2015 was a year of a number of tragedies both personally (I lost people I love dearly, and people I know suffered tragedy) and globally. How do we understand the meaning of these events, if there is meaning to them? This is part 1 of a few reflections on the question of pain and suffering to end off 2015.

Suffering as Proof of God?

Most people say that the existence of evil and suffering in the world and in our lives is evidence against the existence of God, but the reality is, that in many ways it is a powerful evidence for his existence. The skeptic’s position assumes that there’s such a thing as categorical ‘evil’ (that killing innocent people by flying planes into buildings is categorically wrong for instance). It assumes that abusing children, and destroying the environment for corporate gain is ‘evil.’ That having cancer, or being the victim of a tsunami, should be called ‘suffering.’ But the very fact that we have these convictions and these categories (‘evil’ and ‘suffering’) is part of the problem for the atheist, because where did we get them from?

Where did we all come to agree on these objective moral categories with which we then put God on trial? Where did we get the idea that human beings are important and they should be loved and not excluded? That the Holocaust was ‘evil’, that cancer is a ‘bad’ thing? It’s because we sense in ourselves that there’s a way the universe is supposed to be. Atheism has failed to realize that if we take God out of the picture, the problem becomes bigger than it was before. We can’t even talk of ‘evil’ and ‘suffering’ at all because we lose the categories themselves.

This is a problem for the atheist because if he agrees to objective moral laws than he has to have an objective moral-law Giver. In your heart you know what is evil. Not only that, but you know what is good. You know that sharing, loving your neighbor, and laying down your life for the weak are good and noble things. Why? Where does that come from? C.S. Lewis pondered the question this way:

When I was an atheist, my argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? Of course I could have just given up my idea of justice by saying that it was nothing but a private idea of my own. But if I did that, then my argument against God collapsed too, for the argument depended on saying that the world was really unjust, not just simply that it did not happen to please my fancies.[1]

When I stood over my father’s casket when I was 15 years old, there was something in me that felt the reality I was experiencing was disjointed. Staring at my dead father felt out of whack, because in my mind, there was a way that the universe was supposed to be. But with what was I comparing the state of my universe? If we are all just a product of natural processes, as Evolutionary theory suggests, with only our own experiences, and those of our ancestors, to inform what we know and feel about the world, then why would I have ever come to deduce as a teenager that losing my father felt somehow wrong? Or for that matter why the Holocaust, or 9/11 were?

We feel there is a way things ought to be don’t we? And that daily notion, I think, is a clue to the reality of God in the universe, not his absence. As Timothy Keller points out, “The evolutionary mechanism of natural selection depends on death, destruction, and violence of the strong against the weak – these things are perfectly natural. On what basis then, does the atheist judge the natural world to be horrifyingly wrong, unfair, and unjust?”

The fact that you believe in evil and suffering is a pointer not away from the existence of God but toward it.

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[1] C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Harper San Francisco, Zondervan Publishing House, 2001), 38-39.

[2] Timothy Keller, The Reason for God (New York: Dutton, 2008), 26.