God's Problem by Bart Ehrman

The one thing that has most troubled Christianity is the problem of suffering. If God is good and wants the best for his people, why is there suffering? If you reap what you sow, why do evil people prosper and good people suffer? As an ancient greek writer once put it, "If God is able to stop evil and not willing, he is malevolent. If he is not able, but willing, then he is impotent. If he is both able and willing, whence cometh evil?"

To explain why suffering exists despite God being (according to Christians) both able and willing to end suffering, Christians have come up with a number of explanations. But all of them left Ehrman cold, and he was brutally aware that none of them really fit, and said rather bad things about God. It's easy to say that there is no problem, but those who say that haven't thought it through. To put it a different way, who do bad things happen to good people.

If God is trying to bring down bad people and winds up hurting his own followers in the process, what does that say about God? Does he not care about those who worship him? And if evil comes only from the action of free will- of bad people doing evil to good ones, what about earthquakes and tidal waves, which cause suffering and which no person can cause? Is God not able to prevent the suffering caused by natural disasters? Then how can one say he's Good? Or all-powerful?

Ehrman looks at all the explanations Christians have devised as to why there is still suffering with an all-powerful and all good God, and why all these explanations ultimately fail to explain the problem of suffering in the Christian worldview. Ultimately, every version of why suffering exists and continues to exist despite the presence and supposedly benevolent mercy of God end up diminishing the Christian God in some way or making a lie out of one of his attributes- Omnipotence, Omniscience or Omnibenevolence. And for those who survive horrible accidents or tragedies and attribute their survival to God- isn't it rather arrogant to assume God only loved you so much to save you and not everyone else? If God is so powerful that he can save people's lives, why not save all of them?

In the end, most Christians, when presented with these contradictions, fall back on the saying, "God works in Mysterious ways", but Ehrman points out that this is the ultimate cop-out, and makes God unknowable, which contradicts yet another Christian belief about God- that we can know what God wants.

Reading this book was interesting. Even back when I was a Christian, I never asked why suffering existed if God was good and could prevent it. This book, had it existed back then, would certainly have put a rather large dent in my faith. And it did in Ehrman's as well, as he is no longer Christian, after many years of being a Theologian, he became an agnostic. He could no longer believe in the Christian God, as well as the attributes normally assigned to him, when faced with the problem of so much suffering in the world that a benevolent Christian God could prevent.

All the "explanations" for why humans suffer despite the presence of a benevolent, loving God supposedly devoted to the welfare of his people, which is so prevalent as to have an entire branch of scholarship known as Theodicy to explain it are explored and dismissed as inadequate. But not dismissed out of hand- Ehrman shows why each explanation lessens the idea of the Christian God in some way and why this should trouble thinking Christians.

I found this book utterly fascinating and urge everyone who questions assumptions, especially the assumptions of faith, should read it as well and try to come to terms with it and why the facile explanations of why bad things happen to good people don't work. This is one that has the potential to be a life-changing (or at least values-changing) book. Highly recommended.