Dealing with Seemingly pointless suffering. (Part 1)

Part 1: We Can Know How, not Why: But we really want to know Why.

"He who has a why to live, can bear almost any how." -Fredrick Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols.[1]

"Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? Tell me, if you understand. Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know!"-God, Job 38:4-5

If you don’t know my family you wouldn’t know this, but our three-year-old daughter Eden has inoperable and incurable brain cancer. Absent an extreme medical breakthrough or an actual miracle, she will have cancer for the rest of her life.

It was a long and difficult process even getting her diagnosed as the cancer caused an extremely rare condition called Diencephalic syndrome or Russell’s syndrome. It started over two years ago with her not eating enough, not gaining weight, and vomiting at least several times a day. We took her to various types of physical and behavioral therapy and tried all the different methods they suggested. None of it worked. For quite a while I was literally pushing food into her mouth to make her eat as if I didn’t she wouldn’t. It seemed like the poor kid was trying to starve herself to death.

Eventually she was hospitalized for being so malnourished and despite my wife and I claiming over and over that there was some underlying problem, the doctors at that hospital just blamed me for the whole thing because I had been “forcing” Eden to eat rather than let her starve to death. This, they claimed, had given her a feeding aversion and that was the problem. Never mind that I only started doing that when it was already clear there was a problem, that it hadn’t happened to our other two children, or that my wife is a well-respected doctor who knows what she is talking about.

No the answer was that my efforts to address the problem had somehow caused the very problem I was trying to fix. It turns out some medical professionals actually believe in backwards causation! When the cancer was finally diagnosed, I told my wife that I now understand why some people sue hospitals. If they’d bothered to listen to us the cancer could have been diagnosed earlier.

Months after Eden’s first hospitalization we got a new pediatrician who researched what to do as despite all the medications we had Eden on, and us using her g-tube (a feeding tube that is surgically implanted into her stomach), she wasn’t improving. She was gaining weight way too slowly and still vomiting multiple times a day. My wife noticed that Eden had nystagmus, a constant shaking in both her eyes, and told our new pediatrician about it. The pediatrician ordered an MRI to check for Diencephalic syndrome as it fit with Eden’s problems and what my wife and I had been saying the whole time. That revealed the cancerous tumor in her brain and Eden was finally (after almost a year) diagnosed properly. It was also the point when it seems like everything in our lives changed, because now our 3-year-old daughter has inoperable brain cancer.

The problem is that the tumor cannot be surgically removed as doing so would seriously harm key parts of her brain. Further this type of cancer typically doesn’t shrink with treatment like chemotherapy. The treatment just lessens the effects of the Diencephalic syndrome and sometimes halts the growth of the cancer. After a year of chemotherapy this is what has happened to Eden. Her symptoms have greatly lessened. She used to throw up at least four or five times a day, but now she rarely does, and she has gained weight. She is back on the growth charts. The cancer has not measurably grown, but it hasn’t shrunk either. It seems like we are keeping it at bay for now, but absent a miracle it’s not going away.

Now I’ve been studying philosophy and Christian apologetics informally for almost 25 years and formally and professionally for about 10, and if there is unjust suffering in the world, it’s certainly a three-year old girl with incurable and inoperable brain cancer.[2] To claim that there is unjust suffering in the world is actually a much stronger claim than it prima facia appears, but if anything qualifies what’s happening to Eden certainly does. It’s possible that the cancer will kill Eden before she’s an adult, and it’s also possible that she may survive that long. But even if she does, that tumor in her brain is not going away. To avoid committing myself to that a stronger claim than I have the space to defend here, I’ll call this type of suffering, seemingly pointless suffering (SPS). It’s suffering that seems prima facia unjustified where there is no immediate and obvious overriding good.[3]

Now this is the part where many other intellectual and academic people I’ve heard and read (even other Christians) usually start lamenting about how all their study, philosophy, and theology was worthless in the face of real suffering. It’s quite common for them to explain and perhaps complain how none of it helped them deal with their suffering and grief. But I’m not going to do that because it’s just not true. Further this experience has made me a bit suspicious of the philosophers and theologians who make such claims. What exactly were they studying that proved so unhelpful when reality came to roast? If your philosophy and theology is absolutely worthless when your life gets difficult, perhaps you’ve just been doing bad philosophy and theology? If whatever you’ve been studying is that disconnected from your actual life you should seriously reconsider your studies.[4]

The problem of evil and suffering is one of the primary things that brought me into doing philosophy and I’m pretty confident I’ve read and thought more about it than most people have.[5] Not one time as I’ve considered the seemingly senseless suffering of Eden, my family, and the people who know Eden have I thought that it must show that God doesn’t exist, that He doesn’t care, or that He’s not powerful enough to rip the cancer right out of her.

