I used to tell the men in my Jail church services that one of the reasons I had to do Jail Ministry was because God used the time it took me to prepare that sermon to engage with me. If I had not had to prepare, I am sure I could have found all sorts of excuses not to read the Bible that week. It is embarrassingly easy to let the cares of the world distract us from spending time with Him… the God who made the entire Universe. Isn’t that shocking?

Really, when you think about it, when you say it out loud, it sounds outrageous. I mean, if I really believe that, if I really believe that He made everything, and that He made me so that He could love me, how could He ever be second place to anything else?

Today’s thought is motivated by my last post. Because, in it, I was challenging myself (and I hope you, my solitary reader) to imagine, to choose to believe, really believe, that God is supernaturally working for our good every minute of every day… that His Love for us takes no rest, that His attention to each one of us does not waver; that His determination to share eternity with me is unrelenting.

Why is it so hard for us to stay in that frame of mind?

I wrote about this in a previous post, a previous sermon, where my conclusion was that one of the reasons it is hard to stay in that frame of mind is because we grow up in this world wanting what we see with our eyes. But we cannot see Him. Similarly, we grow up communicating our needs and opinions with our voices; but we can’t hear His voice with our physical ears. He lives outside our material senses and because of that we assume He has no material reality.

So why is this important?

Because it means we have to deal with two questions.

I have claimed that His Reality, call it the Spiritual Reality, is infinitely greater than this material reality we live in… which He made. That means the first question we have to deal with is: how we can prove to ourselves that that Spiritual Reality is real. Second, and just as important, is the question of how we then reconcile that Spiritual Reality with the Material one. (After all, He made both. In particular, we instinctively know He made the Material one… so, it must matter… the answer cannot be that we just ignore it, dismiss it… abandon it.)

If you have been reading my posts, then you know my answer to the first question: Since He created us in His image, that means He gave us spirits the same way that He is Spirit. And as Paul said: The Spirit itself bears witness with our spirit, that we are children of God (Romans 8:16).

Our spirit hears the voice of His Spirit. That is how we know His Reality is real. This recognition happens when we read His Word. It also happens when we encounter in this (material) world things or events that partake of His Character. This is why so many people tell you that they feel closer to God when they go out in Nature, to see its beauty, its marvels, its immensity. It happens also when we witness the power of Love… in the wholesale exuberance of a little child… or in the selfless sacrifice of a person who gives their life to save someone else.

But what about the second question? How do we reconcile God’s Love with the reality of the material universe? The stereotypical objection against belief in God is a challenge against that reconciliation: “If God exists then why is there suffering in the world?”

I am sure you can find all sorts of arguments for or against this question on the internet. And maybe you have searched through them trying to find a satisfying answer (or maybe extra ammunition to reinforce what you believe already anyway.) I don’t want to repeat any of them or even advocate for any of them because the problem with that question, like many that try to challenge the (material) logic of the existence of God, is that it is an ill-posed question.

We should expect that problem (ill-posedness) to arise anytime we try to “judge” a God that transcends our reality by using our material reality’s presuppositions. We are just not used to thinking outside our box.

But why, precisely, is the question ill-posed?

It is asked from a purely human perspective…

(a) It begins with the human presupposition that suffering is evil and then (b) posits that if God is assumed to be (at least) humanly good then He would be opposed to that evil (of suffering) and therefore (c) since the concept God includes the attribute of being Almighty, He would be forced to end the evil of suffering.

Thus, the argument goes, since suffering still exists, then God does not.

But, having broken the question down as I have into its component assumptions, it should be easy to see where our logic has lacked rigor. For instance, in (c) we have assumed that an Almighty Being, because it can do anything, would be forced to prevent or end anything that It disagrees with. And the obvious question is: Why? Or more precisely, Why now? How could we, finite, powerless human beings, dictate or even conceive of how an infinitely powerful being must behave? (Or when it must so behave?)

In (b) the assumption is that God’s concept of good is the same as our human concept of good. But the best we can say, if we are assuming the existence of God (which we are doing in order to attempt to disprove it by logical contradiction), is that our concept of good must be in some way derived from God’s concept of Good. But we certainly cannot expect to understand God’s concept of Good… (or for that matter His concept of evil, in (a)).

(Bear with me and consider this: Just because I understand what a quadratic equation is, and how to solve it, does not mean I understand what Matthieu’s equation is, and how to solve it (or for that matter, when it applies to a problem). Yet, they are both equations. But it should be intuitively clear that my understanding of a subset of a “class” does not mean I can understand the whole “class”. Under the assumption that God exists and that He is Good, the best we can say is that human goodness is a subset of His Good.)

And that is the crux. The initial statement (a) is not a proper “given” with which to start a logical dialectic; it is an unproven assumption. We state that suffering is evil because we ascribe to some sort of human value system in which met needs (as in Maslow’s Pyramid of Needs) or actualized pleasure (a la Freud) are at the top of our hierarchy of values. We define those top values as good; therefore, failure to meet those top values is, to us, automatically evil. But why God should ascribe to that same physical, material, hierarchy of values is never proven.

