Earthquakes and suffering bring up an interesting question
TURKEY has experienced serious earthquakes before, but the recent quakes are reckoned to be the worst in a century, with a huge loss of life, and a bigger number seeing everything of theirs and their community destroyed.
When we add north-west Syria in, we are also reminded of the terrible carnage of a decade-long civil war. Understandably people have responded and reacted to all this in many ways. Some, writing philosophical columns, have decided to tackle this catastrophe in the context of religion, God, evil and suffering. It’s the old question of God and evil, the hardest question of all. If we put the question somewhat mathematically, it is this: How can a God who is infinitely powerful and infinitely loving not stop all suffering and evil?
As the philosophers remind us, this question hit thoughtful people with devastating force after the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 – just as powerful and devastating as the recent quakes.
This featured prominently in Voltaire’s brilliant satire, Candide. Of course, some suffering, like war, is caused by human action. But some happens because of nature. Some thinkers – then and now – assume this rules out the possibility of a God who is both all-loving and all-powerful. Atheists often press this argument.
The problem of suffering itself is of course a problem for all people, not just believers. Indeed, it is a problem for all life-forms capable of experiencing it, which typically seek to minimise being killed or injured. It only becomes a problem of evil for creatures with concepts of good and evil, with a moral consciousness. We recoil at suffering as evil because we are creatures who believe in the reality of good and evil.
Why are we such creatures? That raises problems for all, theistic and atheistic alike, and biologist and atheist Richard Dawkins suggested moral awareness was a ‘Darwinian mistake,’ a faulty evolutionary development.
In practice, we all have to wrestle with the problem that the experience of suffering makes a mockery of what we think life should be like, whatever our religion or lack of it. In practice, believers in God have recognised this unresolved tension for millennia, as many of the Biblical Psalms illustrate with the frequent asking of that question “Why suffering?” but do so, affirming that faith in God helps rather than hinders, in facing life’s troubles.
The characteristic Christian response to the issue of suffering and evil is two-fold. To see suffering through the experience of Jesus on the cross: he enters the darkest place with us and for us. And second, to
recognise that life, with all its difficulties, requires a practical response, in line with Jesus’ challenge to love our neighbours. In this context, it means working creatively – through Christian Aid and similar agencies – to do what we can to help people in need, to try to make the world a better place for us, and all creatures great and small.