Why would a loving God let so many bad things happen?

In a recent post, I presented three questions I've heard young people ask--people who think highly of Jesus and even seem to want to become Christians and follow Him, but worry they can't without sacrificing their rationality, their decency, or both. I addressed the first and second questions in my last three posts. Here is the third question:

Question 3: Why would a loving God let so many bad things happen?

This is the problem of evil, a problem as important as it is ancient. Boethius in The Consolation of Philosophy memorably compared this problem to a Hydra: Every time one version of it is dealt with, two more versions sprout up in its place.

I suspect that the biggest problem with evil is not that it is very hard to find answers to this question; answers are easy to find. The biggest problem is that evil hurts, and having a few answers doesn't automatically make it stop hurting.

But, as Boethius says, there is still a big problem with finding answers: While it is easy to find some, finding them all is a never-ending affair. So is articulating all the old answers perfectly. These are two reasons I will not pretend to answer Question 3 here, in a single blog post.


Boethius and Lady Philosophy discuss the problem of evil.
    Instead, I will do something better. I will point you to some places where some of the best answers are articulated. As God says in Time Bandits, "I think it has something to do with free will," but that's not all there is to it.

• Try Augustine's On the Free Choice of the Will or Confessions for the classic free will response to the problem of evil as well as Augustine's wonderful idea that evil does not exist (evil is, strictly speaking, a lack of good, not a thing that exists in itself).
• Try Boethius' The Consolation of Philosophy for a very personal response to a very personal experience with evil. Boethius tackles the problem from several angles. (I made this short cartoon version of the story).
• Try C. S. Lewis' The Problem of Pain. Pain is God's "megaphone to rouse a deaf world." Also included in this edition: Lewis' own experience with suffering in A Grief Observed.
• If you dare tackle recent analytic philosophy, Alvin Plantinga's God, Freedom, and Evil is a classic in the area.
• You could also try Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God by Marilyn McCord Adams, a Christian look at the really, really, really, really evil evils.

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To sum up: There are good answers to this question, starting with free will. But you will have to do some studying if you really want to understand this issue.

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To sum up my last four posts:

There are three big questions that keep people away from Christianity.

Question 1 is: Can I be a Christian and still believe in evolution? And the answer is: Yes. (But you don't have to.)

Question 2 is: Why would God send people to hell just because they haven't heard about Jesus? Maybe the best answer to this is another question: Who says God does?

Question 3 is: Why would a loving God let so many bad things happen? And the answer is: There are reasons. Maybe you can't understand all of them perfectly, but you can understand a little bit. If you really want to understand it all, you will have do some studying.

Did Augustine Hate Music?

Simple Answer: No

Who:  Augustine was a Bishop/Monk/Philosopher in late antique Africa who wrote so prolifically that he became one of the most influential scholars of all time.  Somewhere, there's a college professor talking about him right now.

Background:  Poor Augustine has been accused of every kind of evil by modern historians, and he's not even around to defend himself!  He died in 430 a.d. after writing millions of words about his Christian faith and a remarkable amount of his work is extant.  The problem is that no one bothers to read his work very well because there's so much of it.  (Or, because they're lazy.)  I've read plenty of "serious" Augustinian scholarship written by authors who clearly didn't know the saint's work very well and were only accusing him of things so they could make a name for themselves.  (That sort of thing is all too common in academia, and Augustine seems to be everyone's favorite punching bag.)


Accusation: In recent years, Augustine has been accused of saying that music was a sin.  Why?  Because he once said that he could enjoy church music so much that he would forget to appreciate God and, instead, just appreciate the music.  Of course, he follows this up by saying that well-performed music is pleasing to God and good for the whole church (he was a much more reasonable person than most scholars will admit), but that's not the part people remember.  (If you don't believe me, just read his Confessions.)  Even though the truth of this is obvious to even the most casual reader, in some circles it's considered common knowledge that Augustine wanted to ban music for good.  That would have been quite a shock to Augustine, who once wrote the following:

But when brethren are assembled in the church, why should not the time be devoted to singing of sacred songs, excepting of course while reading or preaching is going on, or while the presiding minister prays aloud, or the united prayer of the congregation is led by the deacon's voice? At the other intervals not thus occupied, I do not see what could be a more excellent, useful, and holy exercise for a Christian congregation.

So, let's let Augustine off the hook for this one.  He loved music, and he wanted to hear talented musicians making good music in his churches.

(More information about his hymnology can be read here.)

C. S. Lewis and Other Great Christian Rhetoricians

The Christian Church has had some great rhetoricians over the centuries. The ones that come to my mind are Augustine, C. S. Lewis, Ambrose, and Charles Spurgeon.

(Personally, I would like to rank these four as the best, and probably in that order too. But I am unqualified to make that call; at any rate, they are among the best.)

Rhetoric should be understood in classical terms. It's not just about delivering pretty speeches or writing pretty essays. It was the capstone of the education system of the Roman world for a good long while, taught to a student who had learned grammar and dialectic (logic). In other words, a good rhetorician has a good command of language and knows how to put words together (grammar); he knows how to argue for a position (dialectic); and he knows how to weave words and logic together in a pleasing way (rhetoric).

Rhetoric is the art of persuasion; a person who delivers a pretty speech or pens some lovely writing, but fails to persuade anyone, has failed as a rhetorician.

