no God. Number three, God is all good. If he’s wicked and cruel, he’s not God. Well, if he’s omniscient, he knows exactly what we need. If he’s omnipotent, he can supply it, and if he’s all good, he does.
Therefore, as a logical deduction from those three premises, we must need everything that we get. It certainly doesn’t seem that way. Once in a while, we see with Greek wisdom how suffering produces wisdom in us, and we can look back at our lives and say, “I’m glad I went through that.” But much of the time we can’t say that, which is exactly what we would expect of the hypothesis that there is such a God. Far from refuting the existence of God, suffering that seems irrational and cannot be explained fits that hypothesis.
It also fits the hypothesis of atheism. Thus, you are left free to choose. You are left to do something like Pascal’s wager,2 since the theoretical arguments are inconclusive. Or if you think the theoretical arguments are inconclusive, then we can use a practical argument: What can you gain, what can you lose? You can gain nothing by atheism. Maybe you’re right, but once you’re dead, you’re dead; there is no reward. What can you gain by theism? Well, maybe you’ll gain nothing, no life after death, no rewards, and no punishment. But if it’s true, you gain everything and lose nothing. That’s not a very high and holy argument, but it’s an utterly rational one, as anyone knows who has ever played poker.
But let me offer three more specifically religious arguments that depend upon faith in the supernatural and in a divine revelation— one coming from faith, one from hope, and one from love.
One answer to why we suffer is basically God’s answer to Job: “Trust me.” It’s an invitation to trust— what parents give to children: “You’re a child; you can’t understand, but you can love, you can trust. You don’t have to, but you can. Try it; you’ll like it.” That’s basically Jesus’s first version of the Gospel— the old Alka-Seltzer commercial: “Try it; you’ll like it. If not, there’s Alka-Seltzer.” Look at Jesus’s first words in John’s gospel: “Come and see.” What an open-ended invitation!
Secondly, there is hope, which is faith directed toward the future. Suppose the entire universe is a very small thing, a womb. When you were in the womb, you probably thought that was the whole universe; it was enormous. Is there life after birth? Maybe so, maybe not. You found out that there was. Well, maybe that’ll happen again when you die, in which case you couldn’t possibly understand the meaning of suffering here. This is only the womb. When you were a little fetus, you probably said, “Why do I have feet? Why am I kicking? There are no sidewalks.” But now, you know. Probably 99 percent of what we do here is preparation for the next life, which we can understand about as well as our cats and dogs can understand our life.
It’s possible to believe the astonishing claim of Saint Teresa of Avila, who suffered a lot and asked God about it and got some answers. She said, “The most horrible life on earth filled with the most atrocious sufferings will be seen from the viewpoint of heaven to be no more serious than one night in an inconvenient hotel.” If that’s not true, then heaven is not heaven.
Finally, the deepest answer of all— love— which is, on a human level, solidarity with the sufferers. If you really love somebody, what’s the fundamental thing you want? What’s the aim of love, true, complete, deep human love? Unity, intimacy, closeness. Philanthropy, which is a genuine form of love, but not the most intimate form, wants to aid and benefit the other person, including giving him or her more happiness and less unhappiness, less suffering. But if you’re more than a philanthropist, if you’re a lover, then if your beloved is suffering, you want to be with him or her in the suffering, because you want to be with him or her everywhere.
According to Christianity, God acted that way. When he came to earth to solve the problem of suffering, he didn’t give us a technique for getting out of it; he didn’t give us a philosophical or mystical explanation of it. He invited us to participate in it, because he participated in ours. I think the most moving divine answer to the problem of suffering is the shortest verse in the Bible. When Jesus’s close friend Lazarus died, he went to the tomb, and the words are “Jesus wept.” In the next verse, everybody says, “See how he loved him.” That shows us what God thinks of our suffering.
For some strange reason, we tend to think of God as an absentee landlord, cold and indifferent, with some philosophical or mystical answer to the problem of suffering, and from afar, he says that you must go through this, but according to the Old Testament, it’s not like that at all. God is intimately present in the worst sufferings.
Where was God in the Holocaust? He was in the gas chambers. He is in every little baby who suffers. He is in the victim; he identifies with the victimized and never the victimizer. That doesn’t solve the philosophical problem, but it certainly solves the emotional problem. I don’t see how it’s possible to love a God who doesn’t identify totally with human suffering, because that’s not a lover.
Suppose your car is stalled in the middle of the night in bad weather and you don’t know how to fix it and there’s no tow truck. What you would like, above all, is to have a cell phone with you to get a taxi or to get a tow truck. You can’t. Let’s say the only person you can reach is your brother-in-law, who lives nearby, and he comes and he doesn’t know how to fix cars either and he doesn’t have a cell phone or a tow truck. So, what does he do? He stays in the car with you all night, and then in the morning you’re freed.
Aren’t you much more grateful to him than even to a tow truck? So, even when God doesn’t immediately tow us out of our suffering, the fact that he’s with us in it is at least the most impressive and satisfying answer to the problem of suffering that I know. And therefore, God doesn’t give us a lot of words to answer the problem of suffering. According to Christianity, he gives us a single word, and his name is Jesus.
1 The event was held in an opulent room of the Metropolitan Club on Fifth Avenue and Sixtieth Street, built by the wealthy industrialist J. P. Morgan.
2 Simply put, Pascal’s wager states that if you believe God exists and he doesn’t, you have nothing to lose; however, if you do not believe God exists and he does, then you have everything to lose. So, why not believe?
Thank you so much, Dr. Kreeft. We’re now going to take some questions. We don’t have any time for monologues. So, please put the question in the form of a question. Ahem. Anybody willing to step up to the microphone?
Q: Romans 8:28 promises that God will work “all things together” for the good. It would seem that he is saying that for believers, for those who love him and “are called according to his purpose.” How should we regard suffering in the lives of people who are ostensibly good people by the world’s standards but who are not believers?
A: I don’t know, because we don’t know who are the chosen and who are not. I don’t think we can make that judgment. We don’t have the faintest idea. Relatively, when the disciples ask Jesus, “Are many saved?” he says, “Strive to enter in. Mind your own business.” So, we’re told about our path. We’re not told about anyone else’s. When the travel agent tells you how to get to Florida, she doesn’t tell you how to avoid the swamps in Georgia; she tells you how to go to the beaches.
Q: I don’t mean to imply that we necessarily know who are saved or who are not, but we do know that there are some who are not saved. How should we regard suffering in their lives?
A:
