Why would God allow suffering? A rabbi, bishop, imam and philosopher respond

The Short Version

Rabbi David Wolpe argues that a world with no suffering would be a world with no growth and no free choice, and that God cannot give freedom to everyone except the people who will abuse it [1]. Bishop Robert Barron gives the answer of Augustine, that God permits evil to bring about a greater good, calls it emotionally unsatisfying, and then points to trust and to a God who went down into suffering himself [2]. Imam Omar Suleiman says humans must first answer for the evil they do, and that for the rest he trusts the planner without having to make sense of the plan [4]. Philosopher Jack Symes, who is not religious, thinks two arguments for God are stronger than the new atheists admit, but that the suffering built into evolution is a devastating problem for a perfectly good God, so he suspends belief [3]. Wolpe says such explanations are obscene to a person who is actually suffering, who wants presence and comfort, and Barron, who had no answer for a mother at a wake, says the point was that he was there [1][2].

Table of contents

What They Said

Rabbi David Wolpe: no robots, no exceptions, no guarantees

Lex Fridman asks Wolpe, the rabbi of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles, why there is suffering and evil in the world if there is a God who cares for us [1]. Wolpe starts with a thought experiment: suppose everything were a primitive robot [1]. "There would be no suffering, but there would also be no growth" [1]. Growth, he says, implies choices [1].

From there he makes a claim he knows hurts people: "the Holocaust presents the exact same theological question as somebody who gets shot on the streets of a city in Los Angeles" [1]. The question in both cases is why God allows some people to do bad things to other people [1]. "It's on an unimaginable scale, but it's the same question" [1]. His answer does not change with the scale: "you either allow people to have free will or you don't" [1]. In his words, "You can't say as God, I'm going to have let everybody have free will, but not Nazis" [1]. He adds that Cambodians and Rwandans killed each other too [1].

Wolpe calls this one piece of the puzzle [1]. The second piece is natural suffering, such as children with diseases, earthquakes and volcanoes [1]. Here his argument is that suffering has to be in some way random, because "if only good things happen to good people, everybody would be good" [1]. If goodness were reliably rewarded, it would have no moral content [1].

Having given both arguments, he turns on them. When a person is actually faced with suffering, he says, "these kinds of explanations are obscene" [1]. Telling someone in pain that the rabbi said God gave people free will is, in his word, awful [1]. Elsewhere in the conversation he says he could hold a conversation about why God allows evil, but that people who are suffering go for presence and comfort, not for answers [1]. "When someone's suffering, an answer doesn't make them unsuffer" [1]. They want to know they are not alone [1].

Bishop Robert Barron: the best argument against God, and three replies

Barron, the founder of Word on Fire Catholic Ministries, tells Fridman that evil is the best argument against God that he knows [2]. He credits Thomas Aquinas with stating it at full strength. If one of two contraries were infinite, the other would be altogether destroyed, as infinite heat would leave no cold; God is described as infinitely good, so if God exists there should be no evil; there is evil, so God does not exist [2]. "That's a darn good argument," Barron says, and after a long time in apologetics and philosophy he calls it "the best argument against God" [2].

Asked to make the case against God himself, he says he would do what Stephen Fry does and what Dostoevsky's Ivan does in The Brothers Karamazov, and say "there's just too much" [2]. To press it further he would add the suffering of animals over the eons and ask whether so much can be reconciled with an infinitely good God [2]. He notes that the three best versions of the argument come from inside the religious tradition, in the Book of Job, in Aquinas and in Ivan Karamazov, all written by believers who preceded critics like Fry [2].

His first reply is philosophical and goes back to Augustine: "God permits evil to bring about a greater good" [2]. He says this names the matter truthfully enough and gets us off the horns of a dilemma [2]. He also says of it, "It's completely emotionally unsatisfying" [2].

His second reply is about how little we see. Our minds take in a tiny swath of reality, and it would be hubris to say that no good could ever come from a given evil [2]. He tells of a young father holding the hand of his three-year-old after surgery; the child's eyes asked why his loving father was allowing this pain, and the father could not explain it [2]. That, Barron says, is us before God, and the answer is trust [2]. He resists the claim that evil is a knockdown argument, because he holds that there are other rational warrants for God [2]. He knows on those grounds that God exists and is infinite love, and then has to square that with the experience of evil [2]. He does it by "a trusting confidence" that God "knows what he's about" [2]. He admits how inadequate that seems to anyone who is suffering, himself included, and adds, "I think that's the best that we've done in the great tradition" [2].

