A few weeks ago, as we shared our day around the dinner table, like we do every night, I mentioned that one of my staff missed a meeting with me because he’s been struggling with infection blockages in both ears, and thought he’d be back from the doctors in time but ended up waiting an hour and a half in the waiting room. He told me that he thought “the doctor completely forgot about me.” It was at this point that Jai, my son, piped up that “Maybe he didn’t hear his name being called…. because his ears were blocked.”
Today’s shareable however, was a sad one.
One of my work colleagues from another division resigned, a man I greatly respect and admire, for he was a doer, a futurist, visionary, truth-teller and boat-rocker, and even though he was an ‘anti-theist’, which I think means he’s anti-God in every possible way, we had ourselves, though not as frequent as we both would have liked, some great conversations. His resignation has had an impact on me and his professional reasons were to be like the proverbial canary in the coal mine, recalibrating some of my business priorities.
As our relationship inched forward, we got more and more into discussions about our faiths. I say ‘our faiths’ because Christianity and Atheism, like most religions if not all, are leaps of faith that rely on a set of unproven beliefs, (for the moment placing personal revelations in quarantine), which is why faiths need to be lived out so we can observe their fruits. Jesus Christ put much emphasis on the fruits of his teaching, and wisdom is essentially the realisation that we don’t have the time to deliberate for too long before death, and so we short-circuit the observable by quick dissecting and following the advice of the suffering fruit bearers from before. I say ‘suffering’ because without trial and tribulation, wisdom cannot be gained. Atheists have tried to follow suit with observable fruit but their deductives don’t make much sense, crudely summarised as thus, ‘we descended from apes, therefore, love one another.’
But there were two things my colleague and friend said during our conversation this week, that disturbed me.
The first was this: “I find nothing more offensive than the word ‘worship’, that some deity should demand his minions to bow down and worship him.” Repeatedly I asked him why it offended him, but with no reasons forthcoming I fell into my short answer; that we all worship something, if not God it will be something else, our career, our mountain bike, ourselves and added that it is a piece of information we tend to deliberately hide from ourselves.
His second objection is a perennial classic which usually erupts near the end of a friendly debate: “That God would allow pain, suffering and evil in the world, drives a stake into the heart of Christianity, and proves there is no God.”
There is something disconcerting when an unbeliever invokes God in their objections when he says; “There is no God because He allows evil.”… “He’s not, because He allows.” How can He allow when He’s not? Alright nitpicking here so let’s put this another way; “There’s evil in the world, therefore there is no God because He does not appear to intervene.” Apart from shirking some of our own responsibility for our sins that brought on the trouble, it sounds something like this; ‘Stephen’s son threw a brick through a car window and because that was a bad thing to do, it means that Stephen does not exist.’ I might not have been there, but I also might have, the point being there is absolutely no way of knowing this. As it stands I don’t correct all Jai’s mistakes, yet the wonderful thing about the Gospel is that the entire salvation narrative through to Jai’s hypothetical brick at the cosmic court is already revealed if one just takes the trouble to read the book through to both its literal and proverbial end. Those who insist on this position possess a great deal of hubris because they are implying that if they themselves cannot come up with a good enough reason, then surely one cannot possibly exist to why God allows all the trouble in the world.
All the theories that exist to explain WHY God allows pain and suffering and evil in the world, are known as ‘theodicies’, and I was impressed that my friend knew at least one of several. But as has become increasingly prevalent in Christian communities today, any attempt to deploy a theodicy, means the burden of proof is on the believer. Therefore the wisest thing to do is to mount a ‘defense’, and the defense is this; that the unbeliever cannot prove God does not exist by noticing there is evil in the world, which then places the burden of proof on the skeptic.
The book of Job exists not only because theodicies do not give us the answers we want, but it is very likely when meeting God He too won’t give us the reason for our trials.
It is however far more likely that the opposite is true, that pain and suffering proves that He is indeed there. For a start, many great thinkers such as Nietzsche have already penned how inescapable it is that if we have an awareness of horrifying wickedness in the world, we are exercising values Christianity brought into the world, and therefore making a powerful argument for the reality of God. The mere awareness of what’s right and wrong the once staunch atheist C.S. Lewis wrestled with until he had no choice but to poignantly posit this paraphrase; ‘If we morally condemn the universe for its hostilities, then we’ve admitted reality to be moral, and the argument for God is made.’
My rebuttals were deflected, like I knew they would, for that is the nature of pride working in us, even though it is not necessarily who we are, nor who I believe my friend to be, and I really hope he reads this because I am still a great admirer who he is and what he’s done. But it is ok. Sometimes we pay these conversations forward, and for some, the only Bible they’ll ever read is you and me, so be good sodium lamps won’t you.
I’ve been thinking a lot of suffering lately. Not only are all of our trials so different, but they mean different things at different times, and while some suffer job loss, divorce, disease, diabetic amputation or an early death of a loved one, which are terrible things I do not wish on my enemies, my own personal sufferings is of the mind – people’s self destructive natures and thought patterns plague me constantly, I go to Him often to fetch miracles on their behalf, and for myself some rest, which at times He grants and at other times He does not.
When next we speak, my friend might tell me that regardless all our conversations he still cannot believe and pledge allegiance to a God who allows these things, and after I try and convince him that we build our trust with God through the knowns and not the unknowns, just like we build trust in our families through the knowns which in turns creates trust allowances for the unknowns, I am likely to return home mournfully, that one more was willing to risk their prospect to eternal life on the basis of half an argument, providing me another nightmare of a suicide bomber shredding himself and others into raw flesh.
He might ask me why I persist in these conversations, after which I’ll ask him if he enjoys his wife. He will frown and say yes of course. I will ask him if he enjoys his son. He will say yes and remind me that I already know this. I will ask him whether he values our friendship and he would say of course yes. I will then ask him to tell me what he would prefer; to wake up next to the woman he loves in this life only, or to wake up next to her for all eternity. I will ask him whether he’s satisfied with enjoying his son in this life alone, or for all eternity, and then I will ask him what the point of this friendship is, if it only lasts these few minutes, or if he’d desire for it to be a friendship which could last forever.
A few weeks ago, as we shared our day around the dinner table, like we do every night, I mentioned that one of my staff missed a meeting with me because he’s been struggling with infection blockages in both ears, and thought he’d be back from the doctors in time but ended up waiting an hour and a half in the waiting room. He told me that he thought “the doctor completely forgot about me.” It was at this point that Jai, my son, piped up that “Maybe he didn’t hear his name being called… because his ears were blocked.”
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