One of the most common objections to Christianity is often called The Problem of Pain. It is the question, "If God is good, then why is there so much suffering in the world." I am among the least qualified human beings to talk about this problem, both because I have lived what might be called a charmed life, and because I have never really understood the objection. Yet the more I read and think about the problem, the more it occurs to me that I may not be the only one who does not understand the objection.
I can never remember a time when the problem of pain bothered me, I think that early on it was probably for entirely selfish reasons. We obviously live neither in the best of all possible worlds nor in the worst of all possible worlds, so we live in a world that is imperfect but has merit. So I have generally appeared to myself -- imperfect, but not wholly worthless. If I object to God on the basis that if he were good he would not allow imperfection in the world, I would seem to be complaining that God allows my existence. I wasn't inclined to argue with my creator that if he were really good, he's do away with me. It might be true, but it hardly seemed like a practical policy to argue with people that I should be killed.
Now, the sins of a ten year old are likely not very grave. I cannot remember what mine were, so I must assume that I was not much out of the ordinary in this regard, and probably compared favorably to people such as Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot, Milosevic, and Saddam Hussein. Yet if I did compare favorably, it was a comparison of degree, and not of kind. I had not the power or perhaps the blood-lust of these men, but I certainly had the sort of imperfections that would lead me cause suffering in those in my power. From what my parents tell me, I certainly caused them enough trouble and grief.
So to complain that God allowed these men to exist seemed equivalent to complaining that he allowed me to exist. That's hardly a winning argument. Even to the milder objection that God allowed them to have so much power, I knew that none of them had a magic gauntlet, scepter, or other device; they all had legions of men who pooled their resources to create such devastation. Each individually wrought comparatively little damage, it was their combined might which was so terrible. It hardly seemed like a pleasant world where men could not cooperate, and I liked disobeying my parents too much to ask for all sin to be forcibly removed. So I was left wondering quite what the objectors to pain wanted. Pain is bad, certainly, but what was the alternative they were proposing? For if there was nothing to be done about it, it hardly seemed worthwhile to blame God for not doing what he couldn't. I certainly wouldn't want to be held up to a standard like that.
So far I have not talked about any philosophical difficulties with or answers to the problem of pain, I merely explain why I never worried much about it. I do not say that it was a good or noble reason, I merely maintain that it was a human reason. Even if it was not that, it was mine, and honesty demands of me that I explain where I came from before I discuss so weighty and important a subject.
More recently, after some reading on the subject, the best answer to the problem of pain that I read was G.K. Chesterton's:
When, at the end of the poem, God enters (somewhat abruptly), is struck the sudden and splendid note which makes the thing as great as it is. All the human beings through the story, and Job especially, have been asking questions of God. A more trivial poet would have made God enter in some sense or other in order to answer the questions. By a touch truly to be called inspired, when God enters, it is to ask a number more question on His own account. In this drama of skepticism God Himself takes up the role of skeptic. He does what all the great voices defending religion have always done. He does, for instance, what Socrates did. He turns rationalism against itself. He seems to say that if it comes to asking questions, He can ask some question which will fling down and flatten out all conceivable human questioners. The poet by an exquisite intuition has made God ironically accept a kind of controversial equality with His accusers. He is willing to regard it as if it were a fair intellectual duel: "Gird up now thy loins like man; for I will demand of thee, and answer thou me" (38:3). The everlasting adopts an enormous and sardonic humility. He is quite willing to be prosecuted. He only asks for the right which every prosecuted person possesses; he asks to be allowed to cross-examine the witness for the prosecution. And He carries yet further the corrections of the legal parallel. For the first question, essentially speaking, which He asks of Job is the question that any criminal accused by Job would be most entitled to ask. He asks Job who he is. And Job, being a man of candid intellect, takes a little time to consider, and comes to the conclusion that he does not know.
This is the first great fact to notice about the speech of God, which is the culmination of the inquiry. It represents all human skeptics routed by a higher skepticism. It is this method, used sometimes by supreme and sometimes by mediocre minds, that has ever since been the logical weapon of the true mystic. Socrates, as I have said, used it when he showed that if you only allowed him enough sophistry he could destroy all sophists. Jesus Christ used it when he reminded the Sadducees, who could not imagine the nature of marriage in heaven, that if it came to that they had not really imagined the nature of marriage at all... It is the root and reason of the fact that men who have religious faith have also philosophic doubt... In dealing with the arrogant asserter of doubt, it is not the right method to tell him to stop doubting. It is rather the right method to tell him to go on doubting , to doubt a little more, to doubt every day newer and wilder things in the universe, until at last, by some strange enlightenment, he may begin to doubt himself.
