The Problem of Pain: Why Every Worldview Must Answer the Question of Suffering

Atheists believe that pain and suffering present a significant challenge to the existence of the Christian God. They are troubled that people would worship a “good” deity who seems to be such a bad actor: a God who is indifferent to, or perhaps even responsible for, pain and suffering. We need to thank them for holding our feet to the fire and pushing us to improve our apologetic arguments, but in the interest of fairness, they must also take their turn in the hot seat and explain why, in a world of “blind, pitiless indifference,” they even care. Atheists may want to eliminate God from the calculation, but they still need to show us how they solve the equation. If they want to be credible, they need to become better advocates for their worldview rather than mere critics of a religious one. The issue of pain and suffering isn’t a mic drop moment at the end of an atheist argument; rather, it is a wake-up call for every worldview that would rather hit the snooze bar than confront the harsh realities of life. Every worldview must answer the problem of evil and suffering, not just Christianity. 

Two Questions

The good news is that these debates begin with all participants agreeing that pain and suffering make for an unpleasant duo. However, that common ground quickly shifts under the metaphysical weight of each competing worldview, creating an interrogative fissure where each side must answer a different question. The atheist must explain why they care, and the Christian must explain why their God doesn’t. 

Greasing the wheels or a spanner in the works

Atheists often emphasize the immense pain and suffering endured by all creatures that have lived and gone extinct since the first cell believed it was safe to leave its warm little pond and venture into the cold, cruel world of evolution. Confident they have sealed the coffin on a God who they don’t believe feeds ravens or clothes lilies, they find themselves defending a natural selection process that appears to have an even more callous attitude toward the dead and dying lying along the road to the fittest survivor. In fact, rather than allowing them to rest in peace, they dig up their remains and use the body count as a measure of evolutionary success. Ironically, they create a tree of life with thousands of dead branches. 

Why, then, would the poster boys and girls of evolutionary success have any sympathy for the little creatures they had to step on to reach the top rung of life’s ladder? Don’t you think it’s odd that those who were naturally selected would recoil from the cruel calculus of the evolutionary algorithm that chose them? Atheists must set aside their distaste for pain and suffering if they want to embrace a process solely interested in fitness and fecundity. 

Pain and suffering are the pomp and circumstance accompanying the fittest survivors down the evolutionary aisle as they graduate from Darwin’s school of hard knocks. So why, after such a remarkable achievement, would they need to return their diploma as if it were blood money? 

It’s important to note that even if you remove God from the equation, pain and suffering don’t disappear. Successfully removing God from the picture puts the atheist in a difficult position because, without a divine figure to blame, they must confront it alone.  

Atheists explain their concern for the less fortunate by saying that compassion evolved as humans became intelligent enough to realise that flourishing is best achieved without pain or suffering. The problem is that when you cut evolutionary empathy, it still bleeds nature red-in-tooth-and-claw. The atheist must therefore decide whether pain and suffering grease the evolutionary wheels or are spanners in the works. They can’t have it both ways. 

Hallowing Lament

Christians, however, do not escape scrutiny. They must explain why a good God would allow so much pain and suffering—why their omnibenevolent God seems so omni-indifferent to the anguish of those created in His image. The good news for Christians is that God considers this a vital question and devotes ample scriptural space to exploring its ramifications, even going so far as to interrogate Himself on the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, from the words of my groaning?” 

God would be genuinely disappointed if beings made in His image didn’t ask such important questions, so He provides us with a scriptural FAQ sheet. Job, Lamentations, and Ecclesiastes articulate the questions, while Psalms provide the lyrics for praise songs sung in a minor key. 

God doesn’t accuse us of being crybabies when we weep; instead, He collects our tears as if they were holy water. 

You keep track of all my sorrows. You have collected my tears in your bottle. (Psalm 56:8)

Garden Hope in a Wilderness World

Our universal disdain for pain and suffering implies that the world would be better off without it, but where did we get that notion? How do we reconcile the disparity between how the world operates and how we believe it should function? 

The atheist feels compelled to believe that our desire for a better life emerged when our intellect developed enough nerve to question the business practices of its naturally selected superior. Anthropological arrogance, however, doesn’t earn one employee of the month honors; instead, it makes one a prime candidate for evolutionary redundancy. Christians, conversely, attribute this cognitive dissonance to the distant memory of a once good world that has since gone bad—a Garden memory stirred every time a wilderness thorn or thistle pricks us. The atheist can dismiss the Biblical narrative as mere fiction, but they cannot overlook their desire for a better life, which eerily resembles Eden.

Read more: 

Why does God allow pain and suffering? A series on the most googled questions

Is the Problem of Suffering the strongest argument against God?

Cancer, War and the God Question: why so much suffering?

Answering theodicy

The atheist argument against God begins by acknowledging His omnipotence, omniscience, and omnibenevolence, but then accuses Him of failing to live up to the hype. The syllogism goes like this:

1. If God exists, then he is omnipotent and perfectly good; 
2. a perfectly good being would eliminate evil as far as it could; 
3. there is no limit to what an omnipotent being can do; 
4. therefore, if God exists, there would be no evil in the world; 
5. there is evil in the world; 
6. therefore, God does not exist.

