The Problem of Suffering? So What's the Problem?

[00:00:01] The Problem of Suffering so what's the Problem? By Bart Ehrman the problem of suffering is especially a problem in the monotheistic religions, in ancient Greek and Roman religions with their many, many gods. It wasn't an intellectual puzzle. If there's suffering, it's because some or all of the gods are ticked off and out to get you. There are some bad ones up there just as well as good ones, just the way it is. [00:00:26] But if there's only one God, why is there suffering? Many people have very simple solutions and they don't see a problem. But there is a problem. It just has to be explained. Here I continue by showing why it's a problem and to motivate some thinking by trying to explain how deep thinkers have expressed the problem and tried to address it. Again, this is exerted from my book God's problem, published by Harper One in 2008. [00:00:52] Just before this excerpt, I was explaining my first time teaching about the issue in a class I did at Rutgers in the mid-1980s. [00:01:01] For the class, I had students do a lot of reading throughout the Bible, and I also assigned several popular books that discuss suffering in the modern world. For example, Eli Wiesel's classic Nights, which describes his horrifying experiences in Auschwitz as a teenager Rabbi Harold Kushner's bestselling When Bad Things Happen to Good People, and the much less read but thoroughly moving story of Job as rewritten by Archibald MacLeish in his play JB in the Class, students wrote a number of papers, and each week we discussed the biblical passages and the extra reading that had been assigned. [00:01:37] I began the semester by laying out for the students the classical problem of suffering and explaining what is meant by the technical term theodicy. [00:01:46] Theodicy is a word invented by one of the great intellectuals and polymaths of the 17th century, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who wrote a lengthy treatise in which he tried to explain how and why there can be suffering in the world if God is all powerful and if he wants the absolute best for people. [00:02:05] The word is made up of two Greek words, theos, which means God, and dike, which means justice. Theodicy, in other words, refers to the problem of how God can be just or righteous, given the fact that there is so much suffering in the world that he allegedly created and is sovereign over. [00:02:23] As philosophers and theologians have discussed theodicy over the years, they've devised a kind of logical problem that needs to be solved to explain the suffering in the world. [00:02:32] This problem involves three assertions that all appear to be True. But if true appear to contradict one another. The assertions are these. God is all powerful. [00:02:43] God is all loving. [00:02:45] There is suffering. [00:02:47] How can all three be true at once? [00:02:50] If God is all powerful, then he is able to do whatever he wants and therefore can remove suffering. [00:02:57] If he is all loving, then he obviously wants the best for people and therefore does not want them to suffer. And yet people suffer. How can that be explained? [00:03:09] Some thinkers have tried to deny one or the other of the assertions. Some, for example, have argued that God is not really all powerful. This is ultimately the answer given by Rabbi Kushner in When Bad Things Happen to Good People. For Kushner, God wishes He could intervene to bring your suffering to an end, but his hands are tied, and so he is the one who stands beside you to give you the strength you need to deal with the pain in your life. But he cannot do anything to stop the pain. [00:03:37] For other thinkers, this is to put a limit on the power of God and is in effect, a way of saying that God is not really God. [00:03:46] Others have argued that God is not all loving, at least not in any conventional sense. [00:03:51] This is more or less the view of those who think God is at fault for the terrible suffering that people endure, a view that seems close to what Eli Wiesel asserts when he expresses his anger at God and declares him guilty for how he's treated his people. [00:04:06] Others again object and claim that if God is not love, again he is not God. [00:04:12] There are some people who want to deny the third assertion. They claim that there is not really any suffering in the world. [00:04:19] But these people are in the extreme minority and have never been very convincing to most of us who prefer looking at the world as it is to hiding our heads in the sand like ostriches. [00:04:30] Most people who wrestle with the problem want to say that all three assertions are true, but that there is some kind of extenuating circumstance that can explain it all. For example, in the classical view of the prophets of the Hebrew Bible, as we will see at length in the next couple of chapters, God is certainly all powerful and all loving. One of the reasons that there is suffering is that his people have violated his law or gone against his will, and he is bringing suffering upon them to force them to return to him and lead righteous lives. [00:05:01] This kind of explanation works well, so long as it's the wicked who suffer. [00:05:06] But what about the wicked who prosper, while the ones who try to do what is right before God are racked with interminable pain and unbearable misery? [00:05:14] How does one explain the suffering of the righteous? [00:05:18] For that, another explanation needs to be used. For example, that all would be made right in the afterlife, a view not found in the prophets, but in other biblical authors. And so it goes. You yourself will no doubt have some answers in mind, such as free will or we can't have good without evil, or suffering can have a silver lining or even bring redemption. [00:05:39] Even though it was a scholar of the Enlightenment, Leibniz, who came up with the term theodicy, and even though the deep philosophical problem has been with us only since the Enlightenment, the basic problem has been around since time immemorial. [00:05:53] This was recognized by the intellectuals of the Enlightenment themselves. One of them, the English philosopher David Hume, pointed out that the problem was stated some 2500 years ago by one of the great philosophers of ancient Greece, Epicurus. [00:06:09] Epicurus. Old questions are yet unanswered. [00:06:13] Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he's impotent. Is he able but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then evil? [00:06:27] As I was teaching my course on biblical views of suffering at RUTGERS More than 20 years ago, I began to realize that the students seemed remarkably and somewhat inexplicably detached from the problem. [00:06:38] It was a good group of students. They were smart and attentive, but they were, for the most part, white middle class kids who had yet to experience very much pain in their lives. And I had some work to do to help them realize that suffering was in fact a problem. [00:06:52] As it turned out, that was the time of the great Ethiopian famines. In order to drive home for my students just how disturbing suffering could be, I spent some time with them, dealing with the problem of the famine. It was an enormous problem, in part because of the political situation, but even more because of a massive drought. Eight million Ethiopians were confronting severe shortages and as a result, starving. [00:07:16] Every day there were pictures in the papers of poor souls, famished, desperate, with no relief in sight. [00:07:23] Eventually, one out of every eight died the horrific death of starvation. [00:07:29] That's 1 million people starved to death in a world that has far more than enough food to feed all its inhabitants. A world in which American farmers are paid to destroy their crops and most Americans ingest far more calories than our bodies need or want. [00:07:46] To make my point, I would show pictures of the famine to my students. Pictures of emaciated Ethiopian women with famished children on their breasts, desperate for nourishment that would never come. Both mother and children eventually destroyed by the ravages of hunger. [00:08:04] I'll continue from there in the next post.