CarlZunker.com

We can spend a great deal of time and energy being angry at God for things we never once thanked Him for. That is not a comfortable thing to admit, but I suspect it is true for many believers and skeptics alike. We keep a mental ledger of everything that went wrong in our lives. When suffering appears on that ledger we either blame it on God or use it as evidence that He does not exist. What we rarely do is audit the other side of the account.

A few years ago I read something that stayed with me. A scientist noted that when a massive tsunami struck South America, the shift of water and earth slightly increased the Earth’s rotation speed. The change was small, but measurable, and it almost perfectly offset the slowing effect caused by the construction of the world’s largest dam in China.

I am not a scientist, and I am not qualified to determine whether that kind of balance is coincidence or design. What struck me was the way we talk about it. No one blamed God for the dam.

There is a predictable pattern that appears whenever people begin asking questions about God. Something terrible happens, like a natural disaster devastating a region, or a disease spreads and takes lives. Or something closer to home, like a friend’s child dying in a way that feels unbearably unfair. Or God forbid, your own child. These events are tragic and painful, and the closer they are to you, the more painful they are. Proximity is a pain multiplier. A question comes that deserves to be taken seriously: how could a good God allow something like this?

It is a fair question, the Bible tells us so. Faith doesn’t silence questions. In fact, it points our questions towards God, not away from him. Lamentations 2:20 asks “Look, O Lord and consider: Whom have you ever treated like this?” I have asked questions about justice and mercy myself. I have asked in hospital waiting rooms and at gravesides. I have asked in the middle of the night when pain refuses to let a body rest. I am not dismissing the question.

What I want to ask is a different one.

When the rotation corrected, who received the credit? When cancer goes into remission, when a storm turns away from a coastline, or when an unexpected meeting changes the direction of a life, what explanation do we reach for in those moments?

If the answer is coincidence, statistics, luck, or if the moment passed without any reflection at all, then it is worth noticing something about the way we are thinking. That approach is not neutral. It is selectively skeptical. We apply strict scrutiny to the possibility that God might be responsible for something good, while applying almost none to the assumption that everything good must have happened by chance.

I say this carefully because I once lived inside that pattern myself. For much of my adult life I was what people sometimes call a cultural Christian, or a Christian in name only. I had absorbed enough of the Christian framework to feel uneasy when I moved away from it, but not enough conviction to let it shape the way I lived.

I also had a list of objections that seemed reasonable. I had questions about suffering. I had questions about the relationship between science and faith. I had questions about the long and complicated history of religious institutions behaving badly. Those questions were enough for me to accept the surrounding cultural narrative and move on with my life.

Part of my questioning, or ignoring, posture came from simple exhaustion. I was building a career, raising a family, and learning how to live inside a body that often reminded me of its limits. I did not feel as though I had the energy to dismantle and rebuild my worldview.

If I am being honest, another part of my reluctance to dig deeper came from fear. I was not afraid that I would find nothing if I started asking harder questions. I was afraid that I might find something. I was afraid the answer might demand more from me than I was prepared to give.

That kind of fear does not get talked about very often, but it shapes more decisions than we would like to admit.

There is a philosopher named Thomas Nagel who once admitted something unusual for a committed atheist. He suggested that the standard secular explanation of reality is probably incomplete. His point was not that he had become a believer. It was simply that something appears to be missing from the picture we use to explain the universe. The honest response, in his view, was to admit that the question remains open.

Most people on either side of belief in God do not stay with the question that long. We tend to settle into answers that feel stable and then stop examining them. A skeptic may return to familiar objections such as the problem of evil, the failures of religious institutions, or the perceived conflict between science and faith. A believer may rely on habit, tradition, or community identity without seriously examining what they claim to believe.

Intellectual honesty requires something harder than that. It requires the willingness to understand the strongest version of the argument you disagree with and to ask a question most of us would rather avoid.

What if I am wrong?

There are certainly people who wrestle with these questions and eventually reach a firm conclusion. Many of us, however, remain somewhere in the middle. We live with a faith that has never been fully examined or with a skepticism that has never been pushed very far.

I stayed in that middle ground for a long time, leaning Christian but never quite stepping all the way in.