This, I say, is the first fact touching the speech; the fine inspiration by which God comes in at the end, not to answer riddles, but to propound them. The other great fact which, taken together with this one, makes the whole work religious instead of merely philosophical is that other great surprise which makes Job suddenly satisfied with the mere presentation of something impenetrable. Verbally speaking the enigmas of Jehovah seem darker and more desolate than the enigmas of Job; yet Job was comfortless before the speech of Jehovah and is comforted after it. He has been told nothing, but he feels the terrible and tingling atmosphere of something which is too good to be told. The refusal of God to explain His design is itself a burning hint of His design. The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.
Thirdly, of course, it is one of the splendid strokes that God rebukes alike the man who accused and the men who defended Him; that He knocks down pessimists and optimists with the same hammer. And it is in connection with the mechanical and supercilious comforters of Job that there occurs the still deeper and finer inversion of which I have spoken. The mechanical optimist endeavors to justify the universe avowedly upon the ground that it is a rational and consecutive pattern. He points out that the fine thing about the world is that it can all be explained. That is the one point, if I may put it so, on which God, in return, is explicit to the point of violence. God says, in effect, that if there is one fine thing about the world, as far as men are concerned, it is that it cannot be explained. He insists on the inexplicableness of everything. "Hath the rain a father?. . .Out of whose womb came the ice?" (38:28f). He goes farther, and insists on the positive and palpable unreason of things; "Hast thou sent the rain upon the desert where no man is, and upon the wilderness wherein there is no man?" (38:26). God will make man see things, if it is only against the black background of nonentity. God will make Job see a startling universe if He can only do it by making Job see an idiotic universe. To startle man, God becomes for an instant a blasphemer; one might almost say that God becomes for an instant an atheist. He unrolls before Job a long panorama of created things, the horse, the eagle, the raven, the wild ass, the peacock, the ostrich, the crocodile. He so describes each of them that it sounds like a monster walking in the sun. The whole is a sort of psalm or rhapsody of the sense of wonder. The maker of all things is astonished at the things he has Himself made.
This we may call the third point. Job puts forward a note of interrogation; God answers with a note of exclamation. Instead of proving to Job that it is an explicable world, He insists that it is a much stranger world than Job ever thought it was.
I have realized that the problem of pain suffers from being poorly defined. To a person who says, "How could God allow so much suffering, if he existed?" I would like to ask, "Well, what is suffering, and why is it so bad?" The first thing that I have come to realize is that no one really has a good definition of suffering, and even less an explanation for why it is so terrible that its very existence denies the existence of God.
Physically speaking, pain is nothing but the recognition in our brain that certain nerves in our body are firing. The actual physical distinction between pain and other sensations such as touch is difficult to describe. Indeed it is all the more difficult because pain and touch share neural pathways -- that is why rubbing a part of the body in pain eases the pain. To distinguish pain from touch is made even more difficult by the people who enjoy pain. There are people who use pain in sexual play because they enjoy it; it brings them heightened sensation and physical awareness. Are they suffering? Leaving off any moral questions about people who enjoy being spanked during sexual play, is their pain bad? They seem to prefer it, and it's difficult to argue that their heightened enjoyment is a disproof of God's goodness. It may be, but it is certainly not a direct disproof.
Complicating this issue even further is the problem of people who can ignore pain. There are people with such powerful control over themselves that they can endure excruciating pain without seeming to notice it. They are rare, but they exist. More familiar are people such as athletes who are familiar with the pain of exhaustion and are much better at enduring it than the lazy are. Since enduring it seems largely to be a matter of will, is the suffering of the lazy at minor exercise really morally unbearable when it seems to be more their fault for just being wimps? Yet what if all of us are merely wimps and the occasional monk who can endure breaking bones without grimacing is normal? What if we're all merely overreacting to pain? It's certainly at least possible. If we are all overreacting to pain, is that God's fault?
In essence, I have yet to see a coherent case that suffering is so terrible. It is bad, certainly. Largely, it is how we define bad. But is this a good definition? Our society seems to recognize times when suffering is worth enduring, such as forcing children to go to school or citizens to pay taxes. Both cause great suffering, and yet few people accuse our government of being evil because they exist. Do we really know which is and is not unjustified suffering?
