Justified True Belief

(P1) Suffering can destroy trust in God without being evidence that God does not exist. + The intellectual problem of evil asks whether the suffering in the world is evidence that there is no God. The emotional problem asks something else entirely, and for most people it is the one that actually bites. (1) The head can be satisfied while the heart is not. - Picture a woman sitting through a careful lecture on the free will defense, the argument that God can be good and still permit the evil people do, because he may not be able to make creatures who are genuinely free and also guaranteed never to choose wrong. She follows every step, and she grants that it works. - Then she drives home to a house where her son's bedroom is still exactly as he left it, and nothing in the lecture has touched that room at all. - The intellectual problem asks whether belief in God is rational. The emotional problem asks whether a person can bear to love him. Someone can answer the first question yes and the second one no, and a great many people do. (2) The strongest version of it is a refusal, not a denial. - In The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan tells his brother a series of stories about tortured children collected out of the newspapers, and then says something easy to miss. He does not deny that God exists, or even that there may be some final harmony that makes sense of it all. - What he says is that he refuses to attend. He compares that harmony to a play he holds a ticket for, and he hands the ticket back rather than take his seat at that price. He would keep his suffering unavenged, he says, even if he turns out to be wrong. - There is a serious argument in the neighborhood of that speech: that no future good could justify permitting the torture of one child. That is a form of the intellectual problem and has to be answered as one. - Answer it, and something is still standing. A refusal has no premises and no conclusion, so there is nothing in it to prove and nothing in it to refute. It is not a mistake in reasoning. It is a decision about what a person will accept. (3) The first answer to grief is presence, not explanation. - Job's friends got it right for seven days. They sat on the ground with him and said nothing, because they could see that his suffering was very great (Job 2:13). They got it wrong the moment they opened their mouths, and God says so at the end (Job 42:7). - The instruction to believers is "weep with those who weep" (Romans 12:15), not explain to those who weep. • Jesus calls the Holy Spirit the parakletos (John 14:16), Greek for one called alongside to help: an advocate who sits with you through the trial, not a lecturer who arrives with a handout. - When Augustine's closest friend died, he gave pages of his Confessions to raw grief before offering any account of it (Book IV). Acute pain has never been the moment for theology delivered as first aid. (4) Sooner or later the sufferer asks which account of the world is true. - A hospital chaplain does not open with arguments for the existence of God. - But by about the third week the question comes anyway, and it is usually one of the same three: is there any hope here, will this ever be put right, will I see her again. - Those are not requests for sympathy. They are questions about which account of the world is true, and they deserve an answer. Therefore, the emotional problem of evil is a crisis of trust rather than a piece of evidence, and it is no less real for that.

(P2a) In Christ, God has entered human suffering and borne it himself. + Every account of the world has something to say to a sufferer. Christian theism says the one thing none of the others can say: God has been here. (1) God did not stay outside the suffering. - The incarnation is the claim that the eternal Son took a complete human nature, body and mind, and lived a human life. Not God in disguise, not God on a visit: God as one of us. - So he got hungry. He was tired enough at a well one afternoon to sit down while the others walked into town for food. He wept at a friend's grave knowing he was about to empty it (John 11:35). - Athanasius put it plainly in the fourth century: the Word took a body that could die, so that death could be destroyed from inside rather than from a safe distance. - Three familiar alternatives cannot say anything of the kind. • Deism: God winds the world up and steps back, so he would not come. • Pantheism: God simply is the universe, so there is nowhere to come from. • Naturalism: the physical world is all there is, so there is nobody to come. (2) At the cross God took the worst that evil can do. - Nothing about it is abstract: betrayal by a friend at supper, a night hearing before the high priest, a flogging, and a public execution the Romans kept for slaves and rebels. - The cry from the cross is "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Matthew 27:46), the opening line of Psalm 22. The God who hears a prayer sent up out of the dark has himself prayed out of the dark. - A German pastor wrote from a Berlin prison cell in July 1944, nine months before he was hanged, that only the suffering God can help. He was not writing philosophy. He was writing from inside the thing. (3) This is a claim about history, not a feeling about the universe. - A good many accounts of the world will tell you that God, or fate, or the universe is somehow sympathetic to what you are going through. The Christian claim is narrower than that, and riskier: God came into it at a particular time, in a particular province, under a governor whose name we know. - The old creeds keep the awkward detail. Besides Mary, the only human being named in the Apostles' Creed is a middling Roman administrator, Pontius Pilate. A block of limestone reused as a step in the theater at Caesarea, dug out in 1961, still carries his name and his title. - A claim with a date on it can be checked, which means it can also be found false. That exposure is not a weakness in it. It is how a sufferer can tell they are being handed a report rather than a sentiment. Therefore, what the Christian answer offers a sufferer first is not sympathy at a distance but a God who has been where they are.

