Notes from Bill Brewer's Class

“Is There Meaning in Evil and Suffering

A Feb 99 discussion hosted by the

Faith & Science Lecture Forum (FSLF)

How does the video fit into our present study of worldviews?

A worldview answers unavoidable questions about the nature of God, the universe, man, history, morality, and knowledge.  Although people may be reluctant to talk about religion, they are often eager to discuss worldview questions despite their religious significance. 

“Is There Meaning in Evil and Suffering,” addresses a serious and frequent issue that cuts across every aspect of a worldview.  In relation to God’s nature, is He (as Tumlin asks in the video) indifferent, impotent, or perhaps sadistic?”  In relation to the universe, is it good, evil, or somewhere in between?  In relation to man, is his role in evil and suffering a choice or is it predetermined?  In relation to history, with its record of evil and suffering, is it going in any particular direction or not?  In relation to morality, is evil simply opposed to man’s purposes or is there a kind of evil that’s opposed to God’s purposes?  In relation to knowledge, how do we know we really know the distinction between good and evil?

The problem of evil and suffering is particularly important for Christians because the Christian conception of God is of a Being who is personal, Father, good, just, and loving. 

Background of the event:

FSLF is composed of Christian faculty who believe the Christian worldview is explicitly and purposefully ignored by university faculty and administrators.  FSLF responds by addressing foundational worldview questions, such as "Does God exist?" and "Is there a rational basis for the belief in Christian truth claims?" via invited lectures by prominent scholars.  In doing so, FSLF seeks to further the cause of Christ by presenting a rational basis for Christian belief coupled with the kindness and gentleness of Jesus.

Overview of the event:

Ravi Zacharias, the featured lecturer, presents a 45-minute address offering the Christian perspective.

Three panelists offered rebuttals and support:

·     Dr. Bernard Leikind, a plasma physicist, senior editor at Skeptic Magazine and a renowned atheist.

·     Dr. Jitendra Mohanty, one of India's most noted Hindu philosophers, a distinguished professor at Emory University in Atlanta, and “religious atheist.” 

·     William Lane Craig, a noted author, Christian philosopher and apologist.

Kerby Anderson, President of Probe Ministries International, author, and syndicated columnist was moderator.

Jim Tumlin, FSLF President:

We live in a world ruled by injustice, where the innocent are slaughtered by the wicked.  Recognition of that fact begs the question, “is God indifferent, impotent, or sadistic?”  For others, the world is simply a product of chance, so it’s not a problem.  The Christian response is that evil and suffering show God’s patience and forbearance. FSLF wants to advance that response in a scholarly and rigorous manner. 

Zacharias’ Remarks:

Andrew Fletcher, Scottish political activist (1655-1716), said, “let me write the songs of a nation—I don’t care who writes its laws.”  Artists express the ethos (ethics) and pathos (passions) of a culture without having to be academically precise.

The “Moody Blues” express it this way.  “Why do we never get an answer when we're knocking at the door with a thousand million questions about hate and death and war?  ‘Cos when we stop and look around us, there is nothing that we need, in a world of persecution that is burning in its greed.  Why do we never get an answer when we're knocking at the door?”  

Most authors seemed compelled to begin the discussion of evil with a recounting of events—to show the problem in its direst light.  They seem to know where to start in raising the question about the meaning of evil and suffering, but they stumble in where to begin in answering the question.  Relate the butler joke.

But it’s more than simply a problem.  Gabriel Marcel[1] says, “it’s a mystery—a mystery because the problem encroaches upon itself by entangling the questioner in the question.”

First, the reality of evil and suffering:  David Hume[2] said, “Were a stranger to drop suddenly into this world, I would show him as specimen of its ills, a hospital full of diseases, a prison crowded with malefactors and debtors, a field strewn with carcasses, a fleet floundering in the ocean, a nation languishing under tyranny, famine or pestilence. Honestly, I don't see how you can possibly square with an ultimate purpose of love.”

Another skeptic goes on to say, “It is not science that has led me to doubt the purpose of God. It is the state of the world. It is the pitiful unending struggle for existence among the nations. It is the collapse of our idealisms before the brute facts of force and chaos. It is the feeling that there is something demonic in the heart of things which is working against us; that there is a radical twist in the very constitution of the universe which will always defeat man's hopes, make havoc of his dreams and bring his pathetic optimism crashing in disaster. Purpose? Look at the world. That settles it.”

Second, the universality of suffering:  Gautama Buddha[3] described it as “dukkha,” suffering that included (1) ordinary suffering—old age, sickness, death, (2) suffering of impermanence, and (3) suffering of conditioned states.  Life is “embattled.”

Third, the complexity of suffering:  The problem of evil and suffering has tentacles into metaphysics (the source of evil), physics (the facts of evil), and morality (the why of evil).