And here comes the first real problem. To know what is unjustified suffering, we must know what is justified suffering. To know what is justified suffering, we must know what is justified. Yet who knows what is justified? If suffering is justified or not based partly on the merits of the person suffering and partly on the affect of this suffering (for surely school children have not sinned before they were born to deserve school and homework), we must know what the affect of each piece of suffering is before we can know if it is justified or not. Yet who knows this? Before we can pass judgment, we must know. And who knows?
This was my first realization: to understand suffering first requires understanding happiness. To understand happiness is to understand life. Who among us understands life? It is not that the problem of pain is an unimportant question. It is quite important. Its answer rests, however, on equally important questions that we do not have the answers to.
We do not know how God can be good despite all of the suffering in the world. Neither do we know how God could be good even if there was no suffering in the world. If we do not understand what goodness really is, it is less of a challenge to it that we don't understand how it is compatible with other things.
To carry the legal parallel even further than Chesterton carries it, if we are to accuse God, is it not proper that we should state the charge? And if we cannot state the charge clearly? It must lessen, somewhat, the force of our conviction of God if we cannot clearly state of what it is we convict him.
But here we come to the real objection to the problem of pain: what other option is there? If God wants a race of moral agents rather than automatons, we must be able to make bad choices as well as good. It is no answer to this to say that we should be able to make bad choices, but that those choices should not be allowed to hurt anyone. If they can't, they can't really be made. It's hardly giving me the freedom to strike my neighbor to say that I can try, though I shall never succeed. And if someone replies that I should not be able to strike my neighbor harder than a certain amount, I should humbly point out that this is already the case. There is a finite amount of harm that I can cause another. You cannot starve a man indefinitely, he will die at some point. If it is possible to prolong his suffering for many years, yet they are certainly less than two hundred years (to pick a very large upper bound). Is that really a long time or a short time? Does not that knowledge require a better understanding than we have? It is quite a lesser charge that God set the maximum threshold of suffering too high than that he unjustly allowed any suffering. Moreover, because it is a question of level rather than absolutes, far more evidence is required. Who is prepared to give the exact cutoff of what duration suffering is permissible? Who is prepared to justify their cutoff?
What is very interesting is that the problem of pain was brought up not only in the old testament, but even more explicitly in the new testament. In John 9:1-3, there is:As he went along, he saw a man who had been blind from birth. His disciples asked him, 'Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, for him to have been born blind?' 'Neither he nor his parents sinned,' Jesus answered 'he was born blind so that the works of God might be displayed in him.'
'As long as the day lasts I must carry out the work of the one who sent me; the night will soon be here when no one can work. As long as I am in the world I am the light of the world.'
Having said this, he spat on the ground, made a paste with the spittle, put this over the eyes of the blind man, and said to him, 'Go and wash in the Pool of Siloam' (a name that means 'sent'). So the blind man went off and washed himself, and came away with his sight restored.
It is only recently that I realized just how badly I had been reading this passage. As a child I somehow forgot the words "in him" and heard Jesus' answer as, "so the works of God might be displayed", i.e., that he was born blind merely as an advertising tool. This seemed rather cruel to visit on a man so much suffering merely to use it to perform a demonstration. Surely hurling a mountain into the sea should be enough, why make this man blind?
Even in that misunderstanding, it did occur to me that there was a certain amount of duplicity in my objection. Certainly the man would be better off to have his sight, but that does not mean that born blind he had nothing. He was comparatively worse off, but he probably would not have traded places with a dog that had its sight. He had much, just not as much as others. Once I thought of that, it occurred to me that much of the complaining of suffering was really comparative. All people die, some sooner than others. Those who starved to death in a famine at age twenty made it much farther than those who died in the womb. Compared to those who died of old age, they got less, but compared to those who died before birth they had far more. If by one light they were well off, might it not be the case that in absolute terms they were well off, but not so well off as others?
If I die today, I may curse God for my short life. But might I also not thank him for the life that I did have? However short it may have been, even when I was only twelve years old, it was filled with wonders. Insects and reptiles and clouds and the sky and the sun and the stars... All of these things I had day after day. If at some point I no longer have them, is there nothing proper in being thankful that I had them at all? Were it not for God making me, I would have had nothing. If he gave me less than other men, what of it? Is existence not his gift to give?
