The world we inhabit is evil and cruel, filled with suffering and despair. Some find unjust suffering a philosophical argument against the very existence of God. Many refuse to trust or believe in any god who allows history and life to proceed as it has. Philosopher J.L. Mackie postulated that a good and powerful God would not allow pointless evil, therefore, the traditional Biblical God could not exist.

Of course, since we’re speaking of logic here, I must point out that just because some kinds of suffering seem pointless to me doesn’t mean that all suffering is pointless or that all people will view it as pointless. It would be fallacious to assert that because I view something as pointless it is therefore pointless. I think carnival rides are pointless. My 9-year-old son and 45-year-old husband would disagree. Just because you can’t  imagine a good reason why God might allow something to happen doesn’t mean there can’t be one. The assumption that good reasons for evil are something we can easily recognize is a faith assumption. The existence of evil is not an argument against God’s existence.

CS Lewis originally rejected the idea of God because of the cruelty of life. Then he came to realize that evil was even more problematic for the atheist. Suffering provided a better argument for God’s existence than against it. He honestly asked himself where he got the idea of “just” and “unjust”. What in the world was he using for a frame of reference in a cruel universe? Was it merely a private idea, something to do with his inner fantasies? He rejected that for an option. We are told people ought not to suffer, die, be mistreated, go hungry, but evolution requires those very inequalities in order to work. On what basis, then, does the atheist judge the natural world as horribly wrong? Without God, there is not objective standard to make such a judgment. The secular way of looking at the world provides no moral framework whatsoever. Wickedness cannot be ascribed in a natural system. The problem of evil and suffering are problems for everyone, whether we are believers or nonbelievers. Abandoning a belief in God does not somehow make the problem of evil easier to handle.

God, through Jesus, experienced the greatest depth of pain and suffering. Christianity does not claim that belief in God will avoid pain. It claims that God will provide great resources to face suffering with hope and courage rather than bitterness and despair.  We see in the cross Jesus facing overwhelming pain and separation from the Godhead. It is important to remember that Jesus is God, Who chose to step down into human existence as one of us. I don’t think we humans can fully appreciate what that meant to Him. The transcendent sinless God chose to become a man and to bear the sins of His fellow human beings. In doing so, He faced the separation from God that every soul who labors under sin must face. Clearly, He accepted this suffering because He loves us. God loves us enough to die a horrible death separated from Himself on our behalf. We cannot say that He allows suffering because He does not care for us. He proved His care while on the cross when He took on our suffering for us.

Please remember, though, that Christianity teaches that the suffering of this world is a temporary condition. In heaven, there will be no pain – not even the memory of pain. The pathway to that painfree future is the incarnation and suffering of God. The doctrine of the resurrection instills Christians with a powerful hope for it promises that we will get the life we most long for and it will be so much better than anything we can even imagine!

Suffering is a pathway to peace and strength. When God finally vanquished pain and evil, it will be so utterly defeated that we will not even remember its existence. The Christian’s future life is one of infinite joy in which we will not even have the memory of suffering.

Please let’s be honest. There are significant, irreconcilable differences between the major faiths, whether we are discussing Christianity, Judaism or Islam. A Christian pastor, a Jewish rabbi and a Muslim iman would likely all agree with the following statement: “If Christians are right about Jesus being God, then Muslims and Jews fail in a serious way to love God as God really is, but if Muslims and Jew are right that Jesus is not God, but rather a teacher or prophet, then Christians fail in a serious way to love God as God really is.” The bottom line?  We cannot all be equally right about the nature of God!

This would cause serious disturbance among my leftist coworkers. I’ve heard that all that really matters is that we believe in God and that we are loving toward others. To insist that one faith has a better grasp of the truth than others is intolerant. Cue the frowns and concerned looks! I remember a college professor of mine once saying that a primary barrier to world peace is the exclusive claims to superiority by the major traditional religions. And, you know, what? He’s probably right!

Each religion informs its followers that they have “the truth”, which naturally makes them feel superior to those of differing beliefs. A religion tells its followers that they are saved and connected to God by devoutly performing “the truth”. This moves them to separate from those who are less devoted and pure in life. It is therefore easy for one religious group to stereotype and caricature other groups. In such a situation, it becomes easy for some groups to marginalize other groups or even oppress and persecute them.

Religion has the power to erode peace on earth. What can we do about that?