I certainly have struggles with this and I’m not “OK with it” or any other such nonsense, but I have good reasons, arguments, and evidence to affirm that God exists, that He cares about us, and it’s not like I wasn’t aware that children get cancer prior to my own daughter being diagnosed.[6] There was apparently senseless evil and suffering in the world before my daughter got cancer, the fact that my family and I have to deal with it more directly and personally now doesn’t make any of those other things untrue. I had a high confidence before this that most, if not all, evil and suffering can be answered with a combination of the free-will defense, soul making theodicy, and some skeptical theism.[7] And it’s not like my arguments and reasons for thinking this went away when I found out Eden has cancer. That didn’t change the nature of reality, even though it was in many other senses earthshattering.

If your beliefs cannot survive contact with reality, even the worst of reality, then either there is something wrong with your beliefs or with you. So when reality shatters your worldview figure out if you held wrong beliefs or if you lack the virtue and discipline needed to endure.[8] It’s pretty likely one of the two.

But there is one point where contemporary Christian philosophy is very bad at dealing with suffering, and that’s the how/why distinction. Nearly all of the theodicies and other explanations of evil and suffering offered by contemporary philosophers address the how question, but what we all really want to know is why. Why is this particular suffering happening to me or my family and what good can or will come from it? Even Nietzsche said that he who has a why can survive almost any how.[9] And unfortunately a lot of my fellow philosophers seem to mix and conflate these two. Here’s what I mean.

How questions are questions of process while why questions are questions of purpose. When I pick up a glass to take a drink, we can talk about how that process works. There are signals my brain sends to my muscles to make my arm move. My muscles contract to move my arm. My individual cells are involved in the process and so on. This the how. The why is that I was thirsty. These are Aristotle’s efficient and final/teleological causes. The vast vast majority of theodicies and explanations for evil and suffering answer the how or efficient question, not the why/final question. Even the three I listed above are not really answering why but how.[10]

None of them can tell you why this particular suffering is happening to you or what good, if any, will come from it. What we really all want to know when we are suffering is why. What is the point of all this? We want to know that it’s not all pointless and meaningless. We want to know that suffering isn’t pointless even when it is SPS. But knowing the why of suffering is at best very difficult.[11] Good theodicies do point to the large cosmic metaphysical purposes of all suffering, but not the why of your particular suffering.[12] It seems quite clear to me that in order to have grace, there must be sin, and if there is sin, there will be suffering and evil. But that’s not the question I want answered. I want to know why my three-year-old daughter has inoperable and incurable cancer.

Understanding the metaphysical reality that grace cannot exist without sin doesn’t really answer that question. Most of the time we probably will never know what the purpose of our suffering is. This is one of the points of Job that many of us miss.

We as the reader are told most of, if not the entire, reason why Job suffers, but Job never knows. Job demands answers to why from God, and what he’s asking seems to be the very good philosophical questions that I also want answers to. He’s basically saying, “This is unjust and I want to know why!” This is very reasonable and the question not just philosophers, but most people have been asking for as long as there have been people. By all reasonable appearances, Job has been treated quite unjustly. But then God shows up, and He doesn’t answer Job’s seemingly very legitimate questions. Rather He just tells Job who He is and who Job is. God seems to give Job a skeptical theism style answer saying, “Who do you think you are that you could know such things?” Job accepts this response/rebuke and then God restores his wealth, health, and gives him new children. We as the reader are aware of the cosmic nature of what happened, but Job isn’t. He doesn’t get to know why.

Unfortunately the majority of the philosophers I’ve read on the problem of evil (POE) and suffering push the why/purpose question out, label it as something like, the emotional problem of evil, dismiss it, and move on. This is disastrous as the real umph of the POE is the why/purpose question. Absent that it’s just another logic problem that only philosophers, logicians, and theologians would care about.