There are two distinct tracks in tackling the question:  Intellectual and emotional.  Both are real, legitimate, and necessary.

The problem of evil and suffering is so weighty that every worldview (theistic, atheistic, pantheistic, monistic) has to deal with it.  It has to be explained or explained away.  Subsumed or assumed in every answer is the purpose of life assigned by a particular worldview. 

The purpose of life:  C.S. Lewis[4] says every ship deals with three questions:  How to keep from sinking?  (personal ethics)  How to keep from bumping into other ships?  (social ethics)  (3) Why is it out in the ocean in the first place?  (essential ethics)  So also, with life. 

Most secular humanists insist on no purpose for life.  So Zacharias’ intent is to challenge their answer to evil and suffering. 

Zacharias begins by using No Exit (the title of a book by Jean-Paul Sartre[5] dealing with the human struggle for meaningfulness in life) to describe the secular humanist predicament in trying to answer the problem of evil and suffering.  Sartre’s answer was there is “no exit” from the meaninglessness, the nihilism[6] of life.

The naturalist in trying to escape (rid himself) of the theistic answers for evil and suffering tries to look for doors (arguments) to escape.  Zaccharias sees those doors as marked “no exit.”

The first door is the evidential challenge that the existence of evil argues against the existence of God.  Zaccharias recounts a story of a student at the University of Nottingham with that question.  Zacharias’ response was that the idea of evil implies the idea of good.  The idea of good implies a moral law to differentiate good from evil.  A moral law implies the existence of a lawgiver.  “So, if there is no moral lawgiver, there is no moral law; if there is no moral law, there is no absolute good; if there is no good, there is no evil.  What then is your question?  Because in using the idea of evil to argue against the existence of God, you are actually assuming that God exists.”  The student then responds, “what then am I asking you?” 

The skeptic’s inability to respond to the problem of evil and suffering is not just a matter of intellectual sophistication.  The great debate[7] between Frederick Copleston[8] and Bertrand Russell[9] exemplifies.  Copleston to Russell—“…what's your justification for distinguishing between good and bad or how do you view the distinction between them?”  Russell—“I don't have any justification any more than I have when I distinguish between blue and yellow. What is my justification for distinguishing between blue and yellow? I can see they are different.”  Copleston—Well, that is an excellent justification, I agree. You distinguish blue and yellow by seeing them, so you distinguish good and bad by what faculty?”  Russell—“By my feelings.”  Zacharias adds, “Somebody could have turned to Russell and said, ‘In some cultures, people love their neighbor, and in others, they eat them, both based on feelings.  Do you have any personal preferences on the matter?’”

The problem for the atheist is not a “straw man” created by the Christian.  Stated syllogistically, objective moral values exist only if God exists.  If objective moral values exist, then God exists. 

Rejection of a moral law/lawgiver leads to the denial of absolute moral values.  In rejecting God, the skeptic entangles himself is a huge problem—trying to find another anchor for his deep-seated knowledge that objective moral values actually do exist.  The only “exit” is to resort to subjectivity.  Thus, the atheist does not really escape entanglement in the question of evil and suffering. 

Even the fierce atheist, J.L. Mackie[10] admits, “We might well argue that objective, intrinsically prescriptive features supervenient[11] upon natural ones constitute so odd a cluster of qualities and relationships that they are most unlikely to have arisen in the ordinary course of events without an all-powerful God to create them.”

So the skeptic is faced with the problem of how an amoral first Cause through an amoral process could ever create a moral basis for living.  The problem of no absolute morality is so awkward that Mackie says you “almost” have to admit the existence of a God to deal with it.  In refusing to admit God’s existence, however, the skeptic necessarily retreats into subjectivity.

Rejection of a moral law/lawgiver leads to the denial of absolute moral evil.  Richard Dawkins[12]—“in a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt; other people are going to get lucky; and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it nor any justice.  The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is at the bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, and no good, nothing but blind and pitiless indifference.  DNA neither knows nor cares.  DNA just is and we dance to its music.” 

Rejection of a moral law/lawgiver leads to the loss of personal identity.  Hobart Mauer[13]—"For several decades we psychologists have looked upon the whole matter of sin and moral accountability as a great incubus[14] and we have acclaimed our freedom from it as epic making.  But at length we have discovered to be free in this sense to have the excuse of being sick rather than being sinful is to also court the danger of becoming lost.  In becoming amoral, ethically neutral and free, we have cut the very roots of our being, lost our deepest sense of selfhood and identity.  And with neurotics themselves, asking, "Who am I?  What is my deepest destiny?  And what does living really mean?"

