How suffering challenges the idea of a good God

HostMost of us have had those long nights where we're staring at the ceiling, thinking about why life can be so cruel. If there's a God who's supposed to be kind and in control, the math just doesn't seem to add up when you look at the news or see someone you love getting sick. Why do you think this specific puzzle has stuck around for thousands of years?

GuestIt stays with us because it hits the heart and the head at the same time. It's basically the big wall that every belief hits eventually. Think of it like a stool with three legs. One leg is the idea that God is all-powerful and can do anything. The second leg is that God is all-good and wants the best for everyone. And the third leg is the fact that there's real, deep pain in the world. The problem is, you can't seem to keep all three legs at the same time. If you keep the pain and the power, then God doesn't seem very kind. If you keep the goodness and the pain, then God doesn't seem strong enough to stop the bad things. It's a logic trap that's very hard to get out of, and it makes people wonder if the whole idea of a protective God is just a wish.

HostI mean, could it be that we just have the definition wrong? Maybe whatever is out there's not actually all-powerful. Maybe there are things even a God can't fix.

GuestWell, some people go that way. They say that God is doing his best, but he's working with a world that has its own rules. But for most people who believe in a traditional God, that feels like a letdown. If God isn't the strongest thing there's, then he's just another part of the world like we are. So, a lot of thinkers try to find a way to keep God powerful and good, while still explaining the hurt. The most common way they do that's by talking about the gift of choice. They argue that for us to be real people, we have to be free. And to be free, we have to be able to choose to do bad things. If God stepped in every time someone was about to lie or hurt someone else, we wouldn't be free agents. We would be more like toys on a track or robots in a cage. In this view, the hurt we cause each other is just the price we pay for not being puppets.

HostThat makes sense when we're talking about people being mean to each other or starting wars. That's on us. But what about a giant wave hitting a town or a tiny bug that makes a baby sick? There's no choice there. No one chose for the earth to shake or for a virus to start. How does a kind God let that happen?

GuestThat's where the choice argument starts to break down for a lot of people. It's a lot harder to explain. Some people say that the whole world has to follow a set of steady rules for us to live in it. If the floor was hard one day and soft the next just to keep us from getting a bruise, we could never learn how to walk or build a house. The world has to be consistent for us to make sense of it. But that consistency means that when the plates of the earth move, they cause shakes. When cells grow in a way they shouldn't, people get sick. It's a very cold way of looking at it, though. It feels like the world is a machine that just runs over people sometimes, and it's hard to see a loving hand in a machine like that.

HostIt feels like a pretty high price for a physics lesson. I have heard people say that these hard things are meant to build our character, like a gym for the soul. But does a kid really need to go hungry for someone else to learn how to be kind? That feels totally out of balance to me.

GuestYou're hitting on the biggest pushback to the soul-building idea. It's the problem of how much pain is out there. Sure, maybe a little bit of struggle helps us grow. We learn to be brave because there's danger. We learn to be kind because there's need. But the world doesn't just have a little bit of pain. It has heaps of it. It has more pain than we could ever need just to learn a lesson. There's a lot of hurt that seems to serve no point at all. It doesn't make anyone better; it just breaks them. This is why some people say that the logic trap can't be solved. They think we have to admit that either God isn't what we thought he was, or the way the world works is just beyond our pay grade to understand.

HostSo we're just left with this gap between what we want the world to be and what it actually is.

GuestIn a way, yeah. There's one other way to look at it, though. Some thinkers say that the fact that we even feel this is a problem is interesting. If we were just bits of meat and bone in a cold universe, we might not expect things to be fair or good. We would just see a storm as a storm. But because we feel that the pain is wrong, it might show that we have a deep sense of what goodness should look like. Some people find a weird kind of hope in that. They think that our anger at the pain is a sign that we're meant for something better. Even if we can't explain why a good God allows a storm, the fact that we think he should stop it says something about our own hearts.

HostThe dark sky we stare at when we're worried doesn't give us many answers, but our hope for something better shows how much we still expect the world to be kind.