For example, both William Lane Craig and Alvin Plantinga have indicated that a person feeling overwhelming doubts about God and Christianity due to the POE is probably in need of counseling as theodicies have successfully answered the problem.[13] Plantinga wrote; Of course, suffering and misfortune may nonetheless constitute a problem for the theist; but the problem is not that his beliefs are logically or probabilistically incompatible. The theist may find a religious problem in evil; in the presence of his own suffering or that of someone near to him.

He may find it difficult to maintain what he takes to be the proper attitude towards God. Faced with great personal suffering or misfortune, he may be tempted to rebel against God, to shake his fist in God’s face, or even to give up belief in God altogether. But this is a problem of different dimension. Such a problem calls, not for philosophical enlightenment, but for pastoral care.[14]

Craig has argued that, “[D]espite the undeniable emotional impact of the problem of suffering, I am persuaded that as a strictly rational, intellectual problem, the problem of suffering does not constitute a disproof of the existence of God. It will be therefore helpful if we distinguish between the intellectual problem of suffering and emotional problem of suffering.”[15] In his debate with Alex Rosenberg, Craig went as far as saying, “If his only obstacle is the logical problem of evil then that obstacle has now been removed and Dr. Rosenberg should find himself free to embrace joyfully the existence of God as the answer to these deep questions.” [16]

What Craig and Plantinga have done is bracket out the truly difficult parts of the POE and only solve the logic problem.[17] The POE doesn’t have compelling force because it is a logic problem. It has compelling force because it is a logical problem (assuming it is not solved) with great existential, moral, and emotional significance. No one (that I’m aware of) has severe and crippling doubts about Christianity because they think modal axiom S5 is invalid, therefore ontological arguments (OAs) don’t work, and therefore God cannot exist. There are people who argue against OAs (both theists and atheists), but there is very little existential and emotional force behind arguing about S5 as it is a pure logic puzzle (that may have existential implications). Saying that I can logically prove that a good God who is all-powerful simply must allow some evil if He wants to create truly free creatures and obtain other overriding goods like Grace works, but it’s hard to see how it would help a person who is suffering with a terminal disease, or who has lost a spouse in an accident, or is stuck living an active warzone, or has a child with terminal cancer, etc. To bracket off the experiential and emotional aspect of the problem of evil is to ignore the actual force of the problem.

But I thought my fellow philosophers had mucked up this how and why distinction long before my daughter had cancer. So this is nothing new. I’m just more convinced of it now.

The point is that it will typically be the case that we simply do not and cannot know why we suffer. There are some exceptions of course. Joseph’s story in Genesis is a great example and I’m sure we can all point to things in our lives where we can infer (almost always after the fact) the why of the evil or suffering. For example, shortly before Eden was diagnosed the University I was teaching at canceled the course I was going to teach. There was an administrative snafu that led to the class cancelation (which may or may not have been malicious) and the department head and I both worked hard to try and make the class happen anyway, but it didn’t work out. Then the University cut all the adjuncts from that department. This was very frustrating and disappointing, and I joked that with how little they were paying me it may have cost more money to cut me than to keep me. But a month or two later we found out about Eden’s cancer, and I realized the extreme amount of time it was going to take to care for her.

Later it occurred to me why this probably happened. Time is a finite resource, and it would have been nearly impossible for me to both teach and care for Eden. So there are some cases where we can reasonably infer what the purpose probably was, but usually only after the fact.

But the problem stands. If you’ve been alive for a significant amount of time, then you’ve experienced some SPS. You want to know why and you don’t. The best you can do is offer up some speculations that may or may not be true. If by some miracle this has not happened to you yet, get ready. It’s coming.

So what can we do? That’s what I’ll explore in the next two parts of this series.

NOTES:

[1] Nietzsche probably didn’t say this exactly. He wrote in German, and this is one of the translations of his text, and this is the translation that best expresses the sentiment I’m aiming for here.

[2] At the least, this is a great candidate for that category.

[3] There are numerous examples of suffering that result in good and so is at least potentially justified. When parents work at horrible and demeaning jobs to provide for their children, that is suffering, but the good of providing for their children justifies the suffering, at least it potentially does. Further it’s quite virtuous for parents to sacrifice for their children and that is another good that comes. SPS is a case where any good that comes from the suffering is not immediately apparent or where such good seems to be much lesser than the evil of the suffering.

