The answer to suffering: caprice, karma, chaos or Christ?

Here's my magazine article for March:

Anniversaries are usually happy occasions, but this month marks a year since the first COVID lockdown and I suspect few of us thought that one year on we'd still be facing restrictions. The pandemic has prompted many people to ask deep questions about life and death; and meaning and purpose, some of which we've looked at in previous articles (see here for some of them). However, we haven't looked much at perhaps the biggest question of all: why does God allow suffering? The problem is often put like this “Suffering exists so God either cannot do anything about it, in which case he isn't all-powerful (omnipotent); or he is unwilling in which case he is not all-loving.”

The first thing to say about this is that this is a specifically Christian question. Although it is often used as the knock-out argument against a belief in God, philosophically, suffering is only a problem if Christianity is true. In other worldviews suffering may exist, but it's not a problem.

If we look at other ancient religions, and to a certain extent Judaism and Islam, the will of the gods is supreme. Norse, Greek and Roman gods were capricious and fickle, they would cause humans to suffer on a whim and were not expected to be fair or just. As ABBA sang: "The gods may throw a dice / their minds as cold as ice / and someone way down here / loses someone dear" ('The Winner Takes it All' 1980). Similarly, for strands of Judaism and Islam, God is so supreme that he can never be questioned even if he acts unjustly. Suffering is therefore not a problem, it should simply be accepted.

For those who believe in karma there is solace (and often glee) in the thought that those who have hurt them will be punished for the suffering they've caused. However, to be consistent the karma-believers should also recognise that the suffering they face is a just punishment for wrongs that they themselves have done. Suffering is therefore not a problem, it is deserved.

The problem for atheistic philosophies is that we see suffering as a problem, because logically there is no grounds for complaining about suffering. If everything that exists exists because of chaos - random atoms banging into each other and 'accidentally' forming the universe – then suffering too is part of this random process. Alternatively, in evolutionary terms suffering is natural: nature is red in tooth and claw, suffering is the by-product of evolution. Either way, suffering is not a problem, it is random or natural.

But we do find suffering problematic. That's because we expect the world to be good and we expect any suffering to be just, because the Christian God is good and just. Only in Christianity can you have a problem with suffering, and only in Christianity can you have the solution to suffering. God created a perfect world, but humanity through rebelling against God (what we call 'sin') corrupted that world and so suffering became part of our experience. Despite that suffering being a just punishment for our rebellion, God did not want to abandon us to that suffering. And so he came to earth as a baby in Jesus; grew up like we do; experienced our suffering and pain; and then took that suffering and punishment on himself by dying on the cross; and in rising from the dead he showed us the new life, free from suffering. By becoming a suffering God, God is able to sympathise with us in our suffering (Hebrews 4:15) but more importantly to enable us to enter the new creation where there is no more suffering (Revelation 21:4). If you have a problem with suffering, then Easter is your answer.