(P2b) In Christ, God has promised to undo the suffering, not merely to outweigh it. + Company in the dark is worth a great deal, and it still leaves the damage standing. The Christian claim goes further than company: the damage itself is going to be undone. (1) The resurrection turns the comfort into a promise. - The Christian hope is not that the dead are somewhere better. It is that they will be raised bodily, as he was. - Paul calls the risen Christ the "firstfruits" of those who have died (1 Corinthians 15:20). Firstfruits was the first sheaf of a harvest, carried to the priest as a pledge that the rest of the field was coming in behind it (Leviticus 23:10-11). He is that sheaf, and the field is everyone else. - Paul then puts the whole thing at risk on whether it happened. If Christ has not been raised, he says, the faith is empty and the dead are simply lost (1 Corinthians 15:17-18). That is not how a man writes who is offering consolation. - The promise is not that the bereaved will stop minding. It is that God will wipe away every tear (Revelation 21:4), which rather assumes there were tears worth wiping. (2) The worst evils are defeated, not outweighed. - A horrendous evil is one so severe that the sufferer has good reason, on the face of it, to doubt their life could ever be a great good to them on the whole: the abuse of a small child, or being forced under duress to do something unforgivable. - The claim is not that later goods outweigh an evil like that. It is that the evil is defeated, taken up into the sufferer's life with God so that nothing in it is finally wasted. • Think of it this way. Outweighing is a good night at the poker table: the winnings exceed the losses, and the losses are simply gone. Defeat is a surgeon's cut that becomes part of the healing. The cut is still there. It has stopped being only damage. - He rose with the wounds still in his hands and invited Thomas to put a finger in them (John 20:27). The marks were not erased. They were made part of the victory. (3) What is finally on offer is a person, not a payout. - On the Christian account the point of a human life is to know and love God, and that is a good of a different order from the goods that suffering takes away. • A woman who loses her hearing has lost something real, and she has not thereby lost her husband. Ask her which of the two she would rather keep and she will not need time to think. - Paul took the thirty-nine lashes five times and was shipwrecked three times (2 Corinthians 11:24-25). He is not a man writing about suffering from a study. - He still called his own sufferings a light and momentary affliction (2 Corinthians 4:17), and he was not being flippant. In the next breath he says what he was doing: looking past what is seen to what is not (2 Corinthians 4:18). Therefore, what a sufferer is offered is not consolation for a permanent loss but the promise that the loss is not permanent.

(P3a) Where there is no God, suffering can be endured but never undone. + Accounts of the world with no God in them have real things to say to a sufferer, and pretending otherwise wins nothing. What none of them has is a way for the suffering itself to be put right. (1) Consolation and redress are not the same thing. - To console someone is to help them carry a loss. To redress a loss is to undo it, or to answer for it. Both are worth having. Only one of them gives you anything back. - Think of the difference this way. The neighbor who sits on the curb with you while your house burns is consoling you. The insurer who rebuilds it is redressing the loss. - Stoicism, Buddhism, existentialism (the attempt to live without appeal to any meaning built into the universe), and secular humanism all offer serious consolation, worked out by serious people over long centuries. None of them offers redress, and their best thinkers have never claimed otherwise. • The nearest thing to an exception is a moral order built into the universe itself, of the kind the doctrine of karma describes, where deeds are recorded and repaid across lives. That is an accounting system rather than a rescue. It does not give a dead child back to her mother. (2) On atheism the dead are not lost but erased. - Parents sometimes keep a bedroom untouched for years. The posters stay up. Nobody moves the shoes. - On the Christian account they are keeping a room for someone who currently exists. On atheism they are keeping a room for someone who has ceased to be, and in time they will cease too, and after that nowhere in the universe will the fact of her be held by anyone. - Whatever meaning the bereaved build afterward is built out of their own resources, and it does not outlive them. That is not a caricature. It is what the honest versions of the view say about themselves. • The usual reply is that nothing can take away the fact that she lived, and the reply is true. What it secures is a permanent fact about the past, not a person with a future, and the second is what the bereaved are asking for. - Plenty of atheists live well, grieve well, and die bravely. The question is not who copes better on a given Tuesday. It is what is on offer at the end. Therefore, an account of the world with no God in it can teach a person to carry a loss with real dignity, but it cannot promise that the loss will ever be undone.

