A dialog between Allen Atheist and Corey Calvinist
This is an edited excerpt from Knowing With The Heart: Religious Experience And Belief In God, by Roy Clouser, revised edition 2007, from Wipf and Stock Publishers, pages 141-151.
Knowing With The Heart is largely a dialog between someone who believes the Christian God of the Bible is real, and an inquirer posing questions and objections. The book defends belief in God’s reality as something that can be justifiably known in the way that our most certain beliefs are known, namely on the basis of self-evident experience. See Reformed Libertarians Podcast episode 24 and shownotes for more. We recommend this book for those interested in the topic as a helpful resource, although we don’t agree with every point made, nor with how every point is expressed.
Allen Atheist:
Surely you can't deny that the Scriptures say God is good, and that they teach God superintends the course of history. So what more do you need to see? Either God doesn't care enough to stop the suffering caused by injustice and cruelty, or He does care but hasn't the power to stop it. This shows conclusively that there couldn't be any being that is all-good, all-powerful, and all-knowing as the Scriptures say God is. You do admit that Scripture teaches God to be all-good, all-powerful, and all-knowing, don't you?
Corey Calvinist:
Yes, although those terms may not mean what you suppose. Some people have construed them in ways that are not what I understand the Scriptures to teach.
Allen Atheist:
OK. But let me say that I don't think the usual replies to this objection succeed; it may save us some time if I say right away why they fail. One standard reply is to say that God gave humans free will, that free will would be meaningless unless He let them exercise it, and that much of the suffering in the world is the result of human choices to do evil rather than good. This reply doesn't succeed for several reasons.
First, even if it’s true that people have free will, it doesn’t explain why God didn't create people so that they have immutably good natures and so always (freely) choose what is good. That has to be possible on your view, since the New Testament says Jesus was sinless (Hebrews 4:15) and that in heaven everyone will be (Romans 7:7-8:30). So presuming that Jesus and the redeemed in heaven have free wills, God can create people who are free but immutably good. If He's going to do it later, why didn't He do it from the beginning? Why doesn't He do it now?
Second, why doesn’t God prevent (at least the worst cases of) the suffering that stems from the evil use of free will? It seems to me that it could be done without violating anyone’s freedom. He could intervene to protect an intended victim or simply cause the evildoer to drop dead. Hitler could have been run over by a beer truck in Munich before coming to power, for example, or Stalin could have choked to death on a fish bone.
Third, evil free choices don’t explain the great deal of suffering caused by natural disasters —earthquakes, droughts, epidemics, tidal waves and so on. Not only are these not the products of creatures’ exercise of their evil free wills, but the Scriptures say God causes them Himself (Isaiah 45:7; Matthew 10:29). In addition, there are choices that are not evil that result in suffering, which could have been avoided had anyone had the knowledge and power to stop them. For example, I once read about someone having a heart attack at the wheel of his car and crashing into another car, killing an entire family. You and I might have prevented that from happening had we only known of the impending heart attack. But if God exists then He did know of it, did have the power to stop it, and yet didn’t stop it. For all these reasons, even if free will is a fact it doesn't explain God's not preventing suffering.
Corey Calvinist:
I could say at this point that God does prevent a great deal of suffering; in fact, He probably prevents far more than He allows. Notice that your own way of putting the accusation accepts that God superintends the whole of creation, which is why you see God as responsible for the undeserved suffering that results from both. But that same point would also mean that every time someone could have suffered but didn't, God is responsible for that too. And surely it is no exaggeration to say that there are hundreds of possibilities for suffering by every person on earth every day that do not ever occur. That amounts to hundreds of billions of prevented occasions of suffering daily.
Allen Atheist:
Cold comfort to those who suffer!
Corey Calvinist:
No doubt you're right. I didn’t mean to sound uncaring about those who do suffer. And there is, indeed, horrific suffering. I was simply pointing out that every one of us has far more for which to be thankful to God than we ever realize. But that’s not what you're interested in at the moment.
Allen Atheist:
No, I'm not, and for good reason. If you say that God sometimes prevents suffering, then you're admitting that God has the power to do it all the time. So I'm asking, what about the other times? You phrased this objection as questioning how there can be undeserved suffering in the world, but it’s not only the undeserved suffering that's the problem. So let me restate the objection by repeating a point I made in connection with free will but this time giving it a wider application.
According to Scripture, God will one day bring heaven to earth. Life in God's kingdom will be everlasting and will be free of wrong-doing and suffering because those who inherit that everlasting life will be given immutably good natures. They will live lives of unmitigated happiness and love, at peace with God and their fellow humans, right?
