John W. Loftus: Horrendous suffering effectively refutes God

By John W. Loftus

In my anthology, “God and Horrendous Suffering,” my focus as an author is on heinous, hideous, horrific levels of horrendous suffering given the belief in a theistic God who is all-powerful, all-knowing and perfectly good. Unless we focus on that kind of suffering — the kind that seems needless and absolutely inexplicable — we’ll fail to see the problem of evil for what it is. Instead of focusing on bruises, sprained ankles, slaps on the cheek, a clump of hair being pulled out, or sicknesses like colds and the flu, let’s focus instead on people who have been burned alive, boiled alive and buried alive.

God may well have good reasons to allow for a modest amount of pain since we have physical bodies and we will all die. So, we can set aside that kind of suffering as largely uninteresting. Horrendous suffering — the kind that turns our stomachs — should be our focus.

My perspective is a “minimal facts” approach to the problem of suffering. I’m arguing that a theistic God should not allow a specific kind of suffering — horrendous suffering. Failing to focus on it is a failure to honestly search for the truth. For when horrendous suffering is our focus, the standard theodicies don’t work. My contention is that the theistic God probably doesn’t exist given the existence of horrendous suffering. I have used several different arguments to get this point across.

Just ask what we would expect to find if we woke up one morning for the very first time (akin to being behind a Rawlsian veil of ignorance). Would we expect to find so much horrendous suffering on this planet given the belief in a theistic God? I submit that no one could ever guess there would be as much horrendous suffering as there is in our world. Such a God would never allow it, since he could have prevented it, should have prevented it, yet doesn’t prevent it.

Think in terms of who has the greatest moral obligation to help someone who is suffering. It’s the person who knows of the suffering, who cares the most to alleviate it, and who has the greatest ability to alleviate it. Therefore, the person who has the greatest obligation to alleviate horrendous suffering is a theistic God, if he exists. Anyone who is wholly good would be morally obligated to prevent horrendous suffering, especially if all it would take was a “snap” of the fingers to do so.

Think in terms of good parents. They would never allow their children to experience horrendous suffering for any reason. While they’re not omniscient, they couldn’t possibly conceive of any circumstances that might justify its use for a greater good. They would never allow it under any circumstances. Parents would protect their children from horrendous suffering regardless of any lessons they might learn from it. They would certainly want all predators, killers and rapists locked in prisons away from their children, because having a safe society is eminently more valuable than allowing really bad people to run amok.

Good parents raise their children to be good people, sometimes despite bad circumstances. Bad parents don’t. Why is it that a heavenly fatherly God couldn’t do that with us, especially since he allegedly had the means to do so? God failed as a parent! There are clearly better parenting influences that can improve the chances that a new baby will be a good person when they grow up. Why isn’t God like a good parent?  Consider D’Angelo Hill, a severely disabled 5-year-old boy who suffered “critical, life-threatening burns” in an apartment fire. If an omniscient God couldn’t have kept him away from that apartment fire, then an omnipotent God should’ve secretly extinguished it as soon as it started. Otherwise, a perfectly good God should’ve created us with a gland that injects morphine to deaden severe pain whenever needed, especially before we discovered anesthesia.

We’re told God infinitely cares for every single individual, enough to die for us all. If that’s truly the case, then it follows that the sufferings of individual people cannot be justified by hindsight lessons learned from their sufferings, like those of the Nazi Holocaust. Otherwise, we would be mere pawns used by God to teach lessons to later generations. If God were to exploit us like that, where the ends justify the means, we wouldn’t have any intrinsic value. We would only have instrumental value. But, if we lack intrinsic value, then God would never send his son Jesus to die for us.

If theists object, then at a fundamental level they don’t think much of God’s infinite love. Surely, God would place his infinite knowledge and power into the service of his infinite love.

Given this present world, horrendous suffering exists because species evolve through an evolutionary process whereby the fittest species survive. There shouldn’t even be a debate about this. The amount and the degree of horrific suffering on Earth throughout every millennium, century, decade, year, month, week, day, hour, minute and second should prove, all on its own, that God is not perfectly good.

Concrete examples like these go on to show God doesn’t do any miracles to alleviate suffering. If God doesn’t stop the most horrific instances of suffering, there’s no reason to think he stops any lesser instances of suffering. If nothing else, the more instances of horrendous suffering, then the less likely God exists. Now do the math.