(P3b) Where there is no God, no one can be called to account for suffering. + An outrage needs somebody to be outraged at. Take God out of the picture and there is no longer anyone standing in the position of owing an answer. (1) On naturalism nobody is answerable for what happened. - Naturalism is the view that the physical world is all there is, with no mind and no purpose standing behind it. Everything that happens is matter working itself out under law. - On that view a landslide that buries a village and a man who buries a village differ in mechanism. They do not differ in what the universe now owes the people underneath, because there is nobody there in the position of owing. - Atheists can be outraged at suffering, often more fiercely than the religious, and it would be cheap to suggest otherwise. The point is narrower: the outrage has no address to send it to. (2) The demand that suffering be put right is itself hard to ground without God. - Listen to the complaint again. The torture of a child is not merely unpleasant. It is wrong, and something better was owed to her. That word "owed" is carrying a great deal of weight. - An indifferent universe has no opinion about a hurricane. Whether it can have one about a man, once God is subtracted, is a live question in moral philosophy rather than a rhetorical flourish. - Two concessions are owed here, and neither one costs anything. • Plenty of atheists hold that moral facts are perfectly objective with no God to anchor them, and that debate is genuinely unsettled. • A critic can also press the complaint from the inside: never mind my grounding, your God fails by your own standard. Doing that borrows nothing he is not entitled to. - What survives both concessions is narrow. The sense that a debt is outstanding is at home in a universe where somebody can owe, and it has to be argued for in a universe where nobody can. (3) Pressing the complaint from the inside brings the whole Christian picture with it. - Run the complaint on the Christian standard and the entire standard comes along, including a God who raises the dead and undoes what was done to them. - It is a little like suing under a contract. You may not have written it and you may not like it, and the moment you sue under it you are bound by all of it, including the clause that says what the other party has promised to put right. - Showing that even a God like that could have no adequate reason is a far heavier lift than showing that the suffering looks pointless from where we are standing. Therefore, where there is no God the outrage at suffering stays entirely real and has nobody it can be addressed to.

(C) Therefore, suffering is a reason to seek God in Christ, not a reason to abandon him. + Grief is a reason to go and look hard at the Christian claim rather than a reason to walk away from it. Everything turns on which sense of the word "reason" is in play. (1) A reason to look is not the same as evidence that a claim is true. - Philosophers separate evidential reasons, which make a claim more likely to be true, from practical reasons, which make an action sensible. - A fire alarm gives you the second kind. It is not evidence about what is burning, or whether anything is burning at all, and only a fool stays in his chair. - Grief is a practical reason to turn toward the Christian claim and examine it. The grief is not evidence that the claim is true, and it is not offered as evidence. Whether the evil in the world is itself evidence, and which way it points, is a separate question. (2) A crisis of trust cannot show that a claim is false. - If the emotional problem is a crisis of trust rather than evidence (P1), it cannot work as a defeater, which is a reason to think a claim is false or unsupported. It never engages the truth of any Christian claim at all. - Christian theism says God came into the suffering and will undo it (P2a, P2b). Accounts with no God in them can teach a person to bear the suffering, and that is the end of what they have (P3a, P3b). - So the grief that presses a person to walk out is pressing them away from the only kind of account that could give them what the grief is asking for. That is worth noticing before walking. (3) A belief does not become true by being needed. - Christianity is not true because it is comforting. Treating consolation as evidence would be a bad argument no matter who made it. - The intellectual problem of evil is untouched by P1 through P3b. Answering it is separate work, and so is the positive case that the Christian claims are true at all. - Nor will the Christian answer console someone who does not believe it, and no honest Christian pretends otherwise. Therefore, the emotional problem of evil, pressed to its end, points not away from Christian theism but toward it: toward a God who could put the suffering right and who claims to have already come into it, with the truth of that claim left to be settled on other grounds.