One solution would be to outlaw religion. This has, by the way, been tried in some cultures – Communist China, the Khmer Rouge, and Soviet Russia are examples of cultures that have outlawed or tightly controlled religious practice in an effort to stop it from dividing society or eroding the power of the state. Their efforts were not successful, leading to more oppression rather than more peace and harmony. At the time that Communism was postulated there was a widespread belief that the world would become more secularized as we became more “civilized”.  Religion was seen as a crutch we used to help us adapt to our environment that would go away as our skills and knowledge increased. This has not been the case. There has been an explosion of evangelical Christian growth across developing nations in the last half-century and there are signs that evangelical Christianity in the United States is at least holding its own, though church memberships are shifting patterns.

Religion is not just a temporary crutch that helped us to adapt to our environment; it is a permanent and central feature of the human condition. This has been a hard swallow for secular, nonreligious people. Everyone wants to think they’re in the mainstream and not extremists, but robust religious beliefs dominate today’s world. There is no reason to expect that to change!

Outlawing religion hasn’t worked. It’s not going away and its power clearly cannot be diminished by government control. So, maybe education and argument can socially discourage religions that claim to have “the truth” and try to convert others to their beliefs. Surely we can find ways to urge all citizens, whatever their religious beliefs, to admit that each religion or faith is just one of many equally valid paths to God and ways to live in the world. Shouldn’t reason win the day?

I’ve already defined reason in a previous article, but I will expand the idea here.

I often hear all major religions are equally valid and basically teach the same things. It’s such a commonplace assertion that some people assume that anyone believing there are “inferior religions” is a rightwing extremist. You certainly here this notion expressed openly on the political pundit shows that populate the television “news” networks. Not too long ago a friend sent me a magazine article that contended that the doctrinal differences between Judaism, Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, and Hinduism are superficial and insignificant. The article claimed we all believe in the same God, some all-loving Spirit in the universe.

How amorphous and inconsistent!  The article’s insistence that doctrine is unimportant is something totally at odds with all the religions considered. Buddhism does not believe in a personal God at all, while Judaism, Christianity and Islam believe in a God who holds people personally responsible for their beliefs and practices, a God whose attributes cannot be reduced to “love”. The insistence that doctrine doesn’t really matter is in itself a doctrinal belief: it holds a specific view of God, which is touted as superior and more “enlightened” than the believers of most major religions. The proponents of this view do the very thing they forbid in others.

Another reasonable argument is that each religion just sees a portion of the truth, sort of like the blind men describing the elephant. The religions of the world, it is claimed, each have a grasp of part of the truth of spiritual reality, but none can claim a comprehensive vision of the truth.  The problem with this is that the story of the blind men and the elephant is told from the point of view of someone who is not blind and knows that they are only describing part of the elephant. How could you possibly know that no religion can see the whole truth unless you yourself have the superior, comprehensive knowledge of spiritual reality you just claimed none of the religions have? They’ve denied their own premise, thus nullifying it.

One of my favorite points of discussion is that religious beliefs are culturally and historical conditioned and, therefore, cannot be true for other cultures. All moral and spiritual claims are the produce of our particular historical and cultural moment; since no one can judge whether one assertion about spiritual and moral reality is truer than another, no one should claim they can know the “Truth”. Peter L. Berger, in his book A Rumor of Angels explained the sociological principle at work here. People believe what they do largely because they are socially conditioned to do so. Everyone belongs to a community that reinforces certain beliefs and discourages others. Noting this, we assume it is impossible to judge the rightness or wrongness of competing beliefs. However, absolute relativism can only exist if the relativists are held exempt from their belief that no belief can be held as universal. “Relativism relativizes itself,” Berger wrote. Our cultural biases make weighing competing truths more difficult, but no impossible. We cannot avoid weighing religious and spiritual claims by hiding behind the canard that “All truth is relative.” The questions remain. Which affirmations about God, human nature and spiritual reality are true and which are false? Alvin Plantinga once answered the argument that if he’d been born in Morocco he’d have been a Muslim not a Christian. He pointed out that the pluralist (those who hold that there are multiple “truths” would also not be a pluralist if he’d been born in an Islamic country, so did that mean “that his pluralist beliefs had been produced by an unreliable, belief-producing process?” The pluralist, of course, would deny this, but you cannot honestly say that all claims about religion are historically conditions except the one I am making right now. We all make truth claims of some sort. Until we can stop doing that, relativism is a self-defeating premise.

Stymied by such arguments, the discussion often breaks down at this point and those holding specific religion beliefs are then accused of being “arrogant” for insisting their religion is right and trying to convert others to it. Of course, most people don’t hold this view concerning their own beliefs, just the belief of others. Many will say that it is ethnocentric to claim our religion is superior to others, but then turn around and say their secular beliefs re superior to others.  It is a Western idea that no religion can claim a truth foundation. Non-western cultures have no problem with this. Thus, the rejection of exclusivity is an ethnocentric premise.