Let’s turn to seven concerns about this conclusion.

1) We don’t abuse the freedom given to us.

The giver of a gift is blameworthy if he or she knowingly gives gifts to people who will terribly abuse them. Any parent who gives a razor blade to a 2-year-old is culpable if that child hurts himself or others with it. Good parents give their children more and more freedom to do what they want so long as they are responsible with their freedom. If children abuse their freedom, parents will discipline them by taking away their freedom to make bad choices. It’s that simple. God, like a good parent, should’ve done likewise when it came to giving us free will. He should have waited until we could use it responsibly.

God should have kept us from abusing our freedom by creating us with a stronger propensity to dislike wrongdoing, in much the same way that we have an aversion to drinking motor oil. We could still drink it if we wanted to, but it’s nauseating. Such a deity could keep a person from hurting or killing someone if, at the very thought of it, the person began to suffer severe nausea.

A theistic god has many other means at his disposal to keep us from harming others. A heart attack could have killed Hitler and prevented World War II. The Zyklon B pellets dropped down into the Auschwitz gas chambers could have simply “malfunctioned” by being miraculously neutralized.

2) The environment God placed us in will not cause us excessive suffering.

At the very minimum, God should prevent all natural disasters. If such a god exists, the 2004 Indonesian tsunami that killed approximately a quarter million people should never have taken place. If God had prevented it with a miracle, by stopping the underwater earthquake before it happened, no one would have been the wiser, precisely because it didn’t happen. By doing so, God could have remained hidden — for some hidden reason. Then, with a perpetual miracle, he could keep it from happening in the future. Such a god could stop all naturally caused horrendous suffering in this manner, and none of us would be the wiser. We would just conclude this is how the natural world works, with much less suffering in it.

A theistic god should not have created predation in the animal world, either. The amount of animal suffering is atrocious, as creatures prey on one another to feed themselves. The extent of animal suffering cries out against the existence of a good god. This horrific suffering is perhaps the most difficult problem of all. In lieu of this, God should have created all living things as herbivores, such as rabbits, deer, sheep, cows and hippos. And, in order to be sure there is enough vegetation for all of us, God could have reduced our mating cycles and/or made edible vegetation like apple trees, corn stalks, blueberry bushes, wheat, and tomato plants grow as plenteous as wild weeds do today.

An all-powerful god didn’t even have to create us such that we needed to eat anything at all. God could sustain us all with miraculously created nutrients inside our biological systems throughout our lives, and we wouldn’t know anything different. Such a deity could simply do a perpetual miracle here, as well. In fact, there is nothing prohibiting God from feeding us by the process of photosynthesis, just like plant life, thereby not requiring animals at all.

3) Our bodies provide us a reasonable measure of well-being.

A god should have created all human beings with one color of skin. There, that was easy! There has been too much institutional racism, race-based slavery and too many tribalistic wars because we don’t all have the same color of skin.

A god should have created us with much stronger immune systems so there would be no pandemics that decimate whole populations, or chronic diseases like cancer, emphysema, leukemia, or, for that matter, babies born with deformed limbs, blindness, deafness, muteness and so on. This is horrific suffering that God should never have allowed in his creation.

Such a God could have created us with self-regenerating bodies. When we receive a cut, it heals itself over time, as does a sprained ankle or even a broken bone. But, why can’t an injured spinal cord heal itself? Why can’t an amputated leg grow back in a few weeks? If that’s all we experienced in this world, we wouldn’t know any different. Many animals can regrow parts of their bodies that have been damaged or severed. Lizards can grow new tails. Sharks can replace lost teeth. Spiders can regrow legs. An octopus can regrow their arms. Starfish can even grow an entirely new body out of a severed arm.

We find lots of examples in nature that God could have created in us but didn’t. Such a god could have created us with a much higher threshold of pain. He could have given us fish-like gills to keep us from drowning. He could have given us wings on our backs so we could fly to safety if we fell off a cliff. Or, he could have made us much smaller in size so if we accidentally fell off that cliff we wouldn’t get hurt, just like ants who have a very low terminal velocity.

Such a deity should also have made all creatures capable of sexually self-reproducing, like zebra sharks, Komodo dragons and others. If God had done this, it would eliminate gender discrimination and gay hate crimes, since there wouldn’t be any gender or sexual differences between us.

