I’ve seen this question asked a countless number of times, and I didn’t have an answer. I came across this article and thought it made a few pretty decent points, and it actually answered a personal question I’ve had – why does it seem easier for those whose suffering is more extreme to choose faith. If nothing else, it gave me something to think about. I wish I could post the whole thing. It’s well written and thoughtful. I recommend following the link.
On December 14, 2012, a twenty-year-old man named Adam Lanza entered an elementary school in Sandy Hook, Connecticut and fatally shot twenty children and six adults before committing suicide. All of the children he murdered were under the age of eight. As news of this mass shooting quickly spread throughout the nation, most people were utterly distraught. How could any person do something so horrific? More distressingly, how could God allow these innocent children to suffer so egregiously?
When I think of the Sandy Hook shooting, I am reminded of Ivan, one of the brothers in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov. Ivan found himself at odds with the idea of God, not because he didn’t like God’s rules, nor for a lack of faith, but because his heart was simply too big. When Ivan heard stories of children too young to know what evil was, let alone practice it, and yet who suffered more than he could even fathom, he could not reconcile their pain with the existence of a benevolent sovereign. In a moment of heartbreaking honesty, he told his brother, “It’s not God that I don’t accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return him the ticket.”1 He could not imagine himself entering heaven and living happily for all of eternity with a God who would allow an innocent child to experience such evil.
Ivan’s dilemma is desperately real, and it can often seem as though Christians do their very best to ignore it. When pressed, many times we will skirt the issue or redirect it, resorting to abstractions like “free will” or “the unknowable mind of God.” This is generally because we cannot find the answer ourselves. The best many of us can do is to humbly explain that we simply do not know. This is not a bad answer. When Job suffered horrible things and did not know why, humility seemed to be exactly the response God wanted from him. “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding,” God tells the pious sufferer, before listing a plethora of his accomplishments that man could only wonder at. The crux of God’s interrogation was the famed question, “Shall a faultfinder contend with the Almighty?”(Job 38-40:1, ESV). God certainly wanted to show Job that there was much that Job did not know.
But there is more for us to learn from Job than simply that we must acknowledge what we don’t know. After all, God commended Job to Job’s friends, telling them, “You have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has” (Job 42:8). Though He chastened Job, God considered him to have spoken truthfully. So what did Job understand about God that his friends did not? Why was Job unwilling to “curse God and die,” (Job 2:9) as his wife advised? The answer to these questions lies in Job 19:25, where Job proclaimed, “For I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the last he will stand upon the earth.” God commended Job over his friends because Job spoke in faith, understanding that God’s work was not yet finished. The grand story of humanity was only just beginning, and there were questions yet to be answered. Our Redeemer had yet to stand upon the earth.
But though Job had to wait humbly in faith and believe that it would all make sense in the end, we no longer have to carry that burden. Our Redeemer has come, and he has redeemed us. Job received an incomplete answer because Christ had not yet entered the world. And blessed is Job, who believed though he did not see. But God has a much clearer answer for those of us who do see. We now have a solution to Ivan’s dilemma, and it rests in the infinite love of God, the life that is to come, and the incomparable sacrifice of our great Redeemer.
In an attempt to explain away the problem of suffering, many theologians have said that all of our pain and all of our suffering come from our free will, and if we would just stop doing bad things, we would no longer suffer. Though popular in modern Christianity, this argument is ultimately not sufficient. It has two main problems, the first of which is the issue of natural disasters. If suffering comes from evil, why does the earth, a presumably non-evil mass of dirt and chemicals, cause us so much pain and death? Some argue that nature is only harmful because humans sinned. When humanity fell, according to this viewpoint, we took nature down with us, because we have dominion over it. This idea is certainly creative, but it doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.
Despite what we would like to believe, there is nothing inherently wrong with tsunamis, tornadoes, or thunderstorms. These are natural occurrences which are no more abhorrent than the growth of a seed into a tree. A seed, when it grows, first destroys the shell that encompasses it, then shoves a large amount of dirt around, and finally, when it is grown, sucks water and nutrients out of the ground. But we do not consider a tree to be a bad thing. Why? Because it doesn’t hurt people. Similarly, a spring shower is not considered a natural disaster, though some poor bugs will certainly be drowned, because it is safe for humans. We do not cry out, “Why, God, why?” when we see a solar flare, because it is millions of miles away. But we would certainly think differently if the earth periodically emitted such explosions. The bottom line is that we tend to think nature is evil when we get in its way, and good when we do not. But it is not evil for tectonic plates to shift and shake the surface of the earth — it is simply a fact of life. The existence of earthquakes is an indication that the laws of physics are working, not that they are fallen. Nature is not an active agent out to get us, but the passive reality of cause and effect, which churns on dutifully whether or not humans are around to witness it. When a tsunami kills thousands of people, we cannot blame sin or free will, because they are unrelated to the problem.
The other issue with the free will argument is that it makes the very mistake it attempts to avoid. It makes God seem immoral. Free will does nothing to solve Ivan’s dilemma. It is not the fault of the children at Sandy Hook that Adam Lanza abused his free will. Couldn’t God have protected them? Is Adam Lanza’s freedom to commit atrocious acts worth more to God than the lives of those little children? Is the freedom of the 9/11 suicide bombers so important to God that He would not thwart their plans and save thousands of lives? He stopped the plane headed towards Washington D.C.; why would He not stop the others? These are hard questions, and no answer will erase the enormous amount of pain caused by the attacks. But the free will argument only exacerbates that pain. If we are honest with ourselves, invoking free will is not sufficient. It leaves a great deal of suffering unanswered for and trivializes the suffering that it attempts to explain.
The free will argument fails because it is not so much an attempt to explain suffering as an attempt to explain suffering away. It is easy to see how we have fallen into this error. We hope that, if we can just understand why we suffer, we might be able to lessen the pain. We consider suffering to be the ultimate evil, and we will not accept an explanation that makes our pain anything but an aberration, something that God is unequivocally against. And there is a deeper fear. We are afraid to let God take the blame. Because if God causes our suffering, then how can He love us? We blame our pain on sin in order to shield God from the responsibility. But God does not want our shielding; He wants our honesty. If we are to reconcile our immense pain with our belief in a loving God, we must seek an answer with integrity. We must acknowledge that suffering is real, and that it hurts. We must admit that suffering is not necessarily sinful, nor is it avoidable; it is a part of life. And we must be willing, if necessary, to allow God to take the blame. Only then can we come to an answer to Ivan’s dilemma.
http://www.veritas.org/why-do-we-suffer/
So here are my questions. Have you seen this point of view before? What do you think?