possible way my life would work out in any sort of positive way. I kept my sexual orientation under wraps and left to serve as a Mormon missionary at age After I came home two years later and started to think seriously about the rest of my life, I finally began to acknowledge the truth.
I went through much of the coming out process while I was studying at the church-owned Brigham Young University. Eventually I started dating guys—something that would have gotten me expelled if discovered—and I realized that I needed to make a decision between the church and the other life that was available to me.
I agonized over this decision for months. One night, I was in the church building and found myself alone in the chapel. Being with him made me feel love and peace, not guilt and shame. I knelt down in the chapel to pray and asked God one last time if he was there and if the church was where I was supposed to be. I sat quietly for a long time, yet felt nothing. I realized then and there that I no longer believed. I stood up in tears and ran my hand along the pews, touching hymn books, as I walked to the door.
I turned around and looked back at the empty chapel, seeing everything I had grown up knowing and loving, and grieved. That grief lasted for a long time. I knew what I was doing was right, but I still grieved for the part of my life that I was leaving behind. It was like that part of me died. But a different part of me flourished for the first time. My relationship at the time ended, but shortly after, I started dating the man who is now my husband.
He also came from a very Mormon family. Together we started to build a life. I dropped out of BYU and we got an apartment together, and last year we got married. I now consider myself agnostic. I still identify with Mormonism as my heritage—it will always be where I come from—but I am no longer a member of that or any church. My gayness definitely shaped my decision to no longer be a part of the Mormon church. For years I beat myself over my own identity. I struggled with reconciling the idea of being married to a woman but being attracted to men.
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