Skeptics believe that any exclusive claims to superior knowledge of spiritual reality cannot be true, but their assertion is itself a religious notion. It assumes that God is unknowable, or loving, but not wrathful, or an impersonal force rather than a person who speaks in Scripture. All these are unprovable faith assumptions. Their proponents believe they have a superior way to view things, that the world would be a better place if everyone dropped the traditional religious views of God and truth and adopted their “enlightened” view instead. Their view is also a claim to exclusivity. If all such views are to be discouraged, then those holding the pluralist viewpoint are not exempt from their own premise.  It is no narrower to claim that one religion is right than to claim that one way to think about all religious beliefs (that all are equal) is right. We are all exclusive in our beliefs about religion; we just make different exclusive claims.

This inevitably leads to the charge that we should keep our religious beliefs “private”. That word private takes on different meanings, but often it is urged that we keep our religious beliefs out of the “public square”. It is argued that we may not argue for a moral position unless it has a secular, nonreligious grounding. This is the argument of Peter Singer and Daniel Dennett, who insist that religious faith must remain a strictly private affair, never brought into a discussion of public policy. Of course, this brings up charges of discrimination by religious believers, but these secularists insist that religion is divisive and controversial while public policy should be secular and universal. We should keep our religious beliefs to ourselves and unite around policies that “work best” for most people.

How does one leave religious belief out of any discussion of moral reasoning? Religious belief is a set of beliefs that explain what life is all about, who we are, and the most important things that human beings should spend their time doing. Even secularism fits this description. It is a worldview or narrative identity that makes certain faith-assumptions about the nature of the world. Some view of the world and human nature informs everyone’s life. Pragmatists say we should leave our deeper worldviews behind and find consensus in “what works”, but our view of what works is determined by what we think people are for. Even the most secular pragmatist holds his own deeply held beliefs about what it means to be human.

It is impossible not to bring your most deeply held convictions to the public square. They are a part of us that cannot be laid aside for the “good of society” because they are what inform our personal definition what is good for society. Honest thinkers cannot deny that fact.

I actually sympathize with those who believe that religion is a major barrier to peace in our world. Exclusivity claims have caused much strife in the past and have the potential to cause more in the future. However, within robust, orthodox Christianity, there are rich resources that can make Christians agents for peace on earth because Christianity holds remarkable power to explain and remove the divisive tendencies within the human heart. Christianity provides a firm basis for respecting people of other faiths (Matthew 5:16; 1Peter 2:12). Jesus assumed some overlap between Christian values and those of other cultures. All human beings are made in the image of God, capable of goodness and wisdom, so Christians are not surprised to find that there are nonbelievers who are much nicer and wiser than we are. We recognize we are not accepted by God because of our moral performance, wisdom of virtue, but because of Christ’s work on our behalf. More religions and philosophies ascribe one’s spiritual status to one’s religious attainments, which naturally leads to feelings of superiority. The Christian gospel, however, should not have effect. One of the paradoxes of history is the relationship of the beliefs and practices of the early Christians compared to those of the cultures around them. The Greco-Roman world’s religious views were open and seemingly tolerant – everyone his or her own god – but the practices of the culture were quite brutal. The Greco-Roman world was highly stratified economically, with great discrepancy between rich and poor. Conversely, Christians insisted that there was only one true God, Jesus Christ, an exclusive and seemingly intolerant claim. Their lives and practices were remarkably welcoming to those that the greater culture marginalized. Early Christianity mixed people from different races and classes in ways that seemed scandalous to those around them. Rather than despising the poor as their neighbors did, Christians gave to the poor both inside and outside of their own community. During the terrible urban plagues of the first two centuries, Christians cared for all the sick and dying in Rome, often at the cost of their own lives.

Why would such an exclusive belief system lead to behavior that was so open to others? The Christian belief system holds that practicing sacrificial service, generosity and peace-making are the strong possible resource. Our Savior died for the sins of His enemies, praying for their forgiveness as they were killing Him. How could that lead to anything other than a radically different way of dealing with those who are different from us. Early Christians could not act in violence and oppression toward their opponents because Jesus had not acted in those ways.

Yes, there have been Christians who have violated Jesus’ basic teachings, sometimes in His name, but who can deny that the force of Christianity’s most fundamental beliefs can be a powerful impetus for peace-making in our troubled world. As it once was, so it can be today.