If that’s true, then it shows that God can make humans who have free wills but are immutably good, and so He can make a life for humans that’s entirely happy. So there won’t be any suffering, period. But if that’s possible, then why didn’t God do it from the beginning? Why doesn't God do it now? Either God can do it or He can’t. If God can't, He’s not the Creator on which everything other than Himself depends. If God can but won't, then how can He be good?
That’s why I'm convinced that if it’s really true that for any being to be God that being has to be all-good, as well as all-powerful and all-knowing, there can be no getting round the point that such a being would prevent all the terrible suffering that ravages the whole world every day. Since that doesn't happen, there is no being that has all three of those qualities. Since Scripture says God has them all, they lie.
Corey Calvinist:
You've certainly posed this objection as forcefully as I’ve ever heard it put. Moreover, I think you're right about the usual replies to it. Although it is appropriate to mention human free choice in certain contexts, or God’s having reasons for allowing specific sufferings such as using suffering to produce greater good, you have pressed the issue to its most profound level by asking why God made the world and humans the way He did.
At this most basic level the straightforward answer to your questions is that we don’t know. God hasn’t revealed His specific reasons or purposes for it. But although we don’t know why God made the creation as it is, His having done so does not make Him evil. What the Scriptures say about God implies that it is beyond our ability to judge God when it comes to why He made the world the way He did (among other ways, with humanity’s capability of falling into sin as we did, and so with the world coming under His curse of pain and misery, and ultimately, apart from any mercy He might have on sinners, coming under His final judgment).
However, it’s important to clarify that you have been speaking of God’s goodness in a way that is importantly different from what I find in Scripture. You seem to be understanding it in a way that derives from the ancient Greek philosophical idea of a “perfection,” which is not what I find to be the biblical idea of what it means to say that God is good. For Plato a perfection meant the greatest conceivable degree of some admirable quality such as the highest possible goodness, justice, mercy or whatever. And, admittedly, many theologians have taken that idea and erroneously identified it with God.
God, they say, is the being who has all the perfections and has only perfections. This is what you assumed, it seems, when you said God would have to be all-good to be God. But Scripture never speaks of God that way. And indeed doing so would compromise the doctrine that God called into being everything found in creation, including goodness and all the other admirable qualities that creatures have or lack. According to Scripture, God created everything that exists other than Himself, whether visible or invisible (Colossians 1:16), and that would include goodness. This means that God’s goodness is not a “perfection” that God can’t help having so that it compels how He treats humans. It is instead a quality attaching to how God freely relates to all else He has made. But there is nothing in those created relations that could oblige Him to create the world one way rather than another.
For now, let me summarize this view of God in a bit more detail so you can see how it contrasts with the answers you found unconvincing. God is the only absolute being; He is self-existent, and the One on whom all else depends. According to Scripture, God called into existence everything found in creation with no exceptions. In that case, God is the Creator not only of every thing and every event, but also of every kind of property they have and every law that governs them. This means that God transcends time and space and His self-existence is above all laws. When Scripture says that God is personal, loving, just, forgiving, all-knowing and so on, it doesn't say He must have those characteristics to be God or that He simply can’t help having them. On the contrary, the doctrine that God brought into existence everything found in creation strongly suggests the reverse. The attributes ascribed to God in Scripture, including those He shares in common with creatures, are qualities God has willed to possess from all eternity, by which He relates to all else He has created.
In other words, because it is God who called these qualities into existence, we should not suppose that any of them have to be true of God’s uncreated, self-existent being. Nor should we suppose that any law governing creatures must apply to God. Rather, God’s having the attributes He does is the result of His always willing it so. This is the same for the way any law found in creation applies to God: insofar as He freely chose it to.
The view I just described was articulated in the fourth century by the so-called “Cappadocian” church fathers and was also held by sixteenth century Reformers, such as John Calvin. The Cappadocians explicitly denied that God is to be identified with His attributes and insisted instead that God’s self-existence was “free of qualities altogether.”* Hence the oft-quoted saying of the Cappadocian Basil of Caesarea: “We do not know what God is [in His self-existent being] but what God is not and how He relates to creatures.” Basil explains that when negative terms are used of God’s being they signify “the absence of non-inherent qualities rather than the presence of inherent qualities.” This corrects the misunderstanding that to deny that God, in His self-existent being, has a property ‘X’ is to assert He has property ‘not-X’. It’s a matter of distinguishing God’s self-existent being from His eternally-willed character.