Internal inconsistency in the atheist who raises the question of evil has become the object of satire.  Chesterton[15]—“For all denunciation implies a moral doctrine of some kind; and the modern revolutionist doubts not only the institution he denounces, but the doctrine by which he denounces it. Thus he writes one book complaining that imperial oppression insults the purity of women, and then he writes another book (about the sex problem) in which he insults it himself. …. As a politician, he will cry out that war is a waste of life, and then, as a philosopher, that all life is waste of time. A Russian pessimist will denounce a policeman for killing a peasant, and then prove by the highest philosophical principles that the peasant ought to have killed himself. A man denounces marriage as a lie, and then denounces aristocratic profligates for treating it as a lie. …. The man of this school goes first to a political meeting, where he complains that savages are treated as if they were beasts; then he takes his hat and umbrella and goes on to a scientific meeting, where he proves that they practically are beasts. In short, the modern revolutionist, being an infinite skeptic, is always engaged in undermining his own mines. In his book on politics he attacks men for trampling on morality; in his book on ethics he attacks morality for trampling on men. Therefore the modern man in revolt has become practically useless for all purposes of revolt. By rebelling against everything he has lost his right to rebel against anything.  So Door #1 marked “Nothing Normative” is marked “no exit.” 

Door #2 is marked “Man Can Be Good Without God.” An example is E.O. Wilson[16], “scientists and humanists should consider together the possibility that the time has come for ethics to be removed temporarily from the hands of the philosophers and biologicized”—in other words, ethics must be explained in terms of Darwinian evolution. 

But how do they explain “supererogatory[17] acts”—acts of great nobility in violation of evolutionary principles.  An example is parents who give their lives (hope of progeny) to save the life of a child with no hope of progeny.  How does the schema of evolutionary ethics (self preservation, progeny preservation, relative preservation, species preservation) explain this?  Daniel Goldman, Emotional Intelligence, begins his book by saying its time evaluate how human ethics are tied to humanity’s emotional makeup. 

There are many unanswered questions in the proposition that man can be good without God.  The dark side of that proposition is even scarier.  Where does the idea that “man is nothing but” lead?  Victor Frankl[18]—“If we present man with a concept of man which is not true, we may well corrupt him. When we present him as an automaton of reflexes, as a mind machine, as a bundle of instincts, as a pawn of drive and reactions, as a mere product of heredity and environment, we feed the nihilism to which modern man is, in any case, prone. I became acquainted with the last stage of corruption in my second concentration camp, Auschwitz. The gas chambers of Auschwitz were the ultimate consequence of the theory that man is nothing but the product of heredity and environment—or, as the Nazis liked to say, ‘of blood and soil.’ I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek were ultimately prepared not in some ministry or other in Berlin, but rather at the desks and in lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers.”  Door #2, “Can Man be Good without God” is marked “no exit.”

Door #3, “If God is all-powerful, why didn’t He make us to always choose good?”  This demand is based on a false argument that God can do anything—that God can make something with mutually exclusive qualities—good and evil—at the same time.  The skeptic wants God to create man with the appearance of free will, but without the ability to choose evil.  In demanding this, he insists on what he would reject in other arguments.  For example in arguing for an old earth, the skeptic says that if the earth is really young then God must be deceptive in making it appear old.[19]  But when it comes to the problem of evil, the atheist wants freedom that’s not actual.  He wants God to be deceptive in giving man the appearance of free will without actually having it. 

The Christian worldview:

If God is the author of life, then the sanctity of life is not merely social or pragmatic—life partakes of God’s sanctity.  If God is the author of life, then there’s a script.  Evil and suffering of life relate to life the same way music relates to a play.  For example, the music to “Phantom of the Opera” seems discordant until you see the play.  In the same way, the problem of evil and suffering doesn’t make sense without the “script.”

If there is no God—no script, then the consequences are horrendous.  Consider a poem by English journalist Steve Turner.  “If chance be the Father of all flesh, disaster is his rainbow in the sky, and when you hear “State of emergency! Sniper Kills Ten! Troops on Rampage! Whites go Looting! Bomb Blasts School!” It is but the sound of man worshipping his maker.”

But the skeptic insists on “no script.”  Consider the response of Steven Hawking[20] on whether human action is entirely predetermined—“Yes, man is determined; but since we do not know what is determined, he may as well not be.”  There is a story line, but we don’t know it!

Steven J. Gould, Harvard paleontologist and evolutionist says “there is no higher purpose; there is no higher meaning.” 

But for the Christian, God is the author of life and so life is sacred.  There is a script that demands a response—and that response is worship.  The chaos (evil) on the outside of man is only a mirror of the chaos on the inside.  So the human response to evil and suffering is worship: quickening of conscience by His holiness, nourishment of mind by His truth, purification of imagination by His beauty, opening of the heart to His love, submission of will to His purposes, all gathered up in adoration is the greatest expression of which we are capable.[21]

The “script of life” is not just to do good deeds.  It is to sanctify the inner life with all its chaotic tendencies.  When that happens, worships spills over into all areas of life.  “I believe God made me for a purpose.  But he also made me fast.  And when I run I feel God’s pleasure”— Olympic runner, Eric Liddell in “Chariots of Fire.”  The opposite of “sacred” (in the sense of bringing all of one’s being into submission to God) is not “secular,” but “profane,” and profanity is where evil finds its ultimate expression. 

