DGE Review 2: "God's Problem," by Bart D. Ehrman

• There is sin and God is punishing it - This is the classical biblical answer to evil and suffering: you're had it coming to you. Somebody in your past -- perhaps not you but one of your ancestors -- did something bad and now you've got cancer. Or you're blind. Or the baby died. Or Hitler kills six million Jews. As you can see, this type of reasoning is perhaps easy to apply to individual adults. It might even work for nations -- a large part of the Old Testament, or Hebrew Bible, is about Israel screwing up, getting punished, and then getting right with God and having things work better. There's even a name for it: Deuteronomic History Later the prophets came along and told folks to behave or more of it was coming. Scholars have theorized that because of the way language was used, much of these works have been written in retrospective, that is, after the fact. It's a little easier to forecast impending doom when you live four-hundred years in the future. If you'd like to read up on some of this angry God stuff, Amos and Hosea are great places to start.(Try Amos 4:6-12 as a starter)

  
  It's a bit difficult, however, to reconcile "God kicks your butt because you've sinned" with dead, sick, or suffering children. After all, they haven't done anything. Or with things like the Holocaust, or plagues, or tsunamis, or great floods. It's one thing to look back in history for a certain people and critique their worship skills, it's quite another to live in a modern world where these things happen to both good and bad, child and adult, good person and bad person. Ehrman (and many others) have deep moral issues with a God that creates intelligent beings just so they can suffer. This type of morality might have worked with primitive tribal people, but modern man wouldn't treat a fish or a plant the way we're supposed to believe God treats all of us.

• There's evil and suffering so that something good may come later- In John 9 Jesus is presented with a blind man. His disciples ask "Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?" Jesus says that "Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God's works might be revealed in him."

  
  Many people find comfort that even though something bad is currently happening, something better will come of it someday. Needless to say, the person suffering might not be around when the good thing finally happens. And what good thing can come of a hundred thousand people dying in a tsunami that would make it all worthwhile? Throughout history, billions have died from horrible, disfiguring, torturous causes. There must be a lot of really good stuff coming sometime, but we haven't seen it yet.

• Suffering is redemptive - Then there's the idea, put forward by Christ's example but carried by most of his immediate followers, that suffering itself is redemptive. Paul makes quite a list of all the suffering he's had to go through. In his mind, you're not really an apostle unless you've been stoned and kicked around a bit by the local authorities.

  This idea that suffering is a powerful purifier has done much to ensure Christianity's place as one of the world's great religions. After all, when the plagues came, followers of other religions ran to the hills: it was only the Christians that stayed and tended the sick. Indeed, the entire basis of Christianity -- that Christ was sent to earth to die for the sins of the world -- is based in redemptive suffering.

  But all of this has a feel of a rigged game to many. When Lazarus was sick and dying, Jesus didn't come to see his friend. Instead he waited several days until his friend died. Then he shows up and raises Lazarus from the dead. All fine and dandy, but why did his friend have to suffer death? So that Jesus could be glorified. Why did Adam have to eat of the fruit and curse all of mankind? So that the rest of this stuff could happen. There's this undercurrent that the entire system is rigged that's very disconcerting to outsiders. If everything was rigged so that suffering leads to some greater good, why not just have the greater good and forget about all of the suffering? Why rig the game so that so much bad stuff has to happen first?

• Job - Job gets special treatment in Ehrman's book, mainly because the entire book is about his suffering. For those of you unfamiliar with the story, God sits down with Satan and decides to torture Job to see if he will remain faithful or not. Job. So Job loses his wife, his kids, all of his property. Finally he gets boils all over his body. To make matters worse, his friends come by and tell him that he must have sinned somehow and that God is punishing him.

  But we readers are in on the joke -- Job has done nothing wrong. God is just kicking him around a bit as sort of a game.

  Interestingly enough, Job was written in two parts. The first part, or the inner part, is the conversations with his friends. Later on, another author came along and wrote a "wrapper" story around the inner one. In the inner story, there is no answer. In the outer story, which contains the whole bet-with-Satan thing, God eventually sees that Job is pretty good and gives him all of his stuff back.

  No mention is made that Job's wife, kids, and servants all died horrible deaths just to test Job. Instead, he's given back even more kids and -- one supposes -- a more beautiful wife to make up for the experiment.

