Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Doesn't Free Will Explain Suffering? By Bart Ehrman when teaching undergraduate students about the problem of suffering, I have sometimes found it hard to explain to them why it is a problem for those who believe in God. Many people do not find it an insurmountable problem. Many others do. My concern is far less where someone lines up on that issue than on that they realize it is indeed a huge issue that should not be ignored or swept under a rug.
[00:00:29] It took a while for some of my students at Rutgers to see the problem years ago when I was teaching about it. As I mentioned in my last post, I continue my reflections here, and again this is exerted from my book God's problem, published by Harper One in 2008, and it's edited a bit before the semester was over. I think my students got the point. Most of them did learn to grapple with the problem at the beginning of the course. Many of them had thought that whatever the problem there was with suffering could be fairly easily solved. The most popular solution they had was one that I suspect most people in our Western world today still hold onto. It has to do with free will. According to this view, the reason there is so much suffering in the world is that God has given human beings free will. Without the free will to love and to obey God, we would simply be robots doing what we were programmed to do. But since we have the free will to love and to obey, we also have the free will to hate and to disobey. And this is where suffering comes from. Hitler, the Holocaust, IDI Amin, corrupt governments throughout the world, corrupt human beings inside government, and out. All of these are explained on the grounds of free will.
[00:01:41] And as it turns out, this was more or less the answer given by some of the great intellectuals of the Enlightenment, including Leibniz, who argued that human beings have to be free in order for this world to be the best world that could come into existence. For Leibniz, God is all powerful and so was able to create any kind of world that he wanted. And since he was all loving, he obviously wanted to create the best of all possible worlds.
[00:02:07] This world, with freedom of choice given to its creatures, is therefore the best of all possible worlds.
[00:02:14] Other philosophers rejected this view, none so famously vitriolically and even hilariously than the French philosopher Voltaire, whose classic novel Candide tells the story of a man, Candide, who experiences such senseless and random suffering and misery in this allegedly best of all worlds that he abandons his Leibnizian upbringing and he adopts a more sensible view that we can't know the whys and wherefores of what happens in this world, but should simply do our very best to enjoy it while we can. Candide is still a novel very much worth reading, witty, clever, and damning.
[00:02:51] If this is the best world possible, just imagine what a worse one would be.
[00:02:57] In any event, much to the surprise of my students, this standard explanation that God had given human beings free will and that suffering is the result of people badly exercising it plays only a very minor role in the biblical tradition.
[00:03:12] The biblical authors did not think about the possibilities of not having free will. They certainly didn't know about robots or indeed any machines that more or less did what they were programmed to do. But they had many explanations other than free will for why people suffer.
[00:03:27] The goal of the class was to discuss these other views, to evaluate them, and to try to see if any resolution of the problem was even possible.
[00:03:35] It was in fact fairly easy to show that some of the problems with the standard modern explanation that suffering comes from free will. Yes, you can explain the political machinations of the competing political forces in Ethiopia, or in Nazi Germany, or Stalin's Soviet Union, or indeed in the ancient worlds of Israel or Mesopotamia by claiming that human beings had badly handled the freedom given to them.
[00:04:00] But how can you explain drought? When it hits, it's not because someone chose not to make it rain. Or how do you explain a hurricane that destroys New Orleans, or a tsunami that kills hundreds of thousands overnight? Or earthquakes, or mudslides, or malaria, or a dysentery, or the list goes on.
[00:04:19] Moreover, the claim that free will stands behind all suffering has always been a bit problematic, at least from a thinking perspective.
[00:04:27] Most people who believe in a God given free will will also believe in an afterlife.
[00:04:31] Presumably, people in the afterlife will still have free will. They won't be robots then either, will they?
[00:04:38] And yet there won't be suffering there. These people themselves tend to agree. So then it is possible to have both free will and the absence of suffering. Why will people know how to exercise free will in heaven if they can't know how to exercise it here on earth?
[00:04:54] For that matter, if God gave people free will as a great gift, why didn't he give them the intelligence they need to exercise it so that we can all live happily and peaceably together?
[00:05:04] You can't argue that he wasn't able to do so if you want to argue that he is all powerful.
[00:05:10] And further, if God sometimes intervenes in history to counteract the free will decisions of others, for example, when he destroyed the Egyptian armies at the Exodus, they freely had decided to oppress the Israelites. Or when he fed the multitudes in the wilderness in the days of Jesus, people who had chosen to go off to hear him without packing a lunch.
[00:05:30] Or when he counteracted the wicked decision of the Roman governor Pilate to destroy Jesus by raising the crucified Jesus from dead. If he intervenes sometimes to counteract free will, why does he not do it so more of the time, or indeed all of the time? At the end of the day, one would have to say that the answer is a mystery. We don't know why free will works so well in heaven, but not on earth. We don't know why God doesn't provide the intelligence we need to exercise free will. We don't know why he sometimes contravenes the free exercise of the free will and sometimes not.
[00:06:02] And this presents a problem, because if in the end, the question is resolved by saying that the answer is a mystery, then it's no longer an answer. It's an admission that there is no answer. The solution of free will in the end ultimately leads to the conclusion that it is all a mystery.
[00:06:21] As it turns out, that is one of the common answers asserted by the Bible. We just don't know why there is suffering. But other answers in the Bible are just as common. In fact, even more common.
[00:06:32] In my class at Rutgers, I wanted to explore all these answers, to see what the biblical authors thought about such matters and to evaluate what they had to say, and I'll continue here in the next post.
