The Problem of Pain

Acknowledgments: My profound thanks to my friend Shelagh for pointing out this passage - little did she know where a casual joke in conversation would lead... Also to Bill Sykes, my college chaplain, for the reflection groups where we discussed some of these ideas (though he won't like my conclusions).

Apologue: To give the Supreme Being a sex is quite manifestly absurd. However, "it" is too impersonal and "he/she/it/we" (which is actually how I think of God) is too long-winded for an essay which seeks to persuade. With apologies to women I propose to use the traditional gender, as I think that this will cause the least offence. For "he" please read "he", "she", "it" or some combination of the three throughout. I am also going to use Love with a capital L to signify the Greek agape (self-sacrifical, Christian love) as opposed to philia (familial love) or eros (physical love).

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The problem of pain (non-moral evil) and the closely related problem of moral evil is not just one for Christians. When non-religious people are asked why, they almost invariably answer with a question along the lines of "How can a God of Love allow millions of people to die of starvation in Africa / children to die of leukaemia" etc. In my opinion, those (such as the media) who ascribe the decline of the Christian religion in this country to the manifest tendency of Christians not to live according to the tenets of their own faith, the authoritarian religion pushed at the young by the over-zealous or the perceived obsession of the established churches with issues that society sorted out years ago (homosexuals, women clergy) have got it wrong. These problems have been around ever since the dawn of Christianity itself; yes, they are important, but they are not the root cause. Nor is it primarily due to "lack of spirit" amongst the faithful. If that were the case, the rise of evangelicism would have stopped the rot, which it hasn't. No, the answer in my view is the fundamental flaw of logic in the Christian world view that is the problem of pain and the failure of the traditional answers to it, and I hope the reasons why I think this will become clear over the course of this essay. I also have a "cure" for the problem, though I think most Christians may prefer the pain.

First, let's be clear what this essay is not about. For Christians, there is a simple, practical response to the problem of unearned suffering. Pain is there, it's a fact of life, we don't seek it but we must learn to live with it, alleviate it if we can and try to turn it into something good. I think that no-one would disagree with this. However, it doesn't answer the nagging intellectual question of why must we suffer? Possible explanations for the existence of pain and evil are what I want to consider in this essay.

At the heart of the problem of pain lies a paradox, and unlike the paradox of the three in one or the divinity/humanity of Christ it is destructive, a cancer at the heart of the belief system that festers because it is so little discussed outside philosophical textbooks. The paradox is this: Christians believe in a God who is a) infinitely loving and b) sole creator of the physical universe. But the universe is manifestly not the product of a loving creator; it contains pain and evil. How can this be? Why does an all-powerful God allow such pain and evil to exist? It is worth noting at this point that the argument can run both ways; from the nature of God we should be able to predict the nature of the universe, and from the nature of the universe we can determine something of the nature of the being (if any) which created it. The former is the direction used by Christians, the latter the approach used by atheists/agnostics. The paradox can be resolved either by re-interpreting our perceptions of the universe, or of God, or of both.

There are three traditional Christian solutions that I know of to this paradox, as outlined by C.S. Lewis in his book "The Problem of Pain". I shall characterise these as The Greater Good, The Ways of God are Strange and the Free Will Argument. I should make it clear that of necessity what follows is a caricature of arguments that have occupied thousands of lines of text and some of the greatest philosophical minds in history. I hope, though, that readers will agree that the caricatures are accurately drawn (if lacking in detail), and that my criticisms would have force however they are expressed.

The Greater Good hypothesis basically says that our perception of the universe is wrong; all evil and pain lead ultimately to a greater good. Pain can focus our minds on the more important things in life or lead to new understandings which make us better people, wars inevitably lead to peace and a chance to improve relations etc. This may have been all right for the early Christians with their more integrated approach to matters spiritual and temporal, but our accumulating knowledge of the workings of nature (especially in the past century) has made it clear that evil and pain do not inevitably lead to a greater good. Some people when struck down by adversity become resentful and selfish, wars lead to settlements which lead to more wars. It is this realisation - that our accumulating knowledge now allows us to predict the major consequences of most actions and that we now know that some actions do not lead to a greater good - that has started the rot in the church. The Greater Good hypothesis is no longer any use; to most people it has been proved wrong. In their eyes, God no longer has an excuse for the evil he allows to happen, and if God isn't good then there's no point in believing in him. They may not articulate it like that, but that is what they feel. This is why finding another "excuse" for God - another solution to the problem of pain - is so vital.