Similarly, John Calvin said, “There is nothing more peculiar to God than eternity and self-existence,” and “every perfection [or quality ascribed to God in Scripture] may be contemplated in creation so that... in the enumeration of His perfections, He is described not as He is in Himself, but in relation to us.”
Allen Atheist:
OK. But where is all this going? How does it supply an answer to my objection?
Corey Calvinist:
It answers the charge of inconsistency between the goodness of God and the existence of suffering, since God is not obligated by His own nature, or anything outside it, to be as “good” as we can possibly conceive or in whatever ways we might wish. God’s having created goodness and willing to be good exactly in the ways and extent He freely determined means He is good exactly in those ways, as He promises to be, not in every way we might imagine. Chief among the ways God has promised to be good is in mercifully saving guilty sinners from the just penalty of everlasting condemnation they deserve, by Jesus Christ and His work on their behalf. Jesus lived a life of complete obedience to God’s law, suffered the penalty of God’s just condemnation of sin, particularly in His death on the cross, and was resurrected to glorified life, all as a representative for a sinner, obtaining their full forgiveness and an entirely righteous record credited to them, and eternal life. And God applies that salvation to a sinner by causing them to be spiritually reborn and enabling them to trust Christ alone for such salvation. (Of course, God is also good to sinners He does not save. As Scripture says, God sends life-preserving rain on the just and the unjust.)
But nowhere in Scripture does God promise to be as beneficent as possible to as many people as possible. He does not promise to prevent all suffering or alleviate all pain. Since He never promised any such things, He is not obliged to do them. In short, Scripture never claims that God is some sort of Platonic Good or Goodness. The fact that God made the world and humans the way He did does not show that He isn’t good in the senses and ways Scripture asserts Him to be, nor is the way He made the world inconsistent with that goodness.
The greatness of God’s goodness consists in the fact that although He isn’t obligated to us in any way apart from His own willing it so, He is good to unworthy sinners anyway. Apart from freely obligating Himself as He has chosen from all eternity, God owes His creatures absolutely nothing. But He freely made promises when under no obligation, and so now has exactly the obligations He has sworn Himself to uphold. As mentioned already, for example, God has promised to save sinners who trust in Christ alone from the just penalty of everlasting condemnation they deserve. So can you see how wildly off it is to suppose that God can’t be real if there’s suffering in the world? It’s worth noting that if the existence of suffering really entails that God doesn’t exist, then even a single instance of the slightest disappointment would yield that conclusion. Such an argument is tantamount to insisting that either everyone’s life be one of uninterrupted bliss or belief in God is irrational. That alone should be sufficient to show that the argument does not attack a biblical idea of God.
Allen Atheist:
This still doesn't explain why God doesn't stop more of the suffering if He has the power to do it. Even if He doesn't have to do it to be good in the ways He has promised, it still seems to me that He should do it.
Corey Calvinist:
I’m afraid I can't help you with why He doesn’t. That’s not something God has let us in on, and I have no idea. But notice that when you say that God should do it, you are trying to judge God by a standard that doesn’t apply to Him; to obligate Him to something He isn’t obligated. There’s no sound argument for rejecting God’s reality on the ground that He is obliged to be and to do what we would like. And in that case, this objection does not succeed in showing belief in God to be contradictory or otherwise false. It’s not good evidence that the experience of the biblical message as self-evident is a spurious one.
Allen Atheist:
Well, this doesn't make me any happier with belief in God, I can tell you! Your reply may remove the logical conflict between belief in God and the reality of suffering, but what kind of God does it allow for? Why would anyone worship a God who made this world?
Corey Calvinist:
The Scripture’s own answer to that is “we love Him because He first loved us.” God made a world that, since humanity’s fall into sin, is now under His curse, and full of terrible pains and misery, and utterly horrific suffering, yes. At the same time, He has also (without external obligation) gratuitously made Himself known in the person and work of Jesus Christ, guaranteeing full and free salvation through trust in Him alone. For those who do trust in Christ, and so experience His saving love, that’s more than enough to induce worship.
You may not find that palatable, but how does that affect its truth? I’m not trying to defend belief in God by making it look more attractive. I’m trying to answer your primary question as to how and why anyone can justifiably believe God is real. Those of us who believe do so because we've had self-evident experience of God, not because everything about what God has revealed is so pleasant that we would simply prefer to believe it.
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*Note:
God’s unqualified self-existence is not something we can conceptualize. It is only something about which we can have a so-called limiting-idea. See about that distinction here.