[4] There are exceptions, but I’ve quite committed to the idea that good philosophy will have a practical effect on your life (directly or indirectly) and if it doesn’t, it’s probably just bad philosophy akin the medieval arguments about how many angels can fit on the head of a pin. Since there are exceptions, this is more of a guideline than a strict rule, but come on. You’ve been studying high level philosophy/theology for 10, 20, or 30 years, you experience a personal tragedy and suddenly all that study is unhelpful or worthless? That’s a strong indication there was something very wrong with what you were studying. At the least you’ve probably been wasting your time. If your philosophy cannot survive contact with the real world, it’s probably just bad philosophy that you should throw away.

[5] There are plenty of other philosophers who have much more expertise on this subject than I do. I mean that I’m confident I’ve looked into this much more than the average person has. I experienced an existential crisis in my early 20s and that forced me to start looking into and thinking about these things. Without that experience it’s doubtful that I would even be doing philosophy today.

[6] Going through and defending all those reasons would take something like a 500+ page book. Perhaps I’ll have the time to write that one day when all this is over, but I don’t now.

[7] Loosely speaking the free-will defense is the idea that if God wants to us to have a genuine freedom to choose good or ill, then eventually at least some people are going to chose ill, and thus if we are really free then it simply is impossible for all evil and suffering to be avoided. It’s a defense rather than a full theodicy as it typically isn’t arguing that things must be this way, simply that it’s possible that things be this way and thus we cannot say that both the existence of God and the existence of evil are true contraries. It’s possible that they can go together. The free-will defense has been so successful that for the most part very few, or perhaps no one, defends the logical problem of evil anymore.

The soul making theodicy is the idea that God wants us to be virtuous people and the best, and perhaps only, way to make people virtuous is for us to endure suffering. Just as your body will not grow stronger without exercise so your soul will not grow stronger without struggle and/or suffering.

Skeptical theism is the very common-sense idea that any God worth being called God will have ideas, conceptions, and plans that are beyond the scope of human comprehension. Hence when something bad happens we simply are not in a good epistemic position to say that God could not have good reasons to allow or cause that bad thing to happen.There are reasonable objections to all three of these ideas as none of them answer every instance of evil and suffering; however, there also is a good point behind all of them and I think if we take them all together we have at least a possible answer for nearly every instance of evil and suffering.

[8] While I do have emotional sympathy for them, I have no intellectual sympathy for I people who say things like, “I believed in God until my grandpa died.” Were you just unaware of the fact that people die before it visited your own family? This is either a sign of bad/lazy thinking, or it is masking something else.

[9] Twilight of the Idols.

[10] Skeptical theism may give you good reasons for thinking that you often cannot know why.

[11] How questions are certainly far from useless. Asking how the human body works has allowed the disciple of medicine to flourish and this has prevented and alleviated quite a lot of suffering. There are many other easy examples where asking how is a good and useful thing . . . but it’s not really what we want when it comes to suffering.

[12] It’s a best very difficult to see how there can be grace without some sin. Sin consequently seems to require that there be evil and suffering so if we want grace, which is quite possibly the greatest thing that exists other than God, we need there to be evil and suffering. This basic idea is expressed quite well in the Fee Will Defense and Felix Copula (Fortunate Fall). But this doesn’t tell you why you are suffering, and that’s where the meat of the issue is. The grand metaphysical purpose of suffering is all good and fine, but we all want to know why we are suffering in this particular way now. And none of these theodicies offer much help there.

[13] Craig and Plantinga are good foils here as they are both good philosophers as well as exceptionally influential. C. S. Lewis also made similar comments about bracketing out the emotional problem of evil. And in general, if Craig, Plantinga, and Lewis all agree on something, that’s probably a strong and reasonable position. Just not in this case.

[14] Alvin Plantinga, God, Freedom, and Evil (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 63-64.

[15] William Lane Craig and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, God? A Debate Between a Christian and an Atheist, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 112.

[16] Craig, William Lane, and Alex Rosenberg, "Is Faith in God Reasonable?," (Purdue University, February 2013), Transcript at reasonablefaith.org, https://www.reasonablefaith.org/media/debates/is-faith-in-god-reasonable .

[17] This is not to pick on Craig and Plantinga. You’ll probably get much the same response from most Christian philosophers . . . at least the ones who are theologically conservative. The liberal ones tend to have other, much worse, answers.