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Suffering

If God Exists, Why Doesn't He Stop It?

John Hunt Publishing Ltd.

Where is God?

"Where is God and what is he doing?" was Goethe's question on hearing news of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake. It speaks for all of us when innocent children die, nations starve, cities are bombed, and we attend funerals. It expresses the ancient problem of suffering which has always been the weakest pillar holding up all religions, and the strongest ground for atheism. Without God, there is no religious problem: suffering is 'simply' part of life's double package of joy and woe, that I witnessed during my nine years on the equator in Uganda.

While helping to care for my own grandson born in 1999 profoundly handicapped - and Daniel is still unable to crawl, walk, talk, and has to be fed and changed - I wrote my Contemporary Creed (CC) which expands on points I shall refer to only briefly here. Those born without a chance of a week of 'normal' life, and beyond medical repair, raise bigger questions about God's world than calamities to healthy bodies.

Can one square the circle and solve the apparent contradiction between suffering and a loving God? I shall try to show it is reasonable to cling on to belief, when one's hands are slipping on the rope over a cliff edge, facing one of life's horrors.

A definition of the problem of suffering

The perennial problem of suffering can be summarised in a nutshell: "If the Creator is good, a kind father to his creatures, he cannot be almighty in a world of abundant suffering. But if he is almighty, he cannot also be good because he lets suffering continue. Therefore God lacks goodness or power or both. But a God who is deficient in goodness or power is not what people call God: therefore he does not exist" (2).

Thus the atheist wins by a neat knockdown argument! I wish my comeback below could be equally swift, but no reader would be convinced by a few Twitter messages! So please stay with me as I try to be as brief as this complex subject allows. The first few sections - which are not conventional chapters but simply steps in an argument - are often very short so you may find yourself galloping through the pages!

Scientific progress and wrong answers to suffering

The word 'optimism' is associated in dictionaries with Leibniz (1646-1716) who, though surrounded by natural disasters and human evil, remained optimistic. His God was not an under-achiever but the Creator of "the best of all possible worlds"; a phrase he felt had roots in Plato. With modern progress in science we are in a better position to discuss whether the Earth is the Creator's best habitat for today's humans or their only possible environment.

My discussion depends on readers being open-minded about my first assumption below, from which follows a sequence of steps in the argument that sometimes pretend more knowledge of God than humans possess! His mysterious transcendence was well expressed by a Jewish prophet: "My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways" (3). I try hard to avoid inappropriately human (anthropomorphic) language in describing God but I do not always succeed! So those thoughts must remain tentative.

First a health warning, in order to avoid misunderstanding. I do not mean "all is for the best" in a cot death, blindness, or cancer. I am not saying: "God has everything under control"; "God allowed, willed or planned it"; "We all die in God's good time"; "God wanted mummy in heaven and has a reason for everything"; "The unfortunate exist to make the rest of us kinder"; "It was all Adam's fault for ruining a perfect world"; "This is God's punishment on our wrongdoing or lack of faith in order to make us better people". These quotes are, I suggest, inappropriate responses to particular individual circumstances.

Another common response is to give up, saying "We don't know and never will, because God's ways are beyond us humans". But I hope what follows will show that we do know more than we think.

More appropriate responses will emerge as we examine the whole global system. In that big picture we shall discover if there is any justification for saying about suffering that "God allowed, willed or planned it".

To find an answer we need evidence of how the world behaves, and this scientific method weighs particular events and human experience before it makes broad generalisations. With my family background, I value the realism of this bottom-up thinking, more than top-down airy-fairy dogma - what matters is whether God-talk is true to life! But my book title requires a combination of both approaches: "if God exists, why doesn't he stop" suffering? We first need to agree on what the word 'God' means - he has many varieties! - and then discuss what sort of God there could be to make this sort of world.

Does God exist?

Not in Richard Dawkins' best seller The God Delusion. But the God he dismissed was often too small to be the real God. So may I ask my atheist readers "Which God do you not believe in?" because I too reject false ideas. My CC weighs the clues not proofs - in modern science, nature and morality that hint of a Creator of supreme intelligence, based on arguments from design, first cause, rationality, order, beauty, coherence, and - above all for me - the amazing fine tuning of the universe.

I shall not repeat those clues here. Nor shall I use the American phrase 'intelligent design'. I am very aware that against design might be set mal-design; against moral order, random suffering for all creatures.