What eventually pushed me out of it was not a clever argument. It was loss, hurt, and pain. I lost my father. I lost my mother. I lost my brother. My body reminded me daily that it would not cooperate the way I wanted it to. As those (and a thousand other) experiences accumulated, the worldview I had been coasting on began to feel strangely thin. It had language for describing suffering, but it had very little to say about what suffering meant.

That realization forced me to reconsider a central objection to belief in God. The argument is familiar. If God is both powerful and good, then evil should not exist. Evil clearly exists, so the conclusion is that God must not exist.

It is a clean logical argument, and it deserves to be taken seriously.

The Christian response begins with a different understanding of what evil actually is. I cannot argue against every definition of evil, so I have to explain how I view it. Evil is not something God created as if it were a substance placed into the world. It is better understood as the absence of good. The idea is similar to the way darkness functions in a room. Darkness is not an independent thing that can be bottled or stored. Darkness advances and grows when the light is removed. The further away the light, the darker it becomes.

Augustine worked through this idea many centuries ago. His insight was that if God is the foundation of all being, then moving away from God is not simply a moral mistake. It is movement toward the absence of what makes existence good in the first place.

In that framework, hell is not best understood as a place God constructed out of anger. It is the end point of a direction. A life that consistently moves away from the source of goodness eventually arrives at the place where that goodness is no longer present. C. S. Lewis once summarized this idea by saying that the doors of hell are locked from the inside. We are stuck with exactly what we choose.

Free will is often described as the flaw that allowed evil to enter the world. Christianity sees it differently. The possibility of love requires the possibility of refusal. If creatures are capable of real love, they must also be capable of choosing something else.

What continues to intrigue me is the asymmetry in the way we reason about these things. When tragedy appears, we immediately raise questions about God. When goodness appears, we rarely ask where it came from.

That asymmetry reveals something important about how human beings experience the world. When we react to suffering, we do not simply say that something unpleasant happened. We say that something went wrong. We instinctively feel that reality has violated some deeper standard.

That raises an important question. Where does that standard come from?

If human beings are nothing more than the product of evolutionary processes, then moral instincts are simply strategies that helped our ancestors survive. With that logic, there should be no objective sense in which the tsunami was wrong. It simply occurred. The universe has no obligation to arrange itself around human expectations.

Yet we do not experience suffering as a neutral event. We experience it as a violation of how things ought to be. The gap between what is and what should be feels real to us. In many moments it feels more real than anything else.

That reaction itself is worth examining. People do not feel the absence of something that was never meant to exist. Grief assumes that something valuable has been lost. Moral outrage assumes that a standard has been violated. A standard that exists without any source behind it is difficult to explain. Without a foundation it becomes little more than a preference that has been given moral language.

The imbalance in how we notice God is not simply hypocrisy. It reflects something deeper about being human. Human beings appear to carry an awareness that the world is not the way it should be. That awareness feels less like invention and more like memory or realization.

It feels like being homesick.

There is another way we misjudge the balance of our personal ledger. When bad things happen, we assume suffering outweighs goodness in totality. Not just in that moment. That’s because suffering is magnified by both proximity and recency. Even for the most painful injuries or losses, the pain changes in quality, quantity, and frequency over time. I cannot honestly recall what it felt like when my gallbladder tried to kill me, but I know it’s the worst pain I have ever felt. I know all other pain will be compared to it, but I cannot conjure the feeling. I can, however, remember with the best of my human emotions what it felt like to watch my wife walk towards me down the aisle, or what it felt like holding my daughter for the first time. Those memories have gotten sweeter. We put pain in the category where it belongs, beneath our conscious experience. But love can be called to the surface when we try.  The heart may be a liar above all things, but it cannot forget what love felt like. If goodness were truly absent from the world, it would not leave that kind of mark.

A person who has never seen light does not long for it. The fact that we recognize darkness as darkness suggests that somewhere, in some way, we know what light looks like.

Christianity claims that this recognition is not accidental. It is the echo of a relationship that once existed between humanity and its Creator. According to the Gospel of John, the light entered the world and the darkness could not overcome it.

Even in a world where suffering is real, that claim remains at the center of Christian hope.