THE DEBATE VIEWER

The nature of evil and suffering

Lennox distinguishes moral and natural evil and connects Christian hope with the resurrection. Shermer challenges religious explanations and advocates scientific and rational inquiry into suffering.

Veritas Forum, Pepperdine University · 11 November 2013

DEBATE RECORDING

KEEP THE QUESTION IN VIEW

Are explanations of why harm occurs being used to answer the separate question of why it is morally wrong?

Compare the assertion, its supporting reason and the response.

IN THIS EXCHANGE

12 sections · 78 passages.

SECTION 1

Lennox: opening

Supplied text · Original source order

John Lennox’s Opening Statement

JOHN LENNOX: Well, ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much for this warm welcome to this magnificent university campus. I’m particularly honored to be here because, to my surprise and delight, I’m meeting Michael Shermer again. I last encountered him in my home University of Oxford last year. So it was on my turf.

Now it’s on his turf. And I’m so thrilled that you take on yourselves the responsibility to get the big ideas into the public by means of dialectical discussion. Now you have asked me to speak to you on why evil, the nature of evil and suffering.

The Problem of Evil and Suffering Evil and suffering come from two logically distinct sources. They are often intertwined: the human source, the problem of moral evil, the awful things people do to one another.

And then there is natural evil, the natural disasters and diseases, earthquakes, tsunamis and cancer, the problem of pain. And the heart of the question goes back many centuries to Epicurus. And David Hume, writing, said Epicurus’ old questions are yet unanswered. Is God willing to prevent evil but not able? Then is he impotent?

Is he able but not willing? Then is he malevolent? Is he both able and willing? Whence then this evil? And some people say that events like 9/11 show us that there is no God.

And early this morning, I walked in your beautiful hero’s garden, and it brought into my mind a reflection that I was at Ground Zero on 9/11 last year. And I listened to the entire service, the reading of the names. And I was deeply moved by something very striking. I heard many assertions of faith in God and his love and the hope it gave to the loved ones left behind. And indeed so vivid were some of the readers’ faith that they spoke about their relatives not in the past tense, but directly addressed them as if they were still alive.

One of the most moving was, “Dad, you’re my hero. Happy birthday.” I didn’t hear one atheistic reaction on 9/11. I found that immensely striking. Now, of course, 9/11 gets eclipsed for many of us by more immediate suffering or pain.

You may be suffering or be close to someone who’s suffering from a terminal disease that has struck without warning. I can remember my reaction years ago when my brother was rushed to hospital after a terrorist bomb had exploded in his face and his life hung in the balance for many weeks. There are no easy answers ladies and gentlemen.

Since this question involves two distinct perspectives, cancer looks very different to the young mother who has just been told she’s three months to live. It looks different to her from what it looks to the oncologist who’s treated her.

We can observe suffering, we can experience suffering. And it has been established that it’s very interesting that the problem of evil seems to be an essentially Western phenomenon. In those countries where they live much closer to suffering, the problem hardly ever arises, which is just a remarkable fact to factor in. They’re hard questions because they go very deep.

Personal Encounters with Suffering I’ll never forget meeting two brilliant Israeli scientists. And we were chatting and they discovered I believed in God and they said, “Look, we don’t believe in God.” And I said, “Why don’t you?”

And they said, “We’re not going to tell you because we don’t want to upset your faith.” Well, I said, “That’s very kind of you, but if my faith is upset by that, then it’s not worth believing in.” And in the end they told me. They said they read out loud to one another and they were reading a book by the Israeli Nobel Prize winner, Bashevitz Singer, Nobel Prize for Literature. And in the book, he described how some Jewish women and children were buried alive in Russia.

And they said to me, “The light went out. I can forgive God anything but not that.” Now let me make clear ladies and gentlemen, my heart goes out to people like that. Many of my colleagues in Oxford are atheists in part because of this kind of thing. I have stood personally in Auschwitz many times and I’ve wept every time.

