Editor's note: Enjoy this devotion from Is God Real? for Teens by Lee Strobel and share with a teenage friend.
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Hardships. Betrayal. Illness. Injury. Heartbreak. Everyone suffers, to some degree. Why? Why?
This isn’t merely an intellectual issue; it’s an intensely personal matter that can tie our emotions into knots and leave us with spiritual vertigo — disoriented, frightened, and angry.
And it appears to be the single biggest obstacle for spiritual seekers. I once sponsored a national survey that said, “If you could ask God only one question and you knew He would give you an answer right now, what would you ask?” By a long shot, the top response was this:
“Why is there pain and suffering in the world?”
This question, in short, is humanity’s heart cry.
But does the presence of suffering necessarily mean the absence of God?
To explore this matter, I met in Boston with the author of Making Sense out of Suffering — a book whose title summed up exactly what I was seeking to do. Peter Kreeft, PhD, is a first-rate philosopher. He earned a doctorate from Fordham University, did postgraduate study at Yale University, and has several decades of experience as a professor at Villanova University and Boston College. And he’s written or coauthored more than eighty books, including Love Is Stronger Than Death and Jesus Shock. Yet he’s no stuffy academic. He has a winsome and engaging manner.
What drew me to Kreeft were his insights in Making Sense out of Suffering. In that book he skillfully weaves a journey of discovery. The clues along the way finally converge on Jesus and the tears of God.
A Bear, a Trap, a Hunter, and God
I began by confronting Kreeft head-on with the burning issue: How could a loving God allow evil? How is that even possible?
Kreeft focused first on that word possible. He called it “intellectually arrogant” to insist there’s no possibility that a loving God — “who knows far more than we do, including about our future” — could possibly tolerate the extreme evil and suffering we see in history and in today’s world. He proposed a “somewhat more reasonable position.” He said there’s at least “a small possibility” that a loving God allows this. “How can a mere finite human be sure that infinite wisdom would not tolerate certain short-range evils in order for longer-range good that we couldn’t foresee?”
He then asked me a surprising question. “Would you agree that the difference between us and God is greater than the difference between us and, say, a bear?”
I agreed. He gave me a story to illustrate a point. “Imagine a bear in a trap. A hunter comes along, and out of sympathy he wants to liberate the bear. He tries to win the bear’s confidence, but he can’t. So he has to shoot the bear full of drugs. The bear, however, thinks this is an attack — that the hunter is trying to kill him.
“Then in order to get the bear out of the trap, the hunter has to push him further into the trap to release the tension on the spring. If the bear is semiconscious at this point, he’s even more convinced that the hunter is his enemy, wanting to cause him suffering and pain. But the bear would be wrong. The bear reaches this incorrect conclusion because he’s not a human being like the hunter.”
Kreeft continued, “I believe God does the same with us sometimes. And we can’t comprehend why, any more than the bear can understand the hunter’s motivations. As the bear could have trusted the hunter — so we can trust God.”
For and Against God
Kreeft understands why people question God’s goodness in the face of evil and suffering all around. He says they’re responding “in a very honest and heartfelt way to the fact that something counts against God. Only in a world where faith is difficult can faith exist. I don’t have faith in two plus two equals four or in the noonday sun. Those are beyond question. But Scripture describes God as a hidden God. You have to make an effort of faith to find Him. There are clues you can follow.”
He said that if there were no such clues, “it’s difficult for me to understand how we could really be free to make a choice about Him. If we had absolute proof instead of clues, then you could no more deny God than you could deny the sun. If we had no evidence at all, you could never get there. God gives us just enough evidence so that those who want Him can have Him. Those who want to follow the clues will unlock them.”
He quoted words of Jesus (from Matthew 7:7):
Seek and you will find.
It doesn’t say everybody will find Him; it doesn’t say nobody will find Him. But some will find. Who? Those who seek — those whose hearts are set on finding Him, and who follow the clues.”
I asked Kreeft to clarify what he meant in saying earlier that “something counts against God” — that evil and suffering are evidence against Him. Was Kreeft conceding that evil disproves God’s existence?
“No,” he insisted. “I’m saying that in this world there is evidence against and evidence for God. There’s no question that the existence of evil is one argument against God.” He noted that in his book Handbook of Christian Apologetics (coauthored with Ronald K. Tacelli), he summarizes twenty arguments “that point persuasively in the other direction — in favor of the existence of God. Atheists must answer all twenty arguments; theists must answer only one. However, each of us gets to cast our vote.”