In fact, if God is Spirit and He transcends our material universe, it would be astounding if physical, material needs and their satisfaction were at the top of His priority list.

I know my answer above is not necessarily satisfactory because what I have pointed out is that what (we think) matters, may be inconsequential from God’s perspective. Therefore, any argument we try to fashion to put God in a box of our own making is in all likelihood going to end up being a hollow or fallacious argument…

That conclusion may not be satisfactory because it sounds like I am avoiding dealing with all possible arguments by declaring that we (as humans) are basically insignificant to God and therefore we cannot expect Him to care about what we care about.

But that is not what I am saying.

It is not… Because the whole idea of God being theCreator arises from the belief that He created us. In fact, He went to a lot of trouble to create a Universe where our kind of human life can exist. It takes an exquisitely fine tuned Universe, where the kind of Big Bang that occurs, the time it takes galaxies to coalesce and then to form stars and then planets, and then the composition of that planet and the distance at which it orbits its particular kind of star… all that, and the laws of Physics all the way down to the subatomic level to enable stellar fusion, liquid water, and DNA to exist in the same universe… it takes all that… and that is evidence that God must care.

I on purpose did not use any argument from Scripture to tackle the challenge to the existence of God because if the existence of God is the point under contention, then using what He says, to prove something, runs the danger of being a circular argument. However, let me cite an often-quoted verse that is easily misunderstood:

Proverbs 3:5-6: (NIV) “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight.”

Most people who want to disagree with that verse think it is stating that faith in God is outside the purview of logic. But the verse does not say that. Leaning on your own understanding is not the same as using logic. Why would it be? If we assume God exists and He made us, He is most likely the One who gave us the capacity to think logically. But thinking through arguments is not just logic. Rather, logic is the calculus that we use to reach a reasonable conclusion. Thinking through an argument involves applying logic to propositions that have some defined value, in order to reach a conclusion that has some understandable value (for example True or False.)

So, when the writer of Proverbs tells me not to lean on my own understanding, he is not telling me to abandon logic, but instead he is reminding me that the values I assign to the propositions I am trying to analyze with my (God-given) logic, are human values. And those are not always well defined. Worse yet: interview a crowd of a hundred people about the value they assign to a given object, or feeling, or principle, and you are bound to get one hundred different answers.

But even more problematic is that the human values I assign to the propositions I am trying to analyze are, in all likelihood, my own human values. I am a biased observer! The writer of Proverbs knows full well how easy it is for us humans to lie to ourselves and to assign value to things capriciously.

Talk about unsatisfactory! Now it sounds like I am saying we human beings are incapable of properly applying the rules of logic… So, we might as well stop asking questions about things that are too high and lofty for us to understand… things like God.

 But that is not what I am saying.

I just want to embark on this adventure with a clear and sober mind.

A way out…

I used to tell all my students that they needed to know two things:

• Know what you know.
• Know what you don’t know.

Yes, it is a play on words, exploiting the various meanings of the verb “to know.”

• Be cognizant, aware, confident of those things that you have studied, understood, and have mastered. Those things, you know. That means you have proven them to yourself. Therefore, you can use them to solve problems, and as stepping stones to learn new things. Those things are a sure foundation on which you can continue to build.
• Be cognizant, fully aware, of your limitations. Be honest with yourself about those things you have not studied, you have not proven to yourself…  because, since you do not know them, you cannot use them to solve problems, nor can you use them as tools to learn new things. To you, those things constitute a treacherous foundation. They are blind spots… Worse, they can be blind guides leading the blind.

If we really want to honestly engage in a rational discussion about God, we need to know our limitations so as to avoid their pitfalls. And this is why I keep challenging our human presuppositions. You see, the fact that they are presuppositions means that, most likely, we have never spent the time questioning them, studying them, dissecting them… we just accept them because they seem to us… obvious. In other words, we are being lazy.

So, how can we tackle this ill-posed challenge to the existence of God that has been around for ages? Are we going to unveil a truth in this blog post that generations of philosophers have not been able to do?

Let me just ask you to use your imagination.

No matter how ill-posed the challenge is, there is no denying that there is a solid kernel of a problem here: It is – we have to admit – a human problem; but by my own admission, God does care about our human problems.

The problem is stated in its most rigorous form when we ask, why do the innocent suffer?

Notice that I cannot dismiss that question, because I have not used it to force an unwarranted conclusion about how it supposedly disproves the existence of God. There is nothing ill-posed about it.

Now, this question, like all others, starts with a premise: its reason for being. In this case, that premise is that we are talking about the concept of Justice. At the back of our minds that is what is behind this question: Justice is supposed to be all about cause and effect. Good deeds deserve reward. Evil deeds deserve punishment. That, in its most basic form, is the concept of Justice.

