God Shouts in Our Pain:
The Theodicy of C.S. Lewis in The Problem of Pain
Examples of God’s failure to protect humanity are everywhere to be seen. The city of New Orleans, for instance, was recently destroyed by a hurricane. More than a thousand people died; tens of thousands lost all their earthly possessions; and nearly a million were displaced. … But what was God doing while Katrina laid waste to their city? Surely He heard the prayers of those elderly men and women who fled the rising waters for the safety of their attics, only to be slowly drowned there. … It is time we acknowledged how disgraceful it is for the survivors of a catastrophe to believe themselves spared by a loving God, while this same God drowned infants in their cribs. Once you stop swaddling the reality of the world’s suffering in religious fantasies, you will feel in your bones just how precious life is.
- Sam Harris
Probably the most common objection raised against Christianity is how a loving God could allow evil and suffering. If Christians are truly to “be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have,” surely they must expect this question to arise and be equipped with a Biblical and well-reasoned response.
The alleged problem of evil comes in two forms. The first, the “logical” problem, claims that there is a logical incompatibility between evil and the Christian God. 18th century philosopher David Hume attributed this version of the problem to Epicurus, the 3rd century B.C. father of hedonistic ethics. “Epicurus's old questions are yet unanswered. Is [God] willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?”
Apologists respond to the logical problem by presenting a “defense.” To refute the alleged logical inconsistency, a Christian only needs to demonstrate some possible way in which a loving God could be compatible with the existence of evil. The explanation does not necessarily need to be true. As long as it is at least possible, there is no per se logical contradiction. For example, humans (unlike God) are not capable of foreseeing the consequences of each and every act in the world. It is possible that by permitting one piece of suffering God is actually preventing an even larger evil from occurring. A mere logical possibility is not satisfactory for most skeptics, however, so they move on to the second form.
The second form of the problem of evil is the “evidential” or “inductive” version. As atheist John W. Loftus explains,
Here the challenge of the skeptics is that theism is not logically inconsistent, but rather it is implausible. That is, given the quantity of evil in our world, it is improbable that a good, all-powerful God exists. Additionally, given the fact that there is pointless or meaningless evil in our world, and there are compelling reasons to think there is, then it’s unlikely that a good, all-powerful God exists.
When responding to this type of objection, it is not sufficient to simply show some possible logical consistency between God and evil. Instead, the Christian must offer good reasons to believe that their co-existence is probable. Apologists must make the existence of evil more palatable under a theistic worldview. This type of response is called a “theodicy.”
Philosopher Gottfried Leibniz first coined the term “theodicy” in 1709. While Leibniz provided his own response to the problem of evil, over the years Christians have approached the question from many different perspectives. Three of the most popular types are the free will, natural law and soul-making theodicies.
Free Will Theodicy
There are many variations of the free will theodicy. One popular formulation focuses on love. The average person on the street likely believes love to be the supreme ethic. Common parlance is filled with sayings that praise love’s virtue: “Love is a many-splendored thing,” “Love means never having to say you are sorry,” “’Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.”
The free will theodicy, however, points out that love is impossible without free will. Love, by definition, must be freely offered. In order for it to have meaning a person must freely choose to either give love or withhold it. However, the freedom to choose love and goodness also includes the freedom to choose hate and evil. If the will is coerced into one option then there is no free choice. A world that contains love must also include the possibility of evil.
Free will theodicies tend to find inherent value in freedom, arguing that to remove free choice would be an even greater evil than allowing the suffering it makes possible. Similar reasoning can apply to natural evils. If they are the result of demonic activity, then “preventing natural evil entails eliminating the free will of Satan and his cohorts.”
Natural Law Theodicy
The natural law theodicy claims that the need for uniform laws in the universe also entails the possibility of evil. “If there is structure and meaning, there must also be the possibility of injury and deceit.”
Suppose a person is standing on the edge of a dangerously tall precipice. Past observations demonstrate that gravity propels objects downward. Therefore, this individual keeps a safe distance from the edge in order to avoid serious injury or death. But imagine a universe in which gravity was not constant. Sometimes objects fall down, other times they fly up and on still other occasions they do not move at all. In that universe, perhaps this person has never seen an object fall when it passes the edge of a cliff and has no qualms about stepping off into space. But in utter shock, upon taking that step the person plummets to the bottom and is seriously injured.
Uniform laws of nature make it possible to predict what actions in life are harmful and how to avoid those dangers. “[W]ithout a great deal of order and regularity in nature we could not predict the effects of our choices, even in the slightest.” But the ability to predict the result of uniform laws also includes the ability to use those laws to harm others. A person who knows to avoid cliff edges for fear of falling also knows that if others are pushed off the edge then they will fall to their unwitting deaths. God could suspend the operation of these laws whenever evil or pain is about to occur, but that would remove the very predictability that helps to avoid harm in the first place. God would end up intervening in almost every action as people literally would have no way of knowing what was good for them.
Soul-Making Theodicy
A simple summary of the soul-making theodicy is found in the expression “no pain, no gain.” Some of the most highly valued virtues require suffering. For example, courage cannot exist without danger. Perseverance requires obstacles to be overcome. There can be no compassion unless there are people in need. “[V]irtually every valuable lesson you’ve ever learned resulted from some hardship in your life.”
God wants children who exhibit positive virtues. Developing these traits prepares them for eternity with him. Therefore, at least some suffering serves to make humans into better people. “[W]e learn from the mistakes we make and the suffering they bring. The universe is a soul-making machine, and part of that process is learning, maturing, and growing through difficult and challenging and painful experiences. The point of our lives in this world isn’t comfort, but training and preparation for eternity.”