There is at least one big issue we all face. Not 'God or evolution?' because, unlike Dawkins, one can accept both God and evolution. Not 'Who caused God?' for that reduces the nature of infinite God, the uncaused cause. 'God or chance?' - yes, that is our choice. I have intelligent friends who opt for chance, a lucky cosmic accident, to explain what exists. That is their huge faith which I respect. Is faith in God as big a leap into the unknown?

My first assumption

To try to make sense of suffering, I start with only one clue to God's existence, namely what is called the ontological argument. Reworking St Anselm (1033-1109), my premise is that God is the greatest idea that the human mind can imagine.

But an idea of something does not prove its existence. If God is a theoretical concept without existence, there is something lacking: real existence seems necessary to complete the truth of that supreme idea. I assume God's objective existence to be eternal, unlimited by space-time, and immaterial Spirit. This One Being is without gender, though for convenience I refer to God as he, rather than writing each time he/she/it.

My first assumption is not self-evidently true, especially if the word 'God' is spoiled by bad memories of a violent father-figure, barren churchgoing, or temple idols. So my premise is an acceptable foundation only if I build on it the highest quality of God, the summit of which means he is both personal and loving. To readers who find no evidence of a kind God, I admit that part of me agrees with them! With one eye I see only my family experience, world conflicts, and savage nature.

My one-eyed thinking sees no ambiguities, just evidence pointing all one way, against God. But my two-eyed thinking is more balanced and sees contradictions that prompt me to dig deeper into his puzzling world.

A Good God of Holy Love

That greatest idea means God is Good. He did not create that goodness; it is his eternal nature or character. That good essence always seeks to propagate Good - though too literal a reading of parts of the Bible might reach less favourable conclusions!

Too much can be made by some philosophers of the intractable problem of defining Good, when most of us know what it means for everyday use. God wills something because he is good. If that is true, it follows that something is right because he wills it. (To say God wills something because the thing is good makes him subservient to good.)

Nature red in tooth and claw might suggest an evil First Cause. I've sometimes thought the same when face to face with the suffering of African children and loved ones in pain: if God exists, where is his mercy? Yet such dark thoughts belittle the splendour of God as the greatest idea, the superlative concept, especially when balanced by the wonder, beauty and pleasure in the natural world. Even those who condemn the Creator's inhumanity, choose to bring babies into the world, on the grounds presumably that life is precious, a gift worth handing on.

The greatest Good is ethical perfection, very different from human imperfections and wrongdoing. That moral excellence or Holiness sets God apart from his creation and its creatures, in awesome Otherness, so he delights in good and opposes evil (4). A Good Creator is the highest Pure Love, not self-centred, dominating and fluctuating, but constantly outgoing, unconditional kindness and compassion, a personal quality in God who is personal but not a human person.

The essence of love is to will and do the best for the beloved and at the same time for all the beloved, in so far as that is possible. For mortals that universal and timeless activity is not possible: human love, whether affection, friendship, passion, or God-like charity, is limited. Whereas the greatest God would have an all-embracing desire to do what is best always for everything and everyone. As far as we can judge, that involves compromise between competing claims upon his love.

The Almighty - in what way is God omnipotent?

An impotent God would not amount to the greatest idea. That highest conception requires him to be omnipotent and rational which includes firstly, the power to create something other than itself, a material universe or multiverse, with laws and order, reflecting his own rationality.

Secondly, the power to restrict himself, if and when he chooses. Before our universe began, mathematical physical laws were presumably in the Creator's mind, which he then chose to use as the framework for an unfolding creation, thereby imposing limits to the use of his power. Since that beginning, the Creator's original choice seems to have been continually confirmed, down the ages. Rarely, it seems, from the evidence humans have, does he lift a self-imposed restriction to intervene and overrule as an Almighty God could do.

A continually Controlling God, is not necessarily the greatest idea or the greatest Love. On the other hand a God who has permanently surrendered or lost all control and never wishes to resume benevolent rule is not what we would expect of the greatest God, who is both the beginning and end, the first and last, the Ultimate.

Cosmology

In so far as I understand it, cosmology suggests to me that an evolutionary process was the only choice open to God consistent with his purpose. A small, young creation would be no good to us. Only a big universe is an old universe, lasting the billions of years needed to produce stars, heavier elements, carbon-based life, and eventually us, a vastly more ingenious continuous creation than one in a flash. Instead of finished species, primitive forms acquired the capacity for wonderful self-development and adaptation.