Evil as Evidence for God
Kreeft then startled me with this remark:
“Besides, the evidence of evil and suffering can actually be used in favor of God.”
He explained that when people respond to evil with outrage, “it presupposes that there really is a difference between good and evil.” We use the standard of good to judge evil — to say that suffering isn’t what ought to be. We understand what ought to be, “and that this notion corresponds to something real, and that there is, therefore, a reality called the Supreme Good — another name for God.”
- Kreeft said his point was this: “If there is no God, where did we get the standard of goodness by which we judge evil as evil?”
He added that the very presence in our minds of these ideas of evil and goodness is something that “needs to be accounted for” — and that atheism fails to do that.
Atheism, he said, “is a cheap answer. Atheism is cheap on people. How is it possible that more than 90 percent of all the human beings who have ever lived — usually in far more painful circumstances than we — could believe in God? The objective evidence, just looking at the balance of pleasure and suffering in the world, would not seem to justify believing in an absolutely good God. Yet this has been almost universally believed. Are they all crazy?
“Also, atheism robs death of meaning. And if death has no meaning, how can life ultimately have meaning? Atheism cheapens everything it touches.
“And in the end, when the atheist dies and encounters God instead of the nothingness they had predicted, they’ll recognize that atheism was a cheap answer because it refused the only thing that’s not cheap — the God of infinite value.”
A Problem of Logic
Our conversation went deeper.
Kreeft mentioned that Christians believe these five things: (1) God exists; (2) God is all-good; (3) God is all-powerful; (4) God is all-wise; and (5) evil exists. But how could all those statements be true at the same time?
“It seems,” he said, “you have to drop one of those beliefs. If God is all-powerful, He can do anything. If God is all-good, He wants only good. If God is all-wise, He knows what is good. So if all those beliefs are true — and Christians believe they are — then it would seem that the consequence is that no evil can exist.”
But of course, evil does exist. Was it then logical to assume that an all-good, all-powerful, all-wise God doesn’t exist?
“I’d say one of those beliefs about Him must be false,” Kreeft said, “or we’re not understanding it in the right way.”
So we explored the logic further.
God as All-Powerful
Kreeft explained that to say God is all-powerful means “He can do everything that is meaningful, everything that is possible, everything that makes any sense at all. God cannot make Himself cease to exist. He cannot make good evil.”
So there are some things God can’t do?
Kreeft went on, “Precisely because He is all-powerful, He can’t make mistakes. Only weak and stupid beings make mistakes. One such mistake would be to try to create a self-contradiction — like two plus two equals five, or a round square.
“Now, the classic defense of God against the problem of evil is that it’s not logically possible to have free will and no possibility of moral evil. In other words, once God chose to create human beings with free will, it was up to them — rather than up to God — as to whether there was sin or not. That’s what free will means. Built into the situation of God deciding to create human beings is the chance of evil, and consequently the suffering that results.”
Then did God create evil?
“God created the possibility of evil,” Kreeft said. “The source of evil is not God’s power, but rather mankind’s freedom. Even an all-powerful God could not have created a world in which people had genuine freedom and yet there was no potential for sin, because our freedom includes the possibility of sin within its own meaning. To ask why God didn’t create a world where there’s real choice but no possibility of choosing evil is like asking why God didn’t create colorless color or round squares.”
So why didn’t God create a world without human freedom?
Such a world, Kreeft said, would have to be a world without humans. “Would it have been a place without suffering? Yes. But also a world without love, which is the highest value in the universe. Real love — our love of God and our love of each other — must involve a choice. But granting that choice brings the possibility that people will choose instead to hate.”
Kreeft noted that God created a world He called “good” (as we read in Genesis), where people were free to choose to love God or turn away from Him. “That potential for sin was actualized not by God, but by people. The blame, ultimately, lies with us. He did His part perfectly; we’re the ones who messed up.”
If you want to read more, pick up Is God Real? for Teens here.
Excerpted with permission from Is God Real? for Teens by Lee Strobel, copyright Lee Strobel.
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Your Turn
The question of whether or not God is real is a vital one for our teens to ask. All their questions about God are important because asking them leads them to decide what they’re going to believe and Who they’re going to follow. Lee Strobel went from atheist to believer and that teen you love can, too. Keep praying! ~ Devotionals Daily