Worship grows into love and love can never be predetermined.  “The man who wants to be loved does not desire the enslavement of the beloved He does not want to possess an automaton, and if we want to humiliate him, we need try only to persuade him that the beloved passion is a result of a psychological determinism. The lover will then feel that both his love and his being are cheapened.”—Sartre.  Russell admitted that love is the one thing he never fully experienced.

Some of the greatest thinkers in the world have identified the Christian understanding of God’s love as the most meaningful aspect of the Christian faith.  In asking the question, “how is such love possible,” suffering takes center stage.  The essence of the Christian message is found in the cross.  It was not something Jesus wanted, but the very purpose for which he came.  “As the cross drew nearer and the shudder was felt, He struggled only to say ‘for this very cause he came into this world.’  With double force, he embodied the destructiveness of evil and its cost by showing what humanity can descend to when God is rejected.  God allowed the One whose life was lived perfectly to suffer, not by His own instigation, but by ours.  Human will gone wrong academically raises the question of innocence and suffering; but in actuality, by exalting itself over God, it in fact instigates it and justifies it”—Zacharias 

Even Mahatma Gandhi found the cross of Christ to be the most overwhelming fact of the Christian faith and singularly unique—so also with Martin Luther King.

Consider Zacharias’ story of Elie Wiesel, holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize winner.  “The last ounce of hope was torn away from Elie when he had to witness the hanging of a small boy. For more than half an hour he stayed there, struggling between life and death, dying in slow agony under our eyes. A man behind Elie asked, ‘Where is God? Where is He?....Where is God now?’ All Elie could think of was ‘Where is He? Here He is—He is hanging here on this gallows...’” 

But why did Wiesel even ask the question?  Because heinous evil is unexplainable to the skeptic—foolishness and ignorance yes, but not wanton wickedness.  If naturalism were true, how could there be a sense of horrifying evil? 

But the evidence of gross evil abounds.  “She begged me not to kill her. I gave her a rose then slit her throat, and watched her shake till her eyes closed, … and drew my name on the wall like helter skelter”—song by the Geto Boys.

Ironically, the list is long of skeptics who have left their unbelief behind because they could not explain the existing of appalling evil from a naturalistic standpoint.  “Dancing to the DNA” doesn’t explain it. 

W.H. Auden[22] and Philosopher Eleonore Stump address the fact of evil as a witness to God.  In “The Mirror of Evil,” Stump’s principal purpose was to communicate that in a strange but compelling way, it was the harshness of evil that had driven her to seek the face of God.  So, in an odd sort of way, the mirror of evil can also lead us to God. A loathing focus on the evils of our world and ourselves prepares us to be the more startled by the taste of true goodness when we find it and the more determined to follow where it leads. And where it leads is to the truest goodness of all— the goodness of God. 

Malcolm Muggeridge[23] agreed.  “Contrary to what might be expected, I look back on experiences that at the time seemed especially desolating and painful. I look back upon them with particular satisfaction. Indeed, I can say with complete truthfulness that everything I have learned in my 75 years in this world, everything that has truly enhanced and enlightened my existence has been through affliction and not through happiness whether pursued or attained. In other words, I say this, if it were to be possible to eliminate affliction from our earthly existence by means of some drug or other medical mumbo-jumbo, the result would not be to make life delectable, but to make it too banal and trivial to be endurable. This, of course, is what the cross signifies and it is the cross, more than anything else, that has called me inexorably to Christ.”

The question of evil is first addressed by questioning the evil within oneself, not by questioning the evil outside.  Meaningless comes from a weariness of pleasure, not pain.

Recap the Christian response:

1.      God is the author of life and life is therefore sacred.

2.      There is a script and a transcendent purpose to life.

3.      That purpose is a response to the Creator in worship leading to love.

4.      But how does one love in the presence of intrusive evil?  The cross shows God right in the middle of our need.

5.      Problem of evil and suffering is internal before it is external. 

6.      Meaningless comes from not from too much pain, but from too much pleasure.  Worship alone is the perpetual novelty. 

“Why do we never get an answer when we're knocking at the door with a thousand million questions about hate and death and war?  ‘Cos when we stop and look around us, there is nothing that we need, in a world of persecution that is burning in its greed.  Why do we never get an answer when we're knocking at the door?” 

Thankfully, even the artist knew how to go beyond just the question.  “I’m looking for someone to change my life.  I’m looking for a miracle in my life.”  That search is answered in Jesus Christ.