A detailed inflexible plan from beginning to end would allow no freedom to God or his creatures. If intelligent humans were an intended objective as the anthropic principle suggests, the omnipotent Creator had ironically no choice but to create slowly by stellar, chemical, and biological evolution. No short cuts, only the gradualism of emergent creation. Thereby Mind could eventually express love to other minds dependent on carbon formed only inside stars.

God the Discoverer

The greatest idea that the human mind can imagine does not have to be a static concept of eternal changelessness. Instead of a God with an initial blueprint of the universe mapping out every step, I wrote about God as the great Discoverer of where creation leads. I later discovered that early Muslim scientists had much the same thought!

"Let us make humankind in our image" (5) pictures God on an adventure to multiply goodness, who would later discover in Jesus what humankind is like from the inside. The greatest all-knowing God knows and foresees only all that is possible, so he cannot know or predict the precise future until it exists - or who will win Wimbledon or next week's lottery! The soccer crowd hymn "Change and decay in all around I see/ O Thou who changest not/ Abide with me" expresses great feeling but less understanding of inventive God, prepared to experiment and take risks, in search of greater Good of overall benefit.

For us mortals, time always flows in one direction, linear, from beginning to end. The eternal God that I attempt to describe is both outside time and making real discoveries within a creation that is genuinely emerging. He is not one for whom cosmic history (past, present and future) is a film already viewed, as if time could be seen in two directions, forwards and backwards.

The Big Bang and inherent violence

In Genesis, most long 'geological days' end with "God saw that it was good" - not perfect, but fit for purpose. Perhaps God rested on the seventh to let his six 'ingredients' take their course. Since the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago, the Creator appears to observe a continuous Sabbath rest, letting creation make itself through seemingly undirected evolution. That remorseless process involves the mathematical laws of nature appearing to operate as a self-governing rational system in which - for non-religious scientists like Stephen Hawking and Martin Rees - God is unnecessary to trigger our violent universe, and certainly not needed to sustain the process once started (6).

That violence - on which we depend, warmed by the sun's explosiveness - was not introduced by legendary Adam's sin, for humans are a relatively recent arrival. Nor, in my view, was it introduced by the Evil One, variously described as a fallen angel, Satan, the serpent, or the Devil, leaving God himself blameless. Surely, the heavenly existence of a powerful adversary would diminish the idea of the one and only greatest God. Yet our ancestors battled with opposites, alternating daylight and darkness, health and sickness, harvests and famine. We too see a chasm between the ideal and the actual; after 'wars to end all wars', conflicts continue, catastrophes fill our TV, and some viewers might wonder if a sort of evil impulse or demonic force is at work besides individual misbehaviour.

Talk of the Devil is more of a joke to both the atheist and deist. Deism is the belief in an impersonal Creator who, after setting the ball rolling, has taken his hands off and ignores what follows, taking no side in any conflict between good and evil. Whether Einstein was amongst those scientists who are deists is debatable (7). Other scientists, notably John Polkinghorne, go further, thinking that some of the mystery in our universe has been removed by God's revelation of himself (8). Their theism and my own is a faith in a double agency, God and natural forces: a restless Creator, constantly interacting, rather than sometimes intervening from outside, with the unfolding and open process he began and upholds, rich in its alternative possibilities.

If God is not a necessary being, one can still argue that he is a rational hypothesis. It may look as though the universe is making itself, yet it is reasonable to believe that nature and its beings exist and are kept in being through the only One with Being in itself, the original essence and sustainer of all being, the perpetual I am.

But is that Quintessential Consciousness aware of human suffering? He would need to be to want to stop it. The Deist God is so far removed from his creation, that he would be either unaware of or unmoved by its pain. The Qur'an - to be considered later - occasionally implies that Allah is so different from us and completely self-sufficient, that he is unaffected by the actions of his transient creatures. Certainly, Michelangelo's finger gap between the Creator and his creatures is an important truth. Yet two other monotheistic faiths, Judaism and Christianity, take the astonishing jump of faith to a God who is deeply affected by human behaviour, and responds to it. Without that faith, my Discoverer God would not possess the personal qualities and nature I have given him.

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Excerpted from Suffering by John Morris. Copyright © 2015 John Morris. Excerpted by permission of John Hunt Publishing Ltd..
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