God's Problem by Bart Ehrman

Rating - 2: not worth reading (skip it)

It is a fine book, but I cannot recommend it to you because I do not think you will find it useful. If you could use the argument, I do not think you will read it.

The problem of evil is that God cannot or will not prevent suffering. Theologian Bart Ehrman reviews the explanations offered in the Bible and finds them wanting. The suffering is so severe and the explanations are so lacking that this former minister can no longer believe in the Judeo-Christian God.

The problem of evil is long-standing, and Epicurus has perhaps the most famous statement of it. How is an all-powerful, all-loving God consistent with the world around us? God exists; suffering exists; God cannot or will not prevent suffering (or both). Some deny the first, very few deny the second, and the third follows pretty clearly from the second (and more clearly from the denial of the first).

The volume and depth of suffering in the world is nigh-incomprehensible. Prof. Ehrman gives a brief treatment that is still wearyingly long. The standard example these days is the Holocaust, the intentional extermination of eleven million people. Too big -- let's use Dostoevsky's approach: one child. Sometime in the next five seconds, a child is going to die for lack of a good water supply. Maybe it is a waterborne parasite, or dehydration in sub-Saharan Africa, or diarrhea so severe that you could not keep food in the child were he not also malnourished. How do you justify the suffering of the innocent?

Another one will be dead before you finish this paragraph. The child has not done anything wrong. He has hardly had time in his brief life. If you take solace in faith, remember that this child will never even have a chance to hear of your religion.

Prof. Ehrman looks at what the Bible has to say. He is no dilettante or smirking atheist; he was a devout Christian who still teaches the New Testament. If you want to cite verse at him, he can recite it, and he can tell you the historical development of when it was written and how the original differs from the English translation. One large point is that many people think things are in the Bible that are not really there. The explanations you do find will be contradicted by other parts.

Much of the Hebrew Bible suggests or explicitly states that God wills suffering -- not fails to prevent, but actively causes it. It is punishment for sin or disobedience. It is something that happens to those around you as an object lesson. It does not count if you are not the main character. Pause for a moment on those last two. Job's children all die. Not only was Job entirely innocent, but his family was collateral damage in a cosmic bet. The slaughter of entire cities is described approvingly as well, not to mention the plagues of Egypt that kept happening because God hardened Pharaoh's heart. There are a lot of children intentionally being thrown on rocks here.

The Christian New Testament is not immune either. Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead, but John tells us that Jesus intentionally waited for Lazarus to die, rather than going to cure him, so that the resurrection would be a big miracle. Nice guy. Paul's letters made it clear that all suffering would be redeemed in the Kingdom of Heaven, but he also made it clear that the Kingdom would arrive in the first century A.D. The same applied to Revelation and the Old Testament prophets: they were speaking for their contemporaries, not us. After the end of the world failed enough times, you saw late-written books like John that got a bit more cagey.

You pretty much have to abandon at least one of the premises that God can or wants to prevent all suffering, unless you want to say there is not any actual suffering out there, which would be a pretty offensive thing given that at least three more of those children have died since our last update. Many theists revise their notion of God, not quite all-powerful or all-loving. A more popular trend tries to keep them both while saying that some "will not" is fine ("some suffering can be good") and some "cannot" is fine ("you cannot have free will without suffering"). For some examples of all those approaches, see here.

Even the best explanations, if they retain their faith, in the end rely on faith. They do not explain the problem away, instead giving one way that you might continue to believe if you already do. They come back to Job's answer: you do not have an answer, you are not getting an answer, and God has no obligation to provide you with one. Which is to say, they grant Prof. Ehrman's thesis: there is no satisfying explanation (unless you are already satisfied and need an "explanation" as intellectual cover). Is "free will" a strong enough explanation for the latest innocent child who died? "This is the best of all possible worlds" is a really big claim to make, especially to the victims.

Prof. Ehrman instead favors the view of Ecclesiastes. This life is all we have, with probably no personal providence to follow. There will be joy and suffering, and being a good person might (maybe just might) help there to be more of the former than the latter. Treasure your joys, deal with your suffering as best you can, and try to reduce the amount of suffering that others face. And yes, he argues, that bit about "no afterlife" and suffering despite virtue is a Biblical explanation, albeit one that hardly needs nor has much place for an all-powerful, all-loving Judeo-Christian God. Such is life.

If you have read all this and rage against the conclusion, then yes, this book is for you and you should read it. You will get more from it if yours is a cry that there must be more; you share the author's dissatisfaction, and your thoughts will be in dialogue with him. If your reaction is that he is a fool who has missed the obvious explanation, I suggest suspending that conclusion until the end, since odds are he has thought of that one too. He has a stack of nice letters from well-intentioned but not-terribly-deep-thinking people who assure him that the problem has been solved. I remind you that your argument is with the author, not the book reviewer.

If you already know the word "theodicy," you are probably familiar enough to judge whether this book is a useful addition to your philosophizing.

If you have never thought about it much, rather than disturbing your thoughts further with theological questions, might I instead direct your attention to those dying children? We have lost at least three more since our last update. Your time might be better spent working on stopping that.

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