  Job is convinced that if God were to appear, Job wouldn't get any kind of useful answer from him. But Job is distraught (one can see why) and pleas with God, who finally does appear in a whirlwind. God's answer? I'm God and you're a little ant. You know nothing of who I am or why I do things.

  That's fine if you're all cowed by that answer, as Job is. But many people have continued to ask the questions, and it seems that whirlwinds are not as prevalent today as they used to be. And there are no more answers than there was for Job.

• The Apocalypse - Finally, what happens when folks are doing what they are supposed to be doing, following all the rules and such, being good Jews or good Christians, and these massive evil things still keep happening? Around Jesus's time there came to be the idea of an apocalypse. Daniel, the last book of the Old Testament to be written, is a prime example. There are many more -- heck, there is an entire genre of books of the apocalypse including the famous book of Revelations -- and the plot is very similar.

  
  Prophet sees vision. The vision is couched in bizarre symbolism. There is a journey into heaven, where events on earth can be watched. Or there is a sequence of events portrayed so that the prophet can see the future. there is an angel to help interpret everything. In each case, the prophets are speaking to folks of the current era, not predicting the far-off future. Usually the authors claim to be some famous person from the past. This provides authority for the accounts. finally, there are good and evil forces abroad in the land. Currently the evil forces have the upper hand, and things are looking really bad. But fear not! Things are going to get even worse! After that, all hell will break loose and everything will be set right.

  The idea is that, even though there is great evil and suffering, it's all because of this war between good and evil. Right now God is allowing all this evil and suffering to take place because evil is winning. And it's just going to get worse. But it'll all work out in the end.

  Jesus is understood by many scholars to be an apocalyptic prophet. Many times he says that the people standing with him will see the Kingdom of Heaven. Some see the sources as looking like Jesus was one (along with John the Baptist and Paul) who preached that things were bad, going to get worse, but that soon -- very soon -- everything would be made right.

  The problem here, of course, is that every generation for the last two thousand years has had people who vehemently thought the end times were here, and they were all wrong. Study up sometime on all the folks who sold their goods and waited for the end of the world. They were all wrong -- dead wrong. But still people predict the end of times over and over again. (This is not just a Christian or Jewish thing) It makes for some sobering reading.

So where are we left after all of this?

Suffering obviously exists, that much is undeniable. Because it exists it is a part of our lives, whether we believe in God or not. So suffering and evil are things we have to come to terms with regardless of our position on the big guy.

I think Ehrman is playing a bit of dishonest pool here. He wants one reason for suffering. He wants God to conform to the biblical notion of a God. He expects there is a single biblical notion of a God. He expects there to be one type of suffering. He wants a world where God is responsible for every horrible thing that happens.

I hate to say it, and I don't mean to belittle the awfulness of evil and suffering in the world, but this seems like so much whining, actually. We live. We suffer. We die. This is the nature of our existence. I suppose one could speculate on other ways of existing -- perhaps without sickness, evil, suffering, or death -- but it gets very tenuous. Speculating on what the universe might be like and actually creating a universe are two different things. When I was a child I had all sorts of moral theories about the way children should be treated. Now that I'm an adult I see things differently. It's not much of a stretch to say that if there is a God he would certainly have a different way of looking at things than we do.

When you say this, those that worry about the problem of evil start waving their hands around and demanding that God be in some fashion something we are able to understand. That we are created in his image. Once again, people make up their own rules here as far as what they want of a God. My personal opinion is that people carry a lot of baggage into their opinions of God. Perhaps with a little less baggage the question of God's existence might be easier to deal with.

After all, Buddhists believe that suffering is an inexorable part of being alive. This seems to be fairly self-evident. They continue with the observation that ignorance and desire lead to most suffering. This also seems to be pretty self-evident and logical. I, and many others, don't think that suffering, evil and God all have to somehow be contradictory. It just means you have to have a new view of suffering, evil, and God. If your old way of doing stuff doesn't work, change it. Don't keep parts of it around and try to make the old parts fit into the new paradigm. Start over.

If something exists, it's our problem, not God's.

I really enjoyed Ehrman's book. I've heard him before on some of the Teaching Company's lectures, and he does a great job of presenting his case. Seems to me like there is a bit of hucksterism behind all of these atheist/God arguments -- after all, a lot of people already have decided and they're just going to buy the books to feel validated. But with Ehrman there is a sense that he is finding his way through things as he writes. in the end, Ehrman is an agnostic -- that is, he doesn't know enough to believe one thing or another.

And that's a very rational position to take.