While this argument may apply to a generic God, it falters in the face of the Christian God. 

1. If God exists, then he is omnipotent and perfectly good; 
2. a perfectly good being would eliminate evil as far as it could; 
3. there is no limit to what an omnipotent being can do; 
4. therefore, if God exists, He would go to great extremes to deal with the evil in the world; 

though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. (Philippians 2:6-8)

1. God incarnated, suffered, died, and rose from the grave to redeem evil.
2. therefore, God exists.

It’s fair to say that omnipotence includes the ability to incarnate, which, for a Christian, may be the greatest superpower of all. The reason Athens has nothing to do with Jerusalem is that it is only in Jerusalem that the God of the omnis suffers and dies.

We are justified in asking God what He is doing during our crises, but we must never forget what He did for us on the cross. It’s difficult for an atheist to pin us against the wall with an argument from pain and suffering when our God has already been nailed there.

Meta-tragedy

Jordan Peterson argues that Jesus suffered in every conceivable way, making His passion not merely a tragedy, but a meta-tragedy. He endured biological suffering through flogging and crucifixion. He experienced emotional pain from being abandoned by family and friends. He faced rejection from His people, His religion, and the government. Innocent, He was grouped with criminals. He received the death penalty despite promising eternal life. He was a Son forsaken by His Father and killed in front of His mother. The God of the universe was ironically accused of blasphemy. The extent of Jesus’ suffering means everyone can find an ally in One who was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. 

You cannot look Jesus in the eye and tell Him that He doesn’t understand. Therefore, it is surprising that pain and suffering would lead someone to abandon belief in a God who already bore it. In his excellent book “A Quiet Mind to Suffer With,” John Andrew Bryant explains how his pain and suffering diminished the closer he came to the cross. 

“I would close my eyes in that (Psych) room, and it was there that my imagination - a mental world I thought completely occupied by wolves and rats—began to preach the gospel to me. I closed my eyes and saw I was weary traveler who was very tired and wanted to sleep but that I had to move through some kind of Wilderness up to a clearing where Jesus Christ was, where there were three crosses up on a hill with Jesus silent and dead against a neutral sky, and when I climbed that hill my mind got quieter and quieter because all the wolves and rats—even my most invasive and intrusive thoughts and most perilous feelings—hung back, reverent and aware they could not compete with the solemnity of the occasion. Son of God died.” (John Andrew Bryant - A Quiet Mind to Suffer With)

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Pointing the Finger

While atheists can easily explain pain and suffering as the inevitable collateral damage resulting from the struggle to be the most fit survivor, they cannot adequately explain why they care. Conversely, the Christian has a solid rationale for their care but finds it more challenging to connect the moral failings of the first human couple to a world plagued by pain and suffering.

Interestingly, if you ask the average person on the street whether anything is wrong with the world, you will receive a resounding yes. When you then press them for details, they will provide a litany of human missteps. Surprisingly, they won’t blame natural disasters, but will quickly point a finger at beings possessing free will who consistently make poor choices. 

Why would the best that evolution has to offer criticize themselves for their tendency to mess things up? Why do we instinctively assume humans are to blame every time we hear nature groan? Could our finger-pointing indicate a deeper connection between our fallen state and a world gone wrong? Is it possible that the first couple poisoned the well and now the world drinks the same tainted water? Is it possible that our intuition that humans are behind all the world’s problems suggests that they are, in fact, metaphysically liable?

The Bible elegantly confirms our intuition that the world isn’t as it should be and humans are responsible. Adam and Eve were closely connected to nature as caretakers of God’s creation. When they fell, they dragged the fabric of the universe down with them, transforming God’s very good Garden into a less-than-good wilderness characterized by sweat, pain, thorns, thistles, and personal conflict. While the Genesis narrative accurately describes our current situation, we find something remarkable as we turn the pages: pain and suffering can be redeemed and made salvific. The Bible doesn’t leave us crying into our drinks at a perpetual pity party; instead, it dries our tears and invites us to a wedding feast.

No more tears

While the atheist mantra is “grin and bear it,” the Christian’s is “bear it and grin.” It makes the mind-blowing claim that carrying one’s cross is pure joy. Christianity does something monumental with pain and suffering by turning the worst thing that could happen in the universe, the death of God on a cross, into the best thing that could ever happen to a people who, by all accounts, are not good, not even one. We cannot avoid pain and suffering, but unlike every other worldview, Christianity allows us to redeem it. It honestly acknowledges that life is a trail of tears, but then offers hope by looking forward to a day when God will hand us the last box of Kleenex we will ever need. 

He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.” (Revelation 21:4)

Erik Strandness is a physician and Christian apologist who practiced neonatal medicine for more than 20 years and has written three apologetic books. Information about his books can be found at godsscreenplay.com