Pain and Suffering

The conflicts you perceive are based on conflating moral with natural evils, not accepting finite knowledge as part of the human condition, ignoring the utility of pain, dismissing the role of our attitude while suffering, and limiting God’s justice to the earthly existence. Taken individually, these mistakes appear to present a conflict between a just God and a fallen creation. A complete picture of the human condition reveals a different story, one in which He, brings justice to the wicked, restores the losses of the innocent, and redeems the suffering of the righteous.

Conflating moral with natural evils: A moral evil is when one person wrongs another. Fraud, murder and fornication are all moral evils. A natural evil is when natural events harm an unsuspecting person. Examples of natural evil include hurricanes, disease, famine, and wild animal attacks. Most people agree that when a villain or deviant suffers as a result of their own bad behavior (like my informed smoker example) they are getting their just desserts. Likewise, most people consider the suffering of the innocent at the hands of a villain (like the pedophile victim), morally equivalent to a wild animal attack, a natural evil.

Not accepting Man’s finite knowledge: Cities get built on fault lines and in flood plains. Food gets tainted with poison. Yesterday’s cures become today’s malpractice. In each of these examples the victims have no fore knowledge of what awaits them. You, non-believers, wonder why God made a world with such hazards and placed us in it. Or at the very least give us the infallible ability to avoid these hazards. This objection is met with a three-part response.

First, “the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.” God gave us the gift of life. It may be long or it may be short. Nevertheless it is life. To complain about the inequality of His blessings, shows a lack of gratitude, i.e. looking the gift horse in the mouth.

Second, in themselves, naturally occurring processes hostile to humans are neither good nor bad. The believer considers them a net good, because they are part of the providential order. Forest fires clear the land for new growth. Earthquakes produce islands and mountains that serve as niches for various types of wildlife. Etc. Only our ignorance places us in harm’s way, which takes you to the next part of the response.

Mankind lacks the omniscience that would allow him to avoid these hazards. God cannot be blamed for failing to make us equal to Himself in this regard. For God to create equals to Himself is logically impossible, like squaring the circle. Any created being must of necessity be less perfect than God. But could we not be made sufficiently aware? Perhaps, except that brings you to the next two mistakes.

Ignoring the value of pain & dismissing the role of our attitude while suffering: I like the proverb that, “Pain is a given; suffering is optional.” Pain serves as a warning of harm and signals injury. As such it is a net good, because it helps protect and inform us about dangers to our health and well-being. Suffering relates to whether the pain we endure has value or is in vain. Athletes willingly endure pain to increase their strength and stamina. Patriots risk life and limb to protect the liberties of their country. It is only when your pain seems senseless that you suffer. It is at this point that you pray to the Lord for comfort and to give you strength. This is how you grow spiritually, by recognizing His authority and trusting that your suffering has purpose.

“But why must suffering even exist?” you ask. A life without hardship would thwart your spiritual growth and personal development. A life of perfect ease* would not provide you with the opportunity to attain the spiritual maturity necessary to partake in the blessings of Heaven. The only reasonable objection to this of which I can think is this: still-born infants and the untimely death of small children seem not to allow enough time for such spiritual development. How do I account for this? I don’t know. In my denomination, children in the afterlife are raised by angels to become citizens of heaven. I suppose they can build on whatever small amount of suffering they experienced and observation of earthly injustice. I don’t know. To me this is a very minor objection.

Finally, the mistake of limiting God’s justice to this world: Anyone can see that wicked people literally “get away with murder”, lie, cheat, and steal with impunity. Meanwhile, good people are hurt, abused and killed through no fault of their own. The problem of evil is only a problem if the wicked go unpunished and restitution is not made to their victims. If you only allow God to work his justice in this earth, then of course you find Him ineffective. You cannot forget that reward and punishment in the afterlife corrects the failures of our species.

In conclusion, you have no justification for claiming that the “Problem of Evil” is a reason to not believe. Your only defense is to retreat into your general lack of belief. That's fine. None of what I have presented makes any sense without taking God as a given, nor have I presented any of this as proof of God's existence, only to show that free will, local/temporary injustice, and natural disasters are not incompatible with a just and all-knowing God.

*The Garden of Eden could be thought of as a life of perfect ease and a counter-point to this statement. Unfortunately I do not have the time to fully address this counter-point, but only to mention that New Church theology does not have the same view of “original sin” as orthodox Christianity. That is because we view the creation account as an allegory and not as history.