Timothy Keller, author of ‘The Reason for God’ wrote:
. . . . I knew a man in my first parish who had lost most of his eyesight after he was shot in the face during a drug deal gone bad. He told me he had been an extremely selfish and cruel person, but he had always blamed his legal and relational problems on others. The loss of his sight had devastated him, but it had also profoundly humbled him. “As my physical eyes were closed, my spiritual eyes were opened, as it were. I finally saw how I’d been treating people. I changed, and now for the first time in my life I have friends. It was a terrible price to pay, and yet I must say it was worth it. I finally have what makes life worthwhile.”
Though none of those people were grateful for the tragedies themselves, they would not trade the insight, character, and strength they had gotten from them for anything. With time and perspective most of us can see good reasons for at least some of the tragedy and pain that occurs in life. Why couldn’t it be possible that, from God’s vantage point, there are good reasons for all of them?
If you have a God great and transcendent enough to be mad at because he hasn’t stopped evil and suffering in the world then you have (at the same moment) a God great and transcendent enough to have good reasons for allowing it to continue that you can’t know. Indeed, you can’t have it both ways.
Evil and Suffering May Be (If Anything) Evidence for God
Horrendous, inexplicable suffering, though it cannot disprove God, is none the less a problem for the believer in the Bible. However it is perhaps a greater problem for nonbelievers. C.S. Lewis described how he had originally rejected the idea of God because of the cruelty of life. Then he came to realize that evil was even more problematic for his new atheism. In the end, he realized that suffering provided a better argument for God’s existence than one against it.
My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of “just” and “unjust”?. . . Of course I could have given up my idea of justice by saying it was nothing but a private idea of my own. But if I did that, then my arguement against God collapsed too—for the arguement depended on the saying that the world was really unjust, not saying that it did not happen to please my private fantasies. . . . Consequently atheism turns out to be too simple.6
Lewis realized that the common objections to God are based on a sense of fair play and justice. People, we believe, ought not to suffer, be excluded, die of hunger or oppression. But the evolutionary mechanism of natural selection depends on death, destruction, and violence of the strong against the weak—these things are all perfectly natural. On what basis, then, does the atheist judge the natural world to be horribly wrong, unfair and unjust? The nonbeliever in God doesn’t have a good basis for being outraged at injustice which, as Lewis points out, was the reason for objecting to God in the first place. If you are sure that this natural world is unjust and filled with evil, you are assuming the reality of some extra-natural (or supernatural) standard by which to make your judgment. ~Timothy Keller, The Reason for God (Penguin Books, New York, NY (2008, 2016, 2018), 25-26 . . . .continued
Timothy Keller is Pastor of a Presbyterian church in New York City.
(Posts with a preamble asterisk * are for a more general audience and not specific to teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.)