His third reply is theological, and he calls it the ultimate answer to the problem [2]. Christ, he says, "went all the way down into our suffering" [2]. He describes the cross as the limit case of evil, where humiliation, cruelty, institutional injustice, psychological and spiritual suffering and death are all present, and says that is where the Son of God went [2]. He attaches a story from his own life. As a 27-year-old priest he attended the wake of a policeman who had shot his son and then himself, and he faced the mother with two coffins in the room [2]. He had no answer, but he was there [2]. "That's where the church goes," he says, because Jesus went there [2].

Imam Omar Suleiman: the question God might ask back

Suleiman, founder and president of the Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research, begins by turning the question around [4]. Asked why God allows cruelty and suffering, he quotes a saying about wanting to ask God why he allows hunger and war, but fearing that God might ask the same question back [4]. There is enough food for everyone, he says, and God has given enough guidance to prevent the cruelty we inflict, so humans must first take responsibility and not blame God for the evil of man [4].

Beyond what people do, his answer is the limit of our view. Trying to explain every event, he says, is like explaining the world to a baby in the womb, or like a child who thinks a parent hates them for taking away a dangerous toy [4]. We are trying to make sense of a pixel without seeing the whole picture [4]. Islam, he adds, distinguishes between what God commands and what God allows to happen [4]. He sums up his position in one line: "I don't have to make sense of the plan, but I can tell you that I trust the planner" [4].

He also gives Islam's account of why a being capable of evil was created at all. When God created Adam, the angels asked whether he would create beings who spill blood, and God answered, in Suleiman's telling, "I know that what you don't know" [4]. Humanity would also produce prophets, saints and people who freely choose righteousness, and could rise above the angels, who have no choice [4]. Humans exist on a spectrum from animal, living only for appetite, to devil, the tyrants for whom other lives are simply objects, to angelic, and every moment presents a choice [4].

Jack Symes: the suffering built into the method

Symes, a public philosopher and researcher at Durham University, takes up the question on The Joe Rogan Experience, and he is not hostile to belief [3]. He calls his position honest agnosticism and says the classic arguments for God are stronger than new atheists admit [3].

The counterweight is what he calls the systemic problem of evil [3]. A perfectly good God could have created life without evolution by natural selection, which requires the pain and suffering of countless creatures over billions of years [3]. If that is how it was done, Symes says, "God's a psychopath" [3].

He argues that the traditional defences do not reach this case. The idea that hardship is needed to build character may work for humans, but not for the many animals who lack free will and simply die painfully without developing into anything [3]. He recounts a two-and-a-half-hour conversation with Jordan Peterson, who, Symes says, conceded this is a massive problem but insisted we just need to keep working on it [3]. He notes that between 1960 and 1998 some 3,600 articles and books were published on the problem of evil without resolving it [3]. And he suggests this may be one reason some Christians in the United States resist evolution: if God designed that process, it is a stain on God's record [3].

His conclusion is that the reasonable response is to suspend belief [3]. He discusses William James's example of a mountaineer who must believe they can make a jump, and says such beliefs may be psychologically useful without making the proposition that God exists any more likely to be true [3].

Joe Rogan offers him an alternative: perhaps evil exists to provoke us to do better, and humanity is on a long upward trajectory [3]. Rogan cites Steven Pinker's argument that the world today is less violent and less discriminatory than at any time in recorded history [3].

Where They Agree, and Where They Don't

All four treat the problem as serious. Barron ranks it as the strongest case against his own faith [2]. Wolpe calls his own explanations obscene at the moment of suffering [1]. Suleiman opens with a saying about wanting to ask God why he allows hunger and war [4]. Symes rests his agnosticism on it [3].

All three clergymen show up. Wolpe speaks from his work at hospital bedsides and funerals [1], and Barron from the wake [2]. When a man claiming to be Muslim held a rabbi and congregants hostage at the Colleyville synagogue, Suleiman drove there and spent the day offering pastoral support to the families until the hostages got out; his lesson from it is "don't be indifferent" to suffering [4].

