Problem of Evil 3 of 3: Christian Philosophical Problems
Besides the issue of human moral evil, the consequence of which is human suffering, there is the issue of natural or physical “evil.” I will refer to this as pain, since there is not really a moral component to the way the earth behaves in, say, an earthquake or a hurricane. Why do these disasters occur? Why does God allow them to inflict pain on so many people?
The answer is that I do not know thoroughly and completely. I can offer some answers that may be somewhat satisfying to some people. Here are four reasons:
- Natural processes such as hurricanes and earthquakes are known in the insurance world as “acts of God” (why is not beautiful weather called an act of God?) and he rightly set up our world so that these processes do occur, and for good reason. An earthquake, for example, is the release of tectonic pressure. More than that, though, the earth benefits from these occurrences. Hurricanes, for example, help to regulate our planetary temperature and earthquakes help to recycle nutrients. What we see as natural disasters tend to be necessary for the benefit of the planet.
- The human pain caused by natural disasters sometimes is exacerbated by human shortsightedness, stupidity, and even wickedness. If a poor country’s infrastructure is inadequate, for example, the results of a natural disaster will be far worse than if the country was prepared, or had been helped to be prepared, for the next disaster.
- The pain caused by a natural disaster can have a beneficial effect on people. When confronted with suffering, some people choose to turn toward God; others turn away. According to the prelude to the book of Job in the Bible, the Satan, who brought enormous suffering on the protagonist of the drama, was attempting to turn Job away from God and to prove that he was not, after all, a good man who served God selflessly. Instead, Job chose eventually to turn more firmly toward trusting in God, just as people today sometimes will turn toward God when faced with painful situations (Job 1-2).
- God may allow pain into people’s lives just for this reason. Apparently, it is more important to him to have a relationship with us humans than it is for him to make sure we have comfortable lives. We do not easily surrender our lives to Jesus, giving him the reverence and honor he deserves, and so God may allow pain to enter our lives. As C. S. Lewis observed,
"We can rest contentedly in our sins and in our stupidities; and anyone who has watched gluttons shoveling down the most exquisite foods as if they did not know what they were eating, will admit that we can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world. A bad man, happy, is a man without the least inkling that his actions do not 'answer,' that they are not in accord with the laws of the universe… No doubt Pain as God’s megaphone is a terrible instrument; it may lead to final and unrepented rebellion. But it gives the only opportunity the bad man can have for amendment. It removes the veil; it plants the flag of truth within the fortress of a rebel soul.” (C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, New York: MacMillan Publishing Company, 1962, pp. 93, 95)
Anyone who reads my words and then concludes that I have drawn some kind of simple cause and effect between natural disasters and sinful people, as if God visited his judgement in the form of tornadoes on particularly wicked towns, certainly has completely missed my point. The experience of suffering, however, is an opportunity to turn toward God—or ultimately and permanently away from him.
I have not tried to demonstrate in this section that the Bible is true so much as that a biblical perspective on evil and the love of God is coherent and beneficial—in other words that the Bible is not untrue.
This article is last of three blog pieces on the problem of evil, a problem that some skeptics consider to be philosophically problematic or even contradictory. It is an excerpt from my book Five Languages of Evidence: How to Speak about Reasons for Christianity in a Post-truth World. Not yet published; available upon request.
Next post: Christian Philosophical Problems: Hell