It goes very deep and there are no easy, simplistic answers but nevertheless I think there is a way into something that can give us real hope.

The Atheist Perspective and Morality I understand the atheist reaction and yet I have a problem with it as I observe it from outside. If there is no God, where do the concepts of good and evil that we all possess come from? Because outrage against the evils in the world presupposes a standard of good that’s objectively real and independent of us. But if there is no transcendence, no God, then how can there be such an objective standard of good?

And if there’s no moral evil or good in any case, the concept of ethics disappear and moral outrage is absurd. Friedrich Nietzsche saw this very clearly and he pointed out that the death of God would mean the death of compassion, kindness and forgiveness. I quote, “When one gives up Christian belief, one therefore deprives oneself of the right to Christian morality. Christian morality is a command. Its origin is transcendental.

It possesses truth only if God is truth. It stands or falls with belief in God. Why morality at all when life, nature, history are non-moral?” And Richard Dawkins interestingly agrees with him. He writes, “The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect.

If there is at the bottom no design, no purpose, no evil and no good.

Nothing but blind pitiless indifference. DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is, and we dance to its music.” Ladies and gentlemen, that’s correct. The terrorists who flew the jets into the Twin Towers were simply dancing to the music of their DNA, and therefore you cannot blame him. Now notice exactly what Dawkins says. I’ve debated it with him. He’s never retracted it. There is no good.

There is no evil. That is the deconstruction of all morality and all moral concepts. And it seems to me he stands with Nietzsche here and it’s the logical outcome of his worldview. Ironically though, if he believes there’s no good and no evil, then what does he mean by saying 9/11 radicalized him as something so evil that it made him determined to get rid of all religion? There’s a doublethink of course and there’s a reason for the doublethink.

It’s an obvious one. It’s the fact that we’re hardwired as moral beings whether we believe in God or not. And from a Christian perspective, that makes complete sense because one of the central claims is that human beings are unique, made in the image of God. They’re moral beings. So no matter what worldview we espouse, we discover that we’re moral beings.

And that’s what we’re faced with, which is why Dawkins philosophically rejects good and evil, but actually is outraged by what he sees to be morally false.

Absolute Moral Standards Not only that ladies and gentlemen, I dare to say that there are absolute moral standards. Michael Ruse, who’s an atheist, says there are some things that are just wrong. Torturing babies is just wrong ladies and gentlemen. J.L. Mackie was an atheist philosopher at Oxford said this, “Ethics constitutes so odd a cluster of qualities and relations that they are most unlikely to have arisen in the ordinary course of events without an all-powerful God to create them. If then there are such moral values, they make the existence of a God more probable than it would have been without them. Thus we have after all a defensible argument from the existence of moral values to the existence of God.”

And so we find ourselves to be moral beings subscribing to certain absolute standards of good and evil. Those standards, that existence is consistent with the existence of God and very difficult to explain without him. So in one sense, it’s the existence of God that gives rise to the problem of evil. And that is why so many people fail and we can understand it, can’t we?

Free Will and Human Nature Why couldn’t God, if there is a God, created us without the capacity for moral evil? Could he not have foreseen that things would go wrong and avoided it?

And of course he could. Of course he could. He could have made us automata or robots. But then we would have been less than human. Robots programmed what we wanted to do would be incapable of certain things.

I have a wife. I’ve been married forty-five years. I’m glad she’s not a robot. If I arrived at home and found the iPad in front of my robotic wife and it had instructions on it, “Kiss,” and I pressed this button and I got a kiss, it wouldn’t be very exciting, you know. And you laugh because you see the difference.

You see the difference deep down. You wouldn’t want to be like that. And the interesting thing, we find ourselves wishing for God to do something that would ultimately mean we were wishing ourselves out of existence. You couldn’t have love if you can’t have hate, you see. And that’s the fascinating thing that God has created a world of people in his image who are capable of the richness of love.