It is perhaps my favorite parable, the parable of the vineyard workers (Matt 20:1-16):
Now the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner going out at daybreak to hire workers for his vineyard. He made an agreement with the workers for one denarius a day, and sent them to his vineyard. Going out at about the third hour he saw others standing idle in the market place and said to them, "You go to my vineyard too and I will give you a fair wage". So the went. At about the six hour and again at about the ninth hour, he went out and did the same. Then at about the eleventh hour we went out and found more men standing round, and he said to them, "Why have you been standing here idle all day?" "Because no one has hired us" they answered. He said to them "You go into my vineyard too." In the evening, the owner of the vineyard said to his bailiff, "Call the workers and pay them their wages, starting with the last arrivals and ending with the first". So those who were hired at about the eleventh hour came forward and received on denarius each. When the first came, they expected to get more, but they too received one denarius each. They took it, but grumbled at the landowner. "The men who came last" they said "have done only one hour, and you have treated them the same as us, though we have done a heavy day's work in all the heat." He answered one of them and said, "My friend, I am not being unjust to you; did we not agree on one denarius? Take your earnings and go. I choose to pay the last-comer as much as I pay you. Have I no right to do what I like with my own? Why be envious because I am generous?" Thus the last will be first, and the first, last.
If God has chosen to give another man a life that is 80 years long, has he then wronged me if he only gives me a live 25 years long? Or twelve? Or two? What did I ever give God that he owes more chocolate and flowers and sunsets than I have already gotten? It is not an answer to the problem of pain, but it always struck me as a bit dishonest (if very human) to complain about an early death without also giving thanks for an early life. It does not prove God good that he does what he wills with his creations, but neither does it disprove his goodness that he gives to some more than to others. For surely a dog receives less than a man, and a tree less than a dog, and a rock less than a tree. Have all of these been wronged because they are not all Gods, and so received less than Jesus?
The existence of pain is a problem, or at least a mystery. But it is not much of anything at all if it's not in the context of gratitude. If it we never did anything to deserve our suffering, which for most people is actually fairly debatable, we certainly never did anything to deserve our life, which is debatable for nobody. If we were freely given the delights of existence, both big and small, is it wholly unreasonable that we might trust our benefactor that our suffering, whatever it means, might be worth it?
But this is all about a misunderstanding of mine. Recently I reread that passage in John and finally noticed the last two words, "in him". It finally occurred to me that the meaning of the passage might not be that God wanted the blind man as a notice board, but that the point of his birth was for God to give him his birth, sight and all, and there happens to be the minor detail of his sight taking a while to get there? I had read Jesus words to mean, "He was born blind so that I can show off by healing him." But might not his words mean, "He was born blind so that he could be given his sight." The aim in God's creating the man was so that he could see, there were just a few details to how that was accomplished.
Stating it more bluntly, perhaps Jesus didn't quite answer the question which was asked, but the question which was meant to be asked: "Was it God's desire that this man be blind? Why was he born blind?" "He was born blind because when he was born, he couldn't see. But that's not how he's supposed to be, and now I will finish what was started at his birth." Perhaps Jesus meant something like this.
None of this is really an answer to the problem of pain, it is merely a doubt. But it is a useful doubt. The problem of pain states that God cannot exist because there is suffering in the world, the only thing which really matters is if that's true. The only answer which really concerns human beings is that suffering does not preclude God's existence; there is enough room for doubt in our doubt for faith to be rational. We do not understand the good parts of life nor do we understand the bad parts; it is enough to know that they can make sense, that the good parts can be true. Once faith is an option, we can then consider whether it is likely that God exists or not. If the problem of pain is not overwhelming, we can ask just how big it is.
And here is where Christianity is the strangest. For most people, when considering the problem of pain, think of it as only applying to God's creatures. He is safe from suffering, it is only his toys that suffer. Yet the Christian claim is that this is not true. Christians claim that God was born into poverty and died by torture. It is the Christian claim that God worked all his life and then died one of the more horrible deaths possible. Indeed, most of his creatures died more peacefully than God did. Whatever the problem pain poses, God chose not to escape from it.
And at the same time, God also did not deny the problem, either. Who knows what is the meaning of the words, "My God, My God, Why have you forsaken me?" Yet whatever they mean, they do not mean that suffering is irrelevant.