Lewis' rhetoric is superb. He has a masterful command of the English language, an equal ability to reason, and an astounding way of putting it all together. The result is that he often says in a paragraph, one a child can understand, what an average scholar may take many pages to say--if not an entire (and perhaps tedious) book. The same scholar would immediately become mired in a long (and perhaps interminable) academic debate with other scholars over the matter. But for most readers of Lewis the academic debate is rarely necessary. We understand him right off; we understand the case he is making, and we have a working understanding of the position he is articulating without the benefit of much hard study.

My point is not that there's anything wrong with hard study, academic debate, and long books. My point is that a good rhetorician can frequently communicate with most of the advantages of scholarship, but with the added advantage of being able to make a big idea make sense to the rest of us non-experts.

This is another reason Lewis is worth reading. If you haven't read him yet, try reading Mere Christianity and see for yourself. You shouldn't read only Lewis. But for heaven's sake, don't neglect to read Lewis!

C. S. Lewis Is One of the Great Philosophers

I may have disagreed with C. S. Lewis on some theological points (see here, here, and here.). But that doesn't mean I don't think very highly of him.

An expert on Boethius defines a philosopher as "a wise cognitive manager and developer of civilization." By this definition of a philosopher, C. S. Lewis might be the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century.

I think a lot of people know that Lewis is a great Christian worldview writer, by which I mean that if you want to know how to view the world Christianly, you need to read C. S. Lewis. (More good Lewis work: The C. S. Lewis Blog.) Fewer know that he's a very good philosopher, at least by this definition of philosophy (and some others).

One of these things is not like the others! Most of these pictures are of great philosophers. But one isn't. Can you tell which one?
(Pictures from here, here, here, and here.)

I bet no one else managed to summarize Plato's Republic in eight words: "The head rules the belly through the chest" (from The Abolition of Man).

I recently learned, in another book by Lewis, that this illustration wasn't originally his; he borrowed it from some medieval literature. It just goes to show that C. S. Lewis doesn't have a lot of original thoughts. I mean that as a very high compliment.

Original thoughts are overrated. Lewis was wise enough to want good thoughts, not original ones. He understood that, in the span of a single lifetime, we will have more success having good thoughts if we study the thoughts of good thinkers from ages past than if we just try to come up with our own.

Lewis' own thoughts came to him through Scripture, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Boethius, and even Confucius. He put these thoughts into new settings, his great books: Mere Christianity, The Great Divorce, The Screwtape Letters, The Abolition of Man, The Chronicles of Narnia, and the Space Trilogy. I would speculate that no one in the twentieth century did more than he to preserve the wisdom of past civilizations: ancient Greece, ancient Rome, medieval Europe, ancient Israel, and even Confucian China.

Some of these people didn't have a lot of original thoughts because their minds were filled with the thoughts of great philosophers and theologians. One of them didn't have a lot of original thoughts because his mind was almost completely empty.
(Pictures from here, here, here, and here.)

It's fitting that Lewis was one of the few great readers of Boethius in our age. Boethius is just such a philosopher. His greatest work, The Consolation of Philosophy, available here, also contains very few ideas that were his own; they were borrowings or developments from earlier thinkers like Plato, the Stoics, and Augustine. (Literary elements are also borrowed from Homer, Greek myths, Augustine's dialogues, and sources I'm not educated enough to recognize.) But Boethius' combination of all these ideas and literary elements was a highly original masterpiece.

Boethius himself wrote in the days of the declining Roman Empire. But his book preserved some of the best things from ancient Greece and Rome, and it helped to create medieval Europe. If modern Western Civilization should fail, don't be surprised if Lewis' books help to create the civilization that replaces it.

Several videos featuring the Boethius expert I mentioned begin here. This video will help introduce you to Boethius' Consolation. (As usual, the book is way better than the movie.)

Xanax and Kierkegaard

I interrupt my remarks on C. S. Lewis to announce that the New York Times has been running a series of articles on anxiety. This one is about Kierkegaard's The Concept of Anxiety. The author notes that in our culture anxiety is conventionally treated with medication. Of Kierkegaard: "Is there any doubt that were he alive today he would be supplied with a refillable prescription for Xanax?"

The same is probably true of Augustine in 386, the year of his conversion to Christ. Many other religious and philosophical figures might, in our day, have been diagnosed and given anti-depressants or anti-anxiety medication. A few who come to my mind are David and some other Psalmists, Jeremiah, Boethius, Nietzsche, and the Buddha (the article actually mentions Buddhism in relation to this topic). You can probably think of your own examples.

"Stop writing Psalms. That won't do you any good. What you need is a prescription."
(Picture originally from here.)

Now I have no problem with seeking medical solutions to anxiety. Sometimes there is a medical condition that calls for a medical response; I disapprove of religiously motivated rejection of medical care for a genuine medical problem.

But I think our culture has gone wrong in not seeking a spiritual solution. (What if David, Jeremiah, Augustine, Boethius, and Kierkegaard had taken these medications?)

"No more philosophy for you, Boethius! What you really need is pills!" (Picture originally from here.)

And I think Christians often go wrong in not applying a spiritual treatment for anxiety and depression. Whether or not there is a medical problem, isn't there always a spiritual problem that calls for a spiritual response?

After all, what does Scripture tell us? What do the Psalmists do with their fears and worries and miseries? And what does the Sermon on the Mount tell us to do with our anxiety? And Philippians 4:6-7? Until we can learn to have the Cross and the Empty Tomb always in mind, until we can learn to pray without ceasing, can we expect any amount of medical care to solve all the problems in our souls?