4) Prevent a wide diversity of religions in the world.

If a good god exists, he should have made it a priority to prevent religious diversity by clearly revealing himself in this world such that only people who consciously refuse to believe would do so. There would be no such thing as reasonable nonbelief in the one true sect-specific religion, regardless of when and where we were born, or how we might be culturally indoctrinated otherwise. Such a god would have made his revelation available to every culture and buttressed it with some astounding evidence-based miracles. This deity would provide a naturalistic moral code for everyone that excluded all religions that were misogynistic, racist, homophobic, nationalistic and otherwise barbaric. In this way, he’d prevent religiously motivated wars, crusades, inquisitions, witch burnings, suicide bombers and terrorists.

5) God just can’t help us when free will is involved.

But as it stands, theists are the first ones to say unrestricted freedom is not a good thing. In the case of heinous crimes, we put criminals in prison. We do not let them roam the streets once they are discovered. They lose their freedom in the interests of having a safe society. Safety is a higher value than freedom. The theistic god has a mixed-up sense of what is more valuable, for that god thinks human freedom is more valuable than having a safe society.

To cut to the chase, all of us have a very limited range of free choices, if we have any at all. The limits of our choices are set by our genetic material and our environment. It does absolutely no good at all to have free will and not also have the ability to exercise it. Some people don’t have the strength needed to stop an attacker, while others don’t have the rational capacity needed to spot a con artist. I could not be a world-class athlete, even if I wanted to. Our free will to do what we want is limited by our age, race, gender, mental capacity, financial means and geographical locality. Since we already have limited choices, then God should further limit our choices if we seek to cause horrific harm to others.

6) Suffering is a necessary byproduct of causal natural laws.

God is believed to have created the universe from nothing, along with the laws of nature. If God can do that, he can also create a different universe with different laws of nature without any horrendous suffering in it. It just doesn’t make any sense that God chose to create this world with so much horrific suffering, when he could’ve created a better one without it.

Even if God failed to create a good universe initially, he could still do miracles in this world to correct any errors in it. An omnipotent miracle-working god can do anything in the material universe, or else he’s not a miracle-working god. Christian philosopher Richard Swinburne agrees, saying in a debate with Eddie Tabash that “God is not limited by the laws of nature; he makes them and he can change or suspend them — if he chooses.”

Since this world is causing so much horrific suffering, the question for the theist is why the laws of this world are fixed and necessary when God could intervene to alleviate the most horrific kinds of suffering. If changing the world requires some miraculous adjustment, what’s the problem? People should matter enough for God to do that. I wonder if theists have really thought through the implications of a god who prefers this present set of natural laws with its sufferings over constant miraculous maintenance. Does their god care? Is their god lazy?

7) We just cannot understand God’s reasons for allowing horrendous suffering in this world.

I am suggesting there are several things a god could do to eliminate horrendous suffering without producing a chaotic world, or inhibiting our character development, that would help draw us to him, all of which are easy to conceive and already found in the animal kingdom. Since God, if he exists, could have done differently but did not, he is to blame for all horrific suffering in this world.

The truth is that it seems very likely we should be able to see God’s reasons for allowing it, since most theists also claim God wants us to believe in him, and will condemn us in the afterlife if we don’t. More importantly, this answer cuts both ways. We’re told we can’t understand God’s purposes. We can’t begin to grasp why there is so much suffering in our world if a good omnipotent god exists. But, if God is omniscient as claimed, he should know how to create a better world, especially since we do have a good idea how he could’ve created it.

So, which is more likely: That we cannot begin to understand God’s omniscient ways, or that we can have some kind of idea about them? If we consider the idea that we’re all created in God’s image, the answer seems obvious. We should indeed have some kind of idea about God’s omniscient ways. Since this is so, and since we have good ideas on how God might have done things differently, the most reasonable conclusion is that an all-powerful, omniscient, perfectly good God does not exist.

Only if theists expect very little from their god can they defend what their god has done. Either God is not smart enough to figure out how to create a good world, or God doesn’t have the power to create it, or God just doesn’t care.

Conclusion

The evidential problem of horrendous suffering is one of the most powerful refutations of the theistic god as can be found.

FFRF member and author John W. Loftus has written and edited a dozen books.