The second argument can be summed up by the biblical phrase "thou shalt not put the Lord thy God to the test". Why don't know why God allows pain and suffering, but because he is loving there must be a reason for it, it is part of his plan. We poor weak humans are incapable of perceiving what it is - all we can do, in the depths of our ignorance, is pray. It should be noted that this argument runs from the nature of God to the nature of the universe which is the opposite way round from the way that atheists and agnostics usually perceive the problem, so this solution is no good for them. It's not much use to Christians either. This argument holds that the nature of God is fundamentally incomprehensible. But we all know what Love is (don't we?), so the workings of a God who is Love should be comprehensible to us, at least in retrospect (sometimes they are, but not always - what was the lasting good of the crusades, the Black Death, the Holocaust?). In any case, we are quite entitled to say that the ends of God's plan (which we don't know) do not justify the means. And we still haven't rebutted Joseph Heller's comment about the necessity of phlegm and tooth decay in the divine scheme of things. The ways of God are not strange; the answer that there is no answer to the problem of pain won't do.

The most sophisticated solution to the problem of pain, the one advanced by Lewis and the philosopher John Hick, is based on the observation that good and evil are phenomena that only make sense in the context of free choice - that is, free will. For future reference, I shall define free will as that quality possessed by a rational human knowingly making decisions as an independent agent, that human being having evaluated the consequences of her or his decisions and thereby taken responsibility for them. The argument runs as follows. God created people with free will. In doing so, he had by necessity to create the possibility for evil (and hence allow pain to be inflicted by evil people) because the choice to do good implies the choice to do evil otherwise it's no choice at all. As Chinese philosophers would say, you can't have Ying without Yang; the knowledge of the existence of good defines the existence of evil simply because if you can define a quality, you can define its opposite. In addition, God can't intervene in the case of unfortunate accidents because to do so would be to break the laws of nature, and if there were no constant laws we couldn't predict the outcomes of our actions and hence we would have no responsibility for them. Under such circumstances, by the definition above, we do not have free will.

The problem with the Free Will Argument is that it begs the questions "why did God give us free will in the first place, when he knew what we would do with it? Is giving humans the ability knowingly to destroy their planet really a greater good than having humans without this choice?" Lewis answers these questions by arguing that God gave us free will so that we could be his children, able to enter into a personal relationship with their Creator of their own free will. Pain then becomes "good for the soul", the means by which some of us (presumably not all) mature and become one with our Creator. Apart from begging all the questions of the Greater Good argument above, it assigns to God the absurd anthropomorphic desire to have children who are like him. Perhaps he got lonely, floating out there in the void? This attribution of human motivations is getting perilously close to making God just an ordinary human writ large, an interpretation rightly repudiated by the Christian churches for many centuries. Indeed the Free Will argument is more dangerous than this; it implies that God is a God of Free Will rather than Love, a sort of super-liberal who is more concerned about humans having a choice than about what choice they actually make. Love and free will are not the same thing, indeed to love fully we must deny our free will (Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane); this argument too is unsatisfactory.

What are we left with, then? Have 2000 years of attempts to explain the problem of pain got us nowhere? I think not. Let's go back to first principles and re-examine the elements of the paradox in the light of the new understandings achieved by the above attempts at explanation. We have to alter either our perceptions of the universe or our understanding of God. Now our current understanding of the physical universe is based largely on interpretations of evidence, mostly from scientific experiments. Whilst detailed interpretations may be wrong, the evidence on which they are based arise from common sense, every day experiences which can in principle be repeated by any human being who is minded to. Recordings of these experiences have accumulated over the centuries to such an extent that I think we can now be as certain as we ever can be of certain general interpretations. One of these interpretations is that pain and suffering exist in the universe. It seems extremely unlikely (to put it mildly) that this interpretation can be altered, so to solve the problem of pain we've got to change our ideas about God.