And the very odd thing is that a lot of evil has occurred on the way to give you your existence, hasn’t it? Maybe your mom and dad met in a bomb shelter during World War II and it was the evil of the bombing that led to your existence. Life is exceedingly complex and sophisticated, isn’t it?

And here we find ourselves in a world where we have these marvelous choices. The existential writer Jean Paul Sartre said, “The man who wants to be loved does not want to possess an automaton.” And if we want to humiliate him, we need only try to persuade him that the beloved’s passion is the result of a psychological determinism.

So what I’m arguing for is the very existence of the freedom to choose and therefore the capacity for love is inevitable if you want to create people like that. Now we find ourselves like that. And therefore God took a risk. Of course he took a risk. I think there are some parents here.

I’m a parent. I’m a grandparent. I took a risk in allowing my children to be. I knew that they could grow up to reject me. I’ve never met a parent yet that gave that as a reason for not having a child.

Because we all hope, it doesn’t always turn out that way of course, that children will grow up to love them. So like God, we create creatures risky in its effort.

Finding Hope in Christianity And you know, we can argue till kingdom come, and we have done, and it’s very interesting what a good God might do, could do, should do and so on. We go round and round in circles and we never solve it. So I ask a different question.

Granted, ladies and gentlemen, that this experience of human life is full of ragged ends. We see some beauty. It’s a bit like Coventry Cathedral. You go into it, you see that a bomb is hit, but you can see traces of beauty. And we ask ourselves the question, is there anywhere, any evidence in the universe that you can trust God with the ragged ends?

That’s the key question. We never solve them all, but is it possible to trust God with them? And this brings me to the heart of it. Christianity is unique in having at its center an absolutely stupendous concept of God becoming human. This God said nature who is on a cross, but let me take it seriously.

Ladies and gentlemen, come with me for a moment. If this is really God, what’s God doing on a cross? I’ll tell you what it tells me at least. It tells me that God has not remained distant from human suffering but has himself become part of it. And he didn’t remain on the cross, he was taken down, he was buried and he rose again.

And of course this is the key point because the problem of evil and suffering looks very different if you live within a worldview that’s got a resurrection and a life after death. I wouldn’t for a moment dream of standing here if I didn’t believe that, that Jesus Christ has broken the death barrier and there’s evidence for it and that makes the universe look totally different. It’s utterly unique, ladies and gentlemen. Christianity competes with no other religion for the simple reason that you find us nowhere else and it seems to me that this is a way into the question and I have seen its effect with many people trying to cope with suffering.

I arrived in Christchurch New Zealand 2 days after the earthquake and I had to meet people that had lost their wives and their husbands just like that. And it was wonderful to see them begin to respond as I tried to explain that there were no simple answers but here’s a possible way in.

And a little note was left for me after one such lecture. The lady was too afraid to stay, she’d lost her husband but on the note it said “This is the first ray of hope I now see.” Thank you ladies and gentlemen.

THE QUESTION UNDERNEATH

Lennox: opening

Identify the claim, the reason and the reply.

PREPARE BEFORE YOU DEBATE

Study the questions underneath.

How can a good God allow suffering?

God is sovereign and good; evil is real, and Christ is our hope.

Can we be good without believing in God?

No one is righteous by nature. God's image remains, and common grace is real.

Does the resurrection really matter?

Christ rose bodily. Our forgiveness and hope depend on it.

Conviction with an open Bible. Scripture first. Reformed convictions. Sources you can examine.

Rooted in Scripture. Open for discovery.

A place to read slowly, ask deeply, and follow the connections. Scripture, study and the voices of Christian history, brought together for a lifetime of learning.

SPEND TIME IN THE WORD

• Open the reader
• Books & reading progress
• Compare Scripture editions
• Find a passage

FOLLOW YOUR QUESTIONS

• Study collections
• People & places
• Faith & apologetics
• Stories of faith

A library with a paper trail.

Meet the authors. Explore the collection. Trace each work to its source.

Download the code.

Open source on GitHub.