Wolpe and Suleiman agree that human evil comes with human choice. Wolpe's God cannot make exceptions to free will [1]. Suleiman's angels have no choice, and humans, who do, can rise above them or become tyrants [4]. Wolpe adds that he fully agrees with Solzhenitsyn that the capacity for evil runs through every human heart [1]. Symes applies human responsibility to animals, quoting Schopenhauer: "on earth, humans are the devils and animals are the tortured souls" [3].

They disagree about suffering that nobody chose. Symes's objection is that the character-building defence leaves out animals [3]. Wolpe does take up suffering no one chose, and his reason for its randomness concerns what would become of goodness in people [1]. Barron, on the believers' side, names animal suffering himself as the way to press the argument hardest [2]. Suleiman's reply to what humans did not cause is the limit of our view [4].

Barron and Suleiman trust; Symes suspends belief. The bishop and the imam use the same image, a small child who cannot understand why a loving parent allows pain or takes something away [2][4]. Barron's trust comes after his other reasons for holding that God exists [2]. Symes grants that those who posit God have the better hand on two questions, the cosmological and fine-tuning arguments set out below, and still concludes, with the systemic problem of evil as the counterweight, that suspending belief is the reasonable response [3].

They differ on what the greater good is. Wolpe names growth, and goodness that has moral content [1]. Suleiman names people who freely choose righteousness [4]. Rogan names progress [3]. Barron's argument is that it would be hubris to say no good could come of a given evil, since we see so little [2].

They read the twentieth century differently. Wolpe says its atrocities came from religions, in a sense, that made no ethical demands about the other, in contrast to the Torah, which mentions the stranger 36 times [1]. Barron argues that when God was excluded in a very systematic way, rights and equality were suspended, and he reads Nietzsche's "God is dead" as a lament [2]. Suleiman says the great atrocities of the century, among them the world wars, fascism, Soviet atheism, the Holocaust, Rwanda and Cambodia, had little to do with Islam [4]. Symes draws another lesson from the same century: meaning cut off from wellbeing is a recipe for atrocity [3].

Why It Works

Why Wolpe thinks freedom needs a soul. If we are entirely biological and chose neither our genes nor our environment, Wolpe argues, there is no room for free choice, and randomness is not free will [1]. He believes free will needs a spiritual, non-material element, and says Sam Harris agrees that without God or a soul it is logically impossible [1].

Why the believers expect not to understand. Wolpe tells high schoolers that the gap between God and people is far greater than the gap between a two-year-old and a 15-year-old, who does not even know what he does not know [1]. He leans on Martin Buber: "God cannot be expressed. God can only be addressed" [1]. Barron holds that God is not a big being alongside other beings but the reason there is a contingent realm at all [2]. His analogy is an author and a book: Tolkien is responsible for every character and plot in his world, yet he is not a character in the story [2]. Suleiman describes God as beyond human imagination and imperfection, yet closer than your jugular vein when you call on him sincerely [4].

What Barron's other grounds are. He argues that the radical intelligibility of the world is a pointer to a creating mind, and cites Eugene Wigner's 1960 article on the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences, in which Wigner, a secular Jew, used the word miracle repeatedly [2]. He also argues that every act of the will seeks a good nested inside a higher good, like a Russian doll, leading to a supreme good, which he calls another rational path to God [2].

What Symes grants the believer. The kalam cosmological argument says everything that begins to exist has a cause, the universe began to exist, and so its cause must lie outside time and space [3]. The fine-tuning argument draws on Sir Roger Penrose, who, as Symes explains it, calculated that the universe's initial low-entropy state had odds of one in 10 to the power of 10 to the power of 123, a number so large you could write one digit per second since the beginning of the universe and still not be done [3].

How Suleiman says trust is formed. You cannot give up control without trust, he says, you cannot trust God without knowing him, and to know him is to love him [4]. He grew up with a sick mother and faced racism in South Louisiana, and says he learned about God through his difficulties rather than letting them push him away [4]. Many of us want to be our own gods, he says, which is unfulfilling when our plans fail, while submitting to an all-knowing, all-wise God is liberating [4].