The paradox now boils down to a contradiction in our perception of the nature of God. Christians say that God is sole creator of the universe, and that he is also good and loving, in fact that he is pure goodness and pure Love. Now the problem of pain arises because God is supposed to have had a choice when he created the universe as to whether to include pain/evil/free will or not. But we've just defined God as being pure goodness. To do evil or to allow to evil to happen is to be evil, and God has no evil in him by Christian definition. So God has no choice! For God, there is only one way - the way of Love. Being pure goodness, he cannot create evil or pain, or anything that leads to them. The pain and evil in this world are not God's doing, not his responsibility, because he has no free will. The goodness and Love that come out of them are, because that is what God is. This cuts the Gordian knot. The problem of pain is seen to arise from an antiquated, anthropomorphic notion of God as a superbeing who makes choices. By appealing to the Johannine idea of God as pure Love, we can make the problem disappear altogether. And it explains why Jesus had to abandon his free will to carry out his ultimate act of Love.

Now I am sure I am not the first person to think of this - why, then, has this neat solution to the problem of pain not been more widely discussed or accepted? Well, it has a number of ramifications that play havoc with traditional Christian teaching in several areas. For a start, we are going to have to ditch the idea of God as sole universal creator. He couldn't solely have created anything with the potential for evil, which means that human beings can't have been created entirely in the image and likeness of God. This is not, I think, a staggering revelation. However it also leads to the idea that any not obviously good thing must have been created jointly by a creative force for good and a creative force for evil. This leads us into the dark waters of Manichean dualism (which, it must be said, is also implied by the Ying-Yang argument in the Free Will argument), which traditionally has always been rejected by Christians. However, as I shall show in a moment, there is a further step we can take to get round this.

The abandonment of the all-powerful Creator God that I am advocating, however logical, would undoubtedly leave the vast majority of Christians feeling very unhappy. We seem to be emasculating God, taking away practically all of the qualities traditionally ascribed to him merely to satisfy our intellectual qualms about pain and evil. Nowhere in the bible is such an interpretation suggested; even John, who first suggested that God is Love, makes it quite clear who is going to be standing in judgement come the end of the world. But the logic is clear; we can't have a God who is Love and a God who is sole creator of a universe containing evil and pain. And isn't the helplessness of Love what the nativity and the passion stories are all about? Isn't it reasonable to expect that a God who is Love would be reliant on our help to carry out his purposes, hoping that we will turn of our own free will from our concerns to his? Isn't a God who comes as a little child, a God who won't - can't! - coerce us into doing anything we don't freely choose to do, more suitable for Christians to worship than the powerful Creator God of the Judaic and Islamic religions?

If we can take the step I am advocating, if we can discard the baggage of an anthropomorphic God who makes choices, we can leave the mysteries of the creation of the physical world to cosmologists and concentrate on the world of the human heart and mind, which is where the battle of good and evil really rages. God can now become a Creator again; the source of our shared understanding of good, the source of beauty, joy and peace. Once again, as our ancestors did, we can see God in dappled sunlight, trees in leaf, flowers in bloom; in the little kindnesses we do for one another (the bread baked, the garden dug), in the glowing colours of a Renoir, the echoes of a church choir, the intricate delicacy of our world's weather systems seen from space. And this God can never be denied us, for he is in these feelings and actions not as an intrinsic objective quality, but in the shared, creative aspect of our response to them. Yes, there is evil in us too, there is pain in the world, but we don't need to worship it, don't have to choose it, and the God in which I believe has nothing to do with it.

This further re-interpretation of God as the sum of our values may sound interesting but also not very Christian. In fact, there is a well-known and well-respected Anglican theologian who in a recent book defined God as just that. Unfortunately, his name is Don Cupitt...

Mark Tolley 24/03/91.
Revised 22/10/91.