John Legend ask the question in his song Show Me;

I can’t stop questioning
O God of love, peace, and mercy
Why so much suffering?
I pray for the world, it gets worse to me
Wonder if you’re listening

I suggested to our church that they do a program on where God is when there is suffering. I had offered to lead the class if no one else was available, so I started to do research. A very capable person did step up to do the class, so rather than letting my thoughts go to waste, I’ve decided to post them here.

I don’t need to tell you that our world is full of troubles. I also don’t need to tell you that I’ve tasted suffering at a severe and intimate level and have, in previous years, written about that freely here. At this juncture, my suffering is modest; some of you have worst suffering, I’m sure. So, this isn’t me talking about my own plight, but the whole issue of suffering in the world and how we rectify suffering with a concept of a loving God.

During my years of intense suffering (2019-2021) it was beyond what I thought a human could bear. Much of that time I was in social isolation, not able to leave my house due to COVID and the high risk for me, having cancer of my immune system and having just endured a bone marrow transplant. Denise was working long brutal hours as a hospital administrator so most of my time was just me, my Saint Bernard, and my lake. In those days, because the suffering was too great to sleep more than a few minutes at a time, I perpetually prayed, day and night, accentuated with copious tears. But my intimate conversation with God wasn’t me crying out in anger or even doubt. It was a mantra I must have repeated more than a million times, “Have mercy on me . . . or please end my life.”

The reason I never doubted the presence of a loving God during this time is no credit to my faith, but because I had already passed through that narrow place in my life, thirty years previously. It was 1990 that I experienced my first major experience with suffering, and it was purely emotional. At that place, I could no longer image a loving God or even a God at all. From my previous, erroneous framework for God, it just didn’t make sense anymore. Then, the concept of God slipped through my fingers and into the bottomless void. It took a decade of meditative thought to find God again, but a very different God from the protagonist in the religion I had known.

As I’ve said before, I prefer to look at the big questions of life from a philosophical perspective. Philosophy is clean and pure while a religious (aka “spiritual”) perspective injects a quagmire of dogmas and cultural beliefs. Secondly, I don’t know what “spiritual” means anymore. It is a modern buzz word, so much so I even hear atheists use it. While my conversations with God, since 2019, has been at a level of intimacy that I never imagined a mere mortal would be so invited. It occurred naturally, without religious precepts.

I will address this from an atheist Vs theist perspective, although a speaker I will link below, clearly takes the discussion into a Christian Vs non-Christian arena.

Simply put, the atheist has both the easiest and most difficult position. To them, suffering is simply living in a cosmos where evolution—being imperfect—has not delivered a painless existence. The hardest part, is that they must also have no hope of a resolution apart from some idealistic future fantasy where nature provides a painless existence, or we humans so engineer one.

For the theists, to open the argument, we must start with what I call first-order assumptions. Those include God exist, that God is loving, and that God is omnipotent. In the second order of assumptions, it must be assumed (if you live in reality) that there is suffering. In the face of suffering, you must conclude that either God is not loving or not omnipotent.

Many religious systems, illogically, try to fuse these assertions by saying suffering (something bad) is given by God for a good reason (to teach us something or to discipline us). Sometimes they make an exception that suffering is directly from an evil place (e.g., Satan), but that idea would challenge God’s omnipotence. Then, there are outliers who say that God is dead, or in the sake of the Deists of the Enlightenment, that God is alive but absent from active interference in human affairs. But all those conclusions I think lead to a dead end, some leading to magical thinking (for example, God gave me cancer to teach me to love Him better, but wouldn’t that make him profoundly sinister and less loveable?)

I think there is only one rational answer for those who hold the first order assertions, God is there, God is loving, and God is omnipotent, but that God—while omnipotent—is not a micro-manager. That life is not deterministic. That evil or even bad luck can cause suffering. The tree in the forest was going to fall, according to the laws of physics, but it was simply bad luck that you happened to be driving under it when it fell. Meaningless suffering in an imperfect cosmos. Or, I could make this more personal by saying that one of my genetic amino acids folded the wrong way (out of a billion folds), which gave me cancer. Bad luck.

A human king can be omnipotent in his kingdom. Absolute power. Yet, that king may or may not want to control the everyday life of his subjects . . . even if he is benevolent. Many religious people—to feel special to God—imagines this God as the puppeteer, we the marionettes. While that is soothing at first, it paints us into a corner philosophically, creating this dilemma. It was my reading of Philip Yancy’s book, Disappointment with God, in the 1990s, that lended me this insight. In simple terms, shit happens. If this idea makes you uncomfortable, then good luck with that . . . pun intended.

During my research on this topic, I discovered a charming speaker, John Lennox. A grandfather and Teddy bear. He is a professor of mathematics at Oxford. He is an outspoken Christian and doesn’t have—in my opinion—the pretentiousness or arrogance of most Christian apologists. I’ve posted his discussion, The Loud Absence; Where is God in Suffering, which he delivered to a secular audience at Harvard Medical School. It is excellent. I will have to add that I like John and his message very much but that doesn’t mean it is true. If you disagree with him, I take no offense. Additionally, I like John because he is a mathematician. Mathematics is one of three things that eventually brought me back to believing in a personal God, math being intrinsic in the cosmos, not a human device or creation. Mike