Complaint #010: The Problem of Pain

In order for this post to make sense for those who are unaware or unfamiliar with the problem of pain, I'll spend this first segment explaining it. The problem of pain refers to the paradox/proof that a purely benevolent, omnipotent God cannot exist because evil exists. I'll break down that statement: if God is all-good and all-powerful, He would use His ultimate power to prohibit evil from occurring. Evil exists in our world; ergo, the aforementioned God cannot exist. Fairly simple proof and fairly logical, and therein lies the problem (for a logic-driven Christian, such as myself).

For those who didn't know, this very problem sidelined me (spiritually) for a good year and a half. I finally got to a place where I could ignore the above proof and just say to myself that He is a mysterious God that none of us will understand Him fully. There's a lot more to it, but it essentially boils down to that. It's at this point that I'll make my (inevitable) plug to Donald Miller and his book Blue Like Jazz (available for $4.00 (incl. shipping) on Amazon) for pointing out that, much like love, God cannot be placed into a formula, He cannot be explained, He just is Himself. But that just isn't a good conclusion to this story. As great as Miller is, he really only taught me a good way to ignore the problem (a perfectly good solution because we can't really solve this problem with our human minds anyway). This wasn't really good enough for me, but the problem was gone for a bit.

Fast forward to today: this problem was discussed at church today (if you're ever in Madison, WI some day, join me at Blackhawk Church downtown (also, I'll take any excuse to promote anything I enjoy in my life)). For some reason, I feel like I got it. Plenty of people probably tried to explain it to me (maybe in the exact same way), but I never really pieced it together until today. So, let's start at the beginning (there is no beginning, but we'll start before our universe is created) and we'll take this God and give Him the power to create animals which have sovereignty to make their own decisions (whatever that means and however that happens) (this kind of leads to a reduction of His power, but if His desire is to create animals with this ability, then it is within His power to do so somehow). Inherent in that previous assertion is the ability for these animals to choose an action which is not in line with the benevolent, omnipotent God. With that, evil can occur. However, despite this, God still has the power to redeem these animal creatures from the beds they've made for themselves (probably with straw and ropes rather than with memory foam). This isn't exactly a logical proof, but it seems to at least try to reconcile the all-goodness and all-powerfulness with the existence of evil in a realistic way.

There's still much more to wrestle with when considering the implications of such a problem. I'm not done tackling the issue, but I'm starting to make progress. I think the next step is reading C.S. Lewis' The Problem of Pain. I don't think I'll ever be able to fully understand even this small aspect in the infinite ocean of attributes that is God, but any closer I can get is better than nothing.