Horrendous Suffering Reduces the Probability of a Loving God to Zero

The desperate scramble of theologians to rescue their deity 

In the classic American play, Inherit the Wind (by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee), about the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial, we find this exchange between the characters based on William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow:
 
Bryan: “I do not think about things I do not think about.”
Darrow: “Do you ever think about things that you do think about?”

The religiously devout have perfected the art of not thinking about realities that threaten their cherished beliefs—and they sometimes spin terrible events to make their god look good. A few days after the crime at the Sandy Hook school (14 December 2012: 20 kids and 6 adults murdered), a Catholic woman suggested—at a Christmas Eve dinner — “God must have wanted more angels.” If a Catholic priest had been in the room, he would have sprung into action, to perform an exorcism, to remove the demon from her brain. Theologians know they have an uphill battle to explain why their god allowed the tragedy, but here was the ultimate stupidity: this woman’s claim that her god engineered the mass murder. That’s god’s way to get more angels? 
 

Theologians—the official apologists—know that they can’t go that far, yet they do scramble desperately to evade the implications of horrendous suffering. John Loftus has the courage and the savvy to go head-to-head with apologists. In an article published here 9 September 2024, he notes than Christian theologian Don McIntosh has acknowledged the impact of egregious suffering: “I fully agree with Loftus that the reality of horrendous suffering is stomach-turning. No amount of theologizing, philosophizing, or apologizing can soften the hard reality of the evil that is horrendous suffering.” But Loftus points out the profound tension between insisting that their Christian god possesses infinite love—and granting that he allows horrible suffering: 
 
“…at a fundamental level they don’t think much of God’s infinite love. For surely God would place his infinite knowledge and power into the service of his infinite love. Instead, believers discard a God of infinite love, choosing to defend the God they have experienced, the one who doesn’t alleviate horrendous suffering.”
 
It is deeply frustrating and disturbing that theological scholars—well educated people—remain committed to defending ancient superstitions that embrace a human sacrifice, and the sky god portrayed in the Bible who watches everything that every human does. This is rooted, of course, in the ancient world view that the earth was the center of creation, an idea that astronomical discoveries of the last two centuries have destroyed. Theologians have tried desperately to modify the biblical concepts, to transform Christian theology into something not nearly so naïve. 
 
They seem to have succeeded in molding the thinking of most churchgoers, who are very much in the habit of not thinking about the things they should be thinking about. Christian theology should have died a natural death in the wake of the Black Plague in the mid-14^th century. Loftus points out:
 
“It was one of the most devastating pandemics in history. Spread by parasites like fleas and lice, it killed 100 million people, 50% of them European Christians. God didn’t help them as they drowned in their own blood. Most all of them believed their sins caused it. A group called the Flagellants went from town to town whipping themselves as an act of public repentance. This only spread the disease. Some of them blamed the Jews and killed them for supposing they contaminated their water. But God didn’t have the goodness needed to create us with better immune systems. Nor did God have the power to secretly stop the pandemic before it took place. God didn’t even have the foresight to unequivocally inform Christians that sins don’t bring on pandemics.” 

Following the European discovery of the new world, hundreds of millions of native Americans died because of the arrogance and cruelty of those who conquered in search of gold and silver—and who brought diseases to which the natives had no natural immunities (see David E. Stannard’s American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World, and my article about this book published here last November). How could a good, loving, powerful god have simply watched all this happening—and do nothing? The same can be said of the Second World War Holocaust, which involved the deliberate murder of more than six million people. We also have to be astounded that the Christian god didn’t have the power to change Hitler’s mind about the Jews. 

In his dialogue with Don McIntosh, Loftus addresses three of McIntosh’s attempts to get god off the hook for horrendous suffering: please read the article for Loftus’ full critique. It’s a rare thing for a Christian theologian to acknowledge that the god depicted in the Bible is a burden in the sense of relishing suffering, but McIntosh notes: “A biblical-historical view of Christian theology thus entails the compatibility of God and horrendous, or even gratuitous, suffering.” Loftus responds:

“However, McIntosh fails to consider the larger worldwide millennia-long picture. He’s focused instead on an occidental, patriarchal, time-stamped, sect-specific religion and fails to consider how other religions solve their own problems of suffering. But they do, just as imperfectly as McIntosh does.”

McIntosh’s third excuse is probably the slickest one: “God’s work of creation is not yet complete,” so there’s good reason to hope “that a fully satisfactory answer may have to await its completion.” This is yet another tiresome iteration of the claim that his god has a grander plan that humans are not aware of. This is theological fantasy, wishful thinking. Please show us where we can find reliable, verifiable, objective evidence that would allow us to take such pretense seriously.  

 

Loftus responds:

“God is the person most responsible for alleviating horrendous suffering. He is the one who knows about it, who cares the most to fix it, and has the greatest power to fix it. If God abdicates his responsibly in our lifetimes, how can we trust he will eventually get around to it? McIntosh’s third response just reintroduces the problem as a solution. God promises to complete his creation in the future, he says, but where is the evidence he’s a good God now? That’s the problem requiring a theodicy now. It cannot wait since lives (and souls) are at stake.” (emphasis added)

Theologians—especially the clergy—have been inventing theodicies forever, but they rarely come even close to working, to providing satisfactory answers. But they get away with them because the laity don’t want to think about events that undermine faith, such as the Black Plague and holocausts. But there are other evils that provoke doubt about god’s goodness and power. Why is the human brain so susceptible to mental illness? Aging is such a debilitating process—was that god’s idea? Why are there so many genetic diseases, if god is a perfect creator? Why did god allow for high infant mortality rates for millennia: modern medicine went a long way to solving that, but apparently a sloppy god couldn’t have cared less.

Loftus’ 2021 anthology, God and Horrendous Suffering, offers twenty-two essays on the issue (full disclosure, I contributed two of them). If you can coax your Christian friends to think critically about their faith, this book is a good place to start. 
 

 
David Madison was a pastor in the Methodist Church for nine years, and has a PhD in Biblical Studies from Boston University. He is the author of two books, Ten Tough Problems in Christian Thought and Belief: a Minister-Turned-Atheist Shows Why You Should Ditch the Faith, now being reissued in several volumes, the first of which is Guessing About God (2023) and Ten Things Christians Wish Jesus Hadn’t Taught: And Other Reasons to Question His Words (2021). The Spanish translation of this book is also now available. 
 
His YouTube channel is here. At the invitation of John Loftus, he has written for the Debunking Christianity Blog since 2016.
 
The Cure-for-Christianity Library©, now with more than 500 titles, is here. A brief video explanation of the Library is here.