Using God-Given Reason to Touch the Mind & the Heart
My mother died when I was 10. You could call that a life shaping moment.” Those were an old friend’s words as we enjoyed a meal together and he explained to me why he was an agnostic. Because of that encounter with profound pain, he could not come to terms with the existence of an all-powerful God who was also all-loving. It’s a simple, yet powerful objection. If God is all-powerful, He could stop suffering. If He is all loving, then He would stop it. Because suffering hasn’t been stopped, God doesn’t exist, or He’s not all-powerful, or He’s not all-loving. In any case, if the objection holds up, the God of the Bible just doesn’t exist.
How does one answer such an objection in light of the personal pain that caused it to rise in the first place? There are myriad philosophical responses to the so-called “problem of pain.” One could respond that there is no way for us, as finite beings, to know that the suffering in the world doesn’t lead to greater good. If we could know that no possible greater good could arise, we would have infinite knowledge. But the objection argues against the existence of a being with infinite knowledge (God), so it is self-defeating. There are plenty of additional arguments one could respond with, but choosing the right one for the moment is a matter of discernment and dependence on the Holy Spirit. It is often the case that someone, like my friend, who has trouble with God’s existence because of deep pain in his life is not looking for just a philosophical answer, but an existential answer. One that satisfies both the heart and the mind.
Which is why I responded with the Moral Argument for God’s existence. It’s powerful because it touches on the intellectual and the heart-felt issues. And it exposes a fundamental flaw in the “problem of pain.” The objection states that an all-powerful, all-loving God would be morally obligated to stop suffering. Since he hasn’t stopped it, He must not exist or he must not be moral. But notice that the objection assumes that objective morality exists. Objective moral values are those values that are always true, for everyone, in every circumstance. Because the objection states that it is always moral for God to stop suffering in every circumstance, then objective moral values exist. Without saying it, my friend was objecting to God’s existence because he felt that if the biblical God exists, He should have kept his mother from dying. God was morally obligated to do so, but didn’t. But this actually proves that God exists instead of disproving it.
The Moral Argument goes like this: (a) objective moral values exist only if God exists; (b) objective moral values do exist; (c) therefore God exists. The second premise, (b), is admitted by the objection (as I showed above). But how do you show that the first premise, (a), is true? Without getting overly technical, there is a simple way. If God doesn’t exist, then humanity is the sole definer of morality. But humanity is notoriously bad at defining morality. For instance, an entire country—Nazi Germany—thought it was a moral duty to exterminate Jews. Yet most of the world thinks this is morally abhorrent. If humanity is the sole judge of morality, then morality is subject to interpretation. One set of humans has a moral code that is exactly the opposite of another set of humans’ moral code. Who is to say one set of humans is better than the others? If there is no God, the answer is no one. But we intuitively recognize that there must be moral values that are always true for everyone in every circumstance. It is inherently evil to kill babies for fun, for example. But some humans disagree. If we are just “bags of chemicals” walking around with no transcendent being guiding us, we cannot logically impose our morality on another “bag of chemicals.” Because objective moral values do exist, there must be a being beyond us that makes those values objective and not subjective.
As I pointed this out to my friend, who is a very logical thinker, he began to see how the argument works. But while the logical issue was being addressed, the existential issue—the issue he has to live with—lingered. While it may make logical sense for God to exist despite suffering, how could my friend have any confidence that God would use his mother’s death to work out an even greater good? Enter the Gospel into the conversation. Every theistic worldview can use the Moral Argument to show that, logically speaking, God exists. But only the Gospel shows us that God not only can use suffering to work out the greater good, but that He did use suffering for the greatest possible good. At the Cross, Jesus, an innocent man, was put to death in the most excruciating way the Romans could devise. And Jesus faced more than just the physical agony. He faced the spiritual agony of the Father’s wrathful and just judgment for the sins of the world. It was suffering like no other. It was utterly undeserved. His followers scattered and must have wondered what God could possibly do with such tragedy. “No good can come from this!” they must’ve thought. But God, in his infinite wisdom, turned evil and suffering into a greater good. The suffering His Son felt on the Cross meant the salvation of the world for all who accept it. Tremendous suffering resulting in the greatest possible good. That’s how my friend, and each one of us, can trust God to use our pain for a greater good.
As my friend and I parted company, I was glad that God had guided the conversation so that truth would be shared and my friend’s pain could be acknowledged and even shared. “I’m not convinced yet, Abdu,” he said. “But you’ve given me a lot to think about.” That’s what I hoped for. We do not convince anyone into God’s Kingdom. We only show them the truth. It is God who brings them the whole way and gives them a “life shaping moment.”
Abdu Murray