criticize him directly, but common these days among Christians is the type of evangelist who turns God
into a jolly guy who just wants to be your pal. I keep looking for something in the Bible-and in the mass of
Christian intellectual tradi- tion-tojustify this essentially American view, and I keep coming up short.
Only one biblical book, job, deals seriously, explicitly and relentlessly with evil (natural and human), and
when Job asks God to explain himself, God basically tells him to put a cork in it.
Then the LORD answered Job out of the storm. He said. "Who is this that darkens my counsel with words
without knowledge? ... "Where were you when I laid the earth's foundation?"
Job 38:1-4
For many years I've advocated that Christian theologians abandon the project of finding a comforting
explanation for evil, especially suffering inflicted on the innocent (e.g., infants dying of malnutrition). The
effort has been going on for centuries and, so far as I can see, it has failed. There is no comforting
explanation, and the "God's ways are mysterious" line is a vapid and dangerous cliche-useful, perhaps, at
funerals but not in the cut and thrust of daily life.
In a certain sense it may be true: there is a lot of mystery in life-in relationships, in questions
concerning the "mind," in the fact that so often many people (like me) never seem to learn from others'
mistakes. But practically speaking, that statement isn't very helpful, and it certainly doesn't answer any
serious questions.
When most people scan the world for signs of God it is not to its scientific orderliness that they look.
Rather it is such matters as the incidence of debilitating and destructive disease that concern them.
The randomly imposed burdens of unmerited suffering seem to many to call in question assertions
that the world is in the care of a loving God.... At the deepest level I believe that the only possible
answer is to be found in the darkness and dereliction of the cross, where Christianity asserts that in
that lonely figure hanging there we see God himself opening his arms to embrace the bitterness of the
strange world he has made.John Polkinghorne, physicist and theologian (1986)When I was in the Navy I saw a great deal of pointless evil-young girls trapped in brothels, a filthy
legless boy begging for coins outside a U.S. military base, kids diving for pennies in a feces-ridden
"river." Nothing I can think of could ever justify this suffering, and if God orchestrated all of it, then the
only moral thing to do (as Camus suggested) is to revolt against him.
The Christian view is that God doesn't want the world to be like this; and when the curtains fall-when
he ends it (perhaps by allowing people to annihilate themselves, perhaps by waiting for the sun to burn
out) -the world to follow won't be like this.
In the meantime, what we must do is alleviate as much suffering as we can by, for example, helping
people to give up self-destructive behaviors, by conserving the world's resources, by promoting
education, by helping neighbors, etc. Here's where you and I are firm allies (though I guess we might
squabble over the contents of what should be taught).