Pain should not be a reason for rejecting God, writes ROBERT BANKS.
Pain is a fact of life. It can involve physical suffering, psychological hurt, social rejection or material deprivation. Loneliness, criticism, unemployment, breakdown, failure, divorce, persecution and bereavement all tend to bring it in their wake.
Some people experience pain more than others and in certain parts of the world it is a daily reality. Think of the chronically or terminally ill at home or in hospital, refugees crammed into border camps, the victims of earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanic eruptions.
It's not surprising, therefore, that for many people it is the main obstacle to believing in God. Down through the centuries it has consistently been one of major objections to faith. For example, the best known philosopher in England between the two World Wars, C.E.M. Joad, stated publicly that it was the only hurdle that prevented him from embracing Christianity. Anyone who talks with others about Christ, or preaches the gospel, soon finds the problem of pain raising its head.
Over the last century many have tried to tackle the subject. One of the most widely read was lay apologist, author and broadcaster C. S. Lewis, whose books have now sold more than a hundred million copies and continue to sell more each year. His treatment of The Problem of Pain first appeared nearly 70 years ago and has been regularly reprinted ever since.
Lewis wrote this book to answer the intellectual difficulties raised by suffering. However his approach was also informed by his personal experiences of pain as a child, teenager and young adult described in his autobiography Surprised by Joy. Since his sharpest encounters with pain to this point in his life took place before he was converted, he knew from the inside how the problem appeared to unbelievers.
According to Lewis, the problem of pain in its simplest form is as follows. "If God were good, he would wish to make his creatures perfectly happy, and if God were almighty he would be able to do what he wished. But the creatures are not happy. Therefore God lacks either the goodness, or power, or both". To answer this, he says, we need to look more closely at erroneous assumptions built into the words "all-powerful' and "good' when ascribed to God.
The "all-powerfulness' of God is often taken to mean that God can do anything. But, says Lewis, He cannot do what is against his nature or choice. For example, even God cannot make 2+2 anything other than 4. Having made the world to work in certain consistent ways, like the force of gravity, he does not arbitrarily change these whenever potential harm rears its head. Though this does not rule out what we call miracles, if God kept changing the way things normally operate in the world, it would be impossible for us to rise to genuine challenges or act with real responsibly within it.
Unfortunately, fashioning such a reliable world opens up the possibility of people hurting each other in various ways. We might be able to conceive of a world in which God would correct every overstepping of a risk or abuse of the free will through constantly intervening in our affairs. However such short-circuiting of all harmful actions and evil intentions would involve the destruction of human responsibility and freedom.
Lewis then examines how people tend to understand "divine goodness'. He argues that if the difference between our human and a divine view of goodness is too great we would not be able to distinguish God from an evil fiend. Also, unless we have some sense of God's standards Jesus would not have been able to call us to repent from our ways.
The trouble is that we frequently water down the meaning of goodness. We do this when we view love as merely showing kindness or as seeking other's happiness. We need to see that for God love is "pure giving" and that ultimately for us love is not about others' kindness to us, about our happiness, or even about our love for God, but instead God's love for us as sacrificially demonstrated in Christ.
Having clarified what God's goodness and power are, Lewis is then in a position to address what lies at the root of the problem of pain. He says modern people need "a recovery of the old sense of sin'. Sin must be reclaimed from the way in which it has been sentimentalised, psychologised, and statistically relativised in favour of what is allegedly "normal'. At the root of this sense of sin is the abuse of our free will by disobeying God we describe as the Fall, which for Lewis was an historical event passed on by heredity.
Therefore much of the problem of pain stems from wanting "some corner of the universe in which we could say to God "This is our business, not yours".' A direct consequence of our self-centredness is our causing pain to others. It is people, not God, "who have produced racks, whips, prisons, slavery, guns, bayonets, and bombs: it is by human avarice or stupidity, not the churlishness of nature, that we have poverty and overwork".
In order to bring us to our senses, he says, "God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world". Lewis does not say that pain is God's direct judgment upon people, meted out according to how much they have offended him or others. Often it is something we bring upon ourselves because of our selfish actions and sometimes it falls more on people who are more decent and caring than others. Nor does he say that God only calls to people when they suffer but also through their sense of right and wrong, and through what gives them pleasure, both of which ultimately come from him. In and through all such things, God is reminding us that the good things in life, indeed our earthly life itself, do not give us what we desire.
By the way, when the philosopher C. E.M. Joad eventually came to faith, he credited C. S. Lewis with helping him to overcome the final obstacle to faith presented by the problem of pain. So have many others since.