What makes the trust bearable for him. There is divine recourse for everything in the hereafter [4]. He cites a hadith that the person who lived the hardest life, whom some commentators link to Job, will be dipped once into paradise and will no longer remember any hardship [4].

Where It Applies, and Where It Doesn't

Free will answers for what people do, and Wolpe uses a different argument for the rest. He applies it to the Holocaust and to a shooting, and turns to the randomness of suffering when he reaches diseases, earthquakes and volcanoes [1]. Suleiman applies human responsibility to hunger and war [4].

The hereafter carries weight where it is believed. Suleiman describes a soul that continues after death to a realm of accountability, reward or punishment, and says "we are souls with bodies, not bodies with souls" [4]. Barron stresses that the Christian hope is the resurrection of the body, and admits he is afraid of death and thinks of it every day [2]. Wolpe does not fear death, but every picture of the afterlife seems foolish to him; what he loves is a parable of twins in the womb, in which one is born and the other mourns a death while everyone outside celebrates a birth [1]. Symes notes that for agnostics there is no all-forgiving father figure to take away wrongdoing [3].

Symes's problem is aimed at a perfectly good God. Rogan suspects the universe itself might be God [3]. Symes answers that a God who is the evolving universe was not perfect at the beginning, which falls short of the classical definition, and that a pantheist God is only worthy of the name if the universe is fundamentally conscious [3].

Wolpe speaks for one voice in a wide tradition. He warns at the start that Judaism, thousands of years old, does not give a single answer even to simple questions [1].

Suffering can turn a person either way. Suleiman says many who grow up in tragedy, such as orphans and refugees, see through the deceptions of the material world, and that you "can choose to be bitter as a result of that or you can choose to be better" [4].

What To Do With It

1. With someone who is suffering, stay. Wolpe's experience is that people in pain do not want his theory [1]. Barron went to the wake with nothing to say [2].

2. Ask the question back. Before asking why God allows hunger and war, apply Suleiman's test: there is enough food and enough guidance, so begin with what people are responsible for [4].

3. Treat your good fortune as luck that obliges you. Wolpe says his own good life is luck, which gives him a tremendous responsibility to others [1].

4. State the other side at full strength first. Aquinas, as Barron describes him, always puts the objections first [2]. Symes does this for the arguments in favour of God [3]. Rogan's rule against the debater's trap is "I am not married to my ideas. They're just ideas" [3].

5. Count animals, and look at your own part. Symes cites figures that roughly 90 percent of people in the UK and 50 percent in the US think keeping animals in cages is cruel, yet around 98 to 99 percent of chickens, turkeys and pigs are raised in factory farms [3].

6. If you are searching, search in a way that can cost you something. Suleiman advises sincerely asking God to guide you to the truth, then investigating the world's religions with rational inquiry while setting aside bias [4]. He warns, "don't seek out the truth unless you're willing to abide by what you find" [4].

7. Read what they read. Barron's three sources for the argument from evil are all books a reader can open [2]. On the separate question of meaning in a universe that does not respond, Symes recommends Camus's The Stranger and The Fall [3].

8. Do the small good in front of you, and keep at it. Suleiman tells of a man who entered paradise for removing something harmful from the road, and of a woman who had lived in prostitution and was forgiven for giving water to a thirsty dog [4]. He cites the Prophet's teaching that "the most beloved of deeds to God are the consistent ones even if they're small" [4].

9. Keep hope alive on purpose. Wolpe retells Hugo Gryn's story from Auschwitz, where his father used the margarine ration to light Hanukkah candles, saying you can't live for three minutes without hope [1].

Sources

1. Rabbi David Wolpe on God, Judaism, Suffering and the Meaning of Life · Lex Fridman Podcast
2. Bishop Robert Barron on God, Sin, Evil and the Catholic Church with Lex Fridman · Lex Fridman Podcast
3. Jack Symes on God, Agnosticism, Animal Ethics and the Search for Meaning · The Joe Rogan Experience
4. Omar Suleiman on Islam: God, Suffering, Prayer, Islamophobia and Palestine · Lex Fridman Podcast