God and Suffering: Incompatible?

Excerpt from the end of Bruce Ballard’s
The Problem of Evil: A Review Essay
http://www.mcmaster.ca/mjtm/volume9.htm

Woody Allen joked that he could not believe in the existence of a beneficent Creator who would let him get his tongue caught in the typewriter. Were we to utilize such evils to argue against God’s goodness, however, the general consensus of what should count as misery would ordinarily disqualify them. A certain experiential threshold is necessary to really motivate the problem of evil and especially the argument from evil.

What is that appropriately motivating threshold? Here the social context can be significant. If, for example, members of a Christian congregation, friends and family, rally round the cancer victim, his or her experience of suffering, all things being equal, will not play in the same register as that of the one who suffers alone. It will be harder for the person who experiences human love to give way to doubts and begin to believe the inner, personal argument that given such suffering, a good God cannot exist.

The same might be said where there is a direct inner experience of divine love. Our personal standard of what is rational for us to believe or continue believing seems to contain an affective component, at least in relation to certain kinds of beliefs.

Consider Mabel: “One side of her face was being eaten by cancer. There was a discolored and running sore covering part of one cheek, and it had pushed her nose to one side, dropped one eye, and distorted her jaw so that what should have been the corner of her mouth was the bottom of her mouth. As a consequence, she drooled constantly . . . I also learned later that this woman was eighty-nine years old and that she had been bedridden, blind, nearly deaf, and alone, for twenty-five years.”* It is probably impossible for those outside such affliction to genuinely appreciate it. And what can the would-be comforter say? Her life seems to be paradigmatic evidence for the argument from evil. Yet to a visitor who asks her what she thinks about while lying in her bed, she replies, “I think about my Jesus. I think about how good He’s been to me. He’s been awfully good to me in my life, you know . . . I’m one of those kind who’s mostly satisfied . . . Lots of folks would think I’m kind of old fashioned. But I don’t care. I’d rather have Jesus. He’s all the world to me.”*

And with her experience of Christ, Mabel not only pre-empts a personal argument from evil, but also makes her suffering unavailable to the outsider for an argument from evil.


*Mabel’s story is in William Lane Craig’s Hard Questions, Real Answers (pgs 110-112). Wheaton: Crossway Books, 2003.