Sandy Hook Massacre - Where Was God? (Part 2)

Does the Sandy Hook Massacre really add more evidence to the case against God? Or, perhaps, is there some deeper truth at work here?

The horrific events at Sandy Hook School on  December 7^th, the slaughter of 26 people, 20 of them five and six year old children, by Adam Lanza, has once again caused many to question either the goodness of God or even if he exists at all. How could God have allowed such a dreadful and outrageous thing to happen?

As I wrote in my last post, many consider this issue, the problem of reconciling a supposedly all-knowing, all-powerful and completely good God with the existence of evil, to be the Achilles’ Heal of religion. Many thoughtful people have looked at this issue and decided there is no way to make all of the Bible’s claims about God fit with what they observe in real life. It’s logically impossible, they think. Given the amount of pain and suffering in the world it has to be that either the Bible is wrong about what it says who God is or else there is no God, he doesn’t exist.

Skeptics have often used this issue to “prove” that God does not exist and that Christianity is a fraud. The Bible says that God is omniscient (all-knowing), omnipotent (all-powerful) and omnibenevolent (perfectly good). If that’s true then it is reasonable, they say, to conclude that God would eliminate evil and the suffering that accompanies it. Wouldn’t you stop your friends from suffering if you could? But God doesn’t end evil or suffering. So the only reasonable conclusion is that God is not omniscient, or not omnipotent, or not omnibenevolent, that is, he is not the God described in the Bible, or else he doesn’t really exist.

According to this thinking, the problem of pain and suffering proves that there is not and cannot be a God who is all-knowing, all-powerful and perfectly good.  Even the famous Christian thinker and writer, C.S. Lewis, wrote in his book The Problem of Pain, “If you ask me to believe that this is the work of a benevolent and omnipotent spirit, I reply that all the evidence points in the opposite direction. Either there is no spirit behind the universe, or else a spirit indifferent to good and evil, or else an evil spirit.”

            In the book 50 Philosophy Ideas You Really Need to Know, Ben Dupre cited four examples of horrible suffering: the 1984 – 1985 famine in Ethiopia that “caused over one million people to starve agonizingly to death;” an October 2005 earthquake in Pakistan that killed 75,000, injured over 100,000 and left 3 million homeless; the account of an “animal-loving, baseball playing” seven-year-old from Michigan, a good kid who never harmed anyone, who died in January 2007 from an inoperable malignant tumor that destroyed his brainstem; and the case of nine-year-old Jessica Lunsford from Florida who in February 2005 was kidnapped, raped and murdered by a convicted sex offender. Dupre then concludes:

Famine, murder, earthquake, disease – millions of people’s futures blighted, young lives needlessly snuffed out, children left orphaned and helpless, agonizing deaths of young and old alike. If you could click your fingers and stop this catalogue of misery, you would have to be a heartless monster not to do so. Yet there is supposed to be a being that could sweep it all aside is an instant, a being that is unlimited in its power, knowledge and moral excellence: God. Evil is everywhere, but how can it exist side by side with a god who has, by definition, the capacity to put an end to it?

If God exists, the only rational thing we can believe about him, according to Dupre, is that he is a heartless monster. If not a heartless monster, then he must be either too ignorant or too weak to do what the right thing for people. A better, or at least a more palatable, conclusion is that he is not there; there is no God.

That’s the philosophical problem of evil and suffering. Many think it’s a pretty convincing argument against the existence of God and the Christian faith.  If that’s so then the tragic events at the Sandy Hook School merely pile up more evidence against God. But, perhaps, things are not as they seem. Perhaps there are deeper truths that show how it is that God not only exists but he is in fact omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent, just as the Bible says, and that he has good reasons for allowing evil.

That’s what I’ll consider in the next and final installment of “The Sandy Hook Massacre – Where Was God?”