And in the face of that “given”, the question is asking: If indeed there are innocent people (like little children), who have done nothing to deserve misery and yet they suffer (whether at the hand of evil humans or the random acts of Nature), then how can we believe in the existence of Justice? Specifically, how can we then believe in the existence of Divine Justice?

Innocence, by definition, is the absence of evil. How can that merit the punishment of suffering?

Have I captured the essence of the challenge?

So, then, allow me to ask you, “How do you know those children suffered?”

To which you would answer: “It is obvious: That tsunami, swept away their parents. Left them alone in the rubble, to starve… helpless… and eventually they died a horrible death.”

Let me then recap the facts: “Before that tsunami, those children had their parents taking care of them, loving them, feeding them, nurturing them. They were… happy. Then suddenly in the space of a few minutes, all that was wiped away. And then after the passage of hours, or days, during which they suffered, they died.”

“Yes.” You would reply. “Doesn’t that violate the concept of Justice?”

And my answer would be: “Yes, if we are talking about human Justice, I would have to agree with you. That scenario makes no sense to us. But it is worse than that, because we have no power to prevent it or undo it. We hate that it happens but most of all we hate the fact that we cannot right this wrong. It makes us angry and therefore we use that anger to question the existence of God.”

“So, you agree with me.” You say.

“Yes.” Is my reply. “So, if you could right that wrong. How would you do it? And before you answer, we have to admit that claiming you would not allow tsunamis to happen is not a reasonable answer… because tsunamis are not evil. They are just physical phenomena that arise from the interplay of the physical laws that rule our planet. Changing any detail of any law would surely have catastrophic consequences somewhere else.

“I have never believed in the so-called butterfly effect. But you would be talking about a sledge-hammer effect… I guarantee you that if you change the laws of physics to prevent tsunamis, earthquakes, forest fires and so on, you eventually break down the ecological systems that make our planet what it is. I am willing to bet that if you change the laws of biology to prevent the existence of disease-causing bacteria and viruses, to prevent cancer, that you would end up altering the rules of DNA to such an extent that we human beings could not exist.

“Everything in this material universe is intricately interconnected because this material universe is exquisitely fine tuned to allow us humans to exist. You cannot have one without the other.

“So, again, I ask: if you could right that wrong. How would you do it?”

After a moment’s cogitation you might reply: “You have defined away every alternative. That’s not fair.”

“But I haven’t.” I reply. “You acknowledged that Justice is all about cause and effect. That was in your premise. Well, we know from the laws of physics that cause and effect are intimately connected to the fact that time marches forward. In other words, the moment we state the proposition that (a) is the cause of effect (b) we have stated that (a) happens earlier in time than (b). I won’t go into the details but there are hundreds (or more) papers in the scientific literature devoted to the monumental consequences of this statement that seems so obvious to us. (Among them my PhD dissertation).”

At this point you are wondering where I am going with this.

But all I have to say is this: “Suppose, imagine, that you could travel backwards in time. Imagine further that you had the power to take anyone that you want backwards in time with you. Then, isn’t that the way to right the wrong?

“We already established that the innocent children were happy X number of hours before the catastrophe finally took their lives. Wouldn’t taking them back those X number of hours erase the conundrum? If the suffering has not happened to them, then there is no challenge to Divine Justice.”

“Wait, wait,” you say. “But the tsunami is coming anyway, it is still there in the future. It will take them away. They will suffer!”

To which my answer is: “How will they know? If there is a Being that has the power to take time back, undo it, rewind it, and return the mind, the soul, the spirit (the essence of what makes us human) to the time when there was no such suffering… has the suffering taken place?”

“But look at their little bodies smashed against the rocks!”

And my reply is: “But those are just that: bodies. The same Being that made them mind, soul, spirit, and body, that same Being that has the power to undo time at will, can certainly transport what really makes them who they are – mind, soul, spirit – to another place and give them a new body.

“None of that is beyond the power of such a Being.”

I hope that you can see my point…

A fair challenge.

The moment we challenge the motives, the Justice, the Love, the Truth, of God, we must assume that the God we are talking about is a God who completely transcends our finite material reality. Otherwise, there is no logical challenge, only a human, strawman, fallible version of God, erected to make us feel superior.

To be fair, to be honest, we must assume that this God has the power to transcend space and time. And, therefore, we know that in the Kingdom of that God nothing is impossible. Human suffering does not exist, cannot exist, in His Kingdom.

Isaiah 25:8 (NIV) … He will swallow up death forever. The Sovereign Lord will wipe away the tears from all faces; He will remove his people’s disgrace from all the earth. …

Revelation 21:3-4 (NASB) And I heard a loud voice from the throne, saying, “Behold, the tabernacle of God is among the people, and He will dwell among them, and they shall be His people, and God Himself will be among them, and He will wipe away every tear from their eyes; and there will no longer be any death; there will no longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain; the first things have passed away.”

This concludes Part 1 of this Interlude.

Human suffering is not a challenge to the existence of God or Divine Justice…  But it certainly is a challenge to us. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have bothered asking the question. So, how do we deal with it, here on Earth? That’s Part 2.