Christian father Irenaeus advanced this theodicy as early as the late second century. In fact, its roots go even further back into the first century scriptures themselves. The apostle Peter told Christians that sufferings came to them “so that your faith—of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire—may be proved genuine and may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed.” Paul instructed the church in Rome, “suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.” Christ himself is said to have “learned obedience from what he suffered.” This may not explain all suffering, but it is hard to deny that many of the most valuable lessons in life are learned through pain.
C.S. Lewis’ Theodicy in The Problem of Pain
C.S. Lewis, possibly the most well known Christian apologist of the 20th century, struggled with the existence of pain prior to his conversion. He admitted that as an atheist, “My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust.” “If God were good, He would wish to make His creatures perfectly happy, and if God were almighty He would be able to do what He wished. But the creatures are not happy. Therefore, God lacks either goodness, or power, or both.”
In his book The Problem of Pain, Lewis responds to this problem with a theodicy based in free will but which incorporates natural law and soul-making elements. Starting from the postulate that we enjoy true free will, Lewis sets out to prove “that not even Omnipotence could create a society of free souls without at the same time creating a relatively independent and ‘inexorable’ Nature.” This Nature in turn inevitably leads to pain and suffering. But because people have abused their freedom, God also allows some pain so that they will recognize their need for him.
Understanding the interrelationship between free will, natural law and soul-making hinges on first grasping the parameters of true freedom. According to Lewis, “the freedom of a creature must mean freedom to choose; and choice implies the existence of things to choose between.” But the ability to have true options has profound implications upon the environment.
For two free souls to meet there must be some external environment in which the meeting takes place. For them to be truly free, that environment must be fixed and neutral. “If a ‘world’ or material system had only a single inhabitant it might conform at every moment to his wishes – ‘trees for his sake would crowd into a shade’. But if you were introduced into a world which thus varied at my every whim, you would be quite unable to act in it and would thus lose the exercise of your free will.” In order for free will to be possible, therefore, the environment must be neutral, not favoring the whims of any one individual. There must be uniform laws that apply equally to everyone.
The predictability afforded by a uniform nature “furnishes occasion for all those acts of courtesy, respect, and unselfishness by which love and good humour and modesty express themselves. But it certainly leaves the way open to a great evil, that of competition and hostility. And if souls are free, they cannot be prevented from dealing with the problem by competition instead of courtesy. And once they have advanced to actual hostility, they can then exploit the fixed nature of matter to hurt one another.”
If a person knows how to send a lead projectile into another body, it is only a matter of time before someone uses that knowledge to commit murder. Of course, God in his omnipotence has the power to intervene whenever someone seeks to use freedom for evil ends “so that a wooden beam became soft as grass when it was used as a weapon, and the air refused to obey me if I attempted to set up in it the sound-waves that carry lies or insults.” But by no means would this be a “free” world. People would only be free to do whatever actions God willed for them to perform. But in that case they are always doing God’s will, not their own. Without wills of their own, they are not truly free beings.
According to Lewis, four-fifths of the pain and suffering in the world can be explained by the human abuse of free will. Lewis’ explanation for the remaining pain, though, also finds its foundation in freedom. God is love. God loves his people and wants them to be capable of love as well, but love is only possible with free will. It must be freely given. Unfortunately, humankind has abused the gift of free will and has now become “a horror to God and to himself and a creature ill adapted to the universe not because God made him so but because he has made himself so by the abuse of his free will.” God could interfere with our free decisions, but unless he removes the result of every sin, eventually humanity will end up in the same predicament in which it currently find itself. Removing every sin, though, leads to “a world in which nothing important ever depended on human choice, and in which choice itself would soon cease from the certainty that one of the apparent alternatives before you would lead to no results and was therefore not really an alternative.”
Understanding the full implications of God’s love (and how it bears on Lewis’ theodicy) requires an examination of what true love means. “Love” is not synonymous with “kindness.” “Kindness, merely as such, cares not whether its object becomes good or bad, provided only that it escapes suffering ... It is for people whom we care nothing about that we demand happiness on any terms: with our friends, our lovers, our children, we are exacting and would rather see them suffer much than be happy in contemptible and estranging modes.” Thus, if God is love, he will permit suffering in order to foster growth and the ultimate well being of his creatures. “His love must, in the nature of things, be impeded and repelled by certain stains in our present character, and because He already loves us He must labour to make us lovable.”
People often believe that they know what will make them happy, but what individuals believe will bring happiness is not God’s chief end any more than the candy so earnestly desired by a child would be the chief end of a parent. Sometimes good parents may permit the child the indulgence, but good parenting also requires them to sometimes say “no.” This is true even in times when the child does not understand their reasons. God knows that the trivial pursuits people seek will never bring true happiness. When “we are such as He can love without impediment, we shall in fact be happy.”
At this point, however, free will causes additional problems. In order to bring about this true happiness, people must completely surrender their fallen selves to God. But humans are more than simply imperfect beings who require repair. Their will is in active rebellion. To “render back the will which we have so long claimed for our own, is in itself, wherever and however it is done, a grievous pain … [T]o surrender a self-will inflamed and swollen with years of usurpation is a kind of death.”
Lewis identifies three ways in which God uses pain to teach people to surrender their wills. First, humans will not even consider surrendering so long as they believe all is well with their lives. “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” Lewis acknowledges that this may lead to “final and unrepented rebellion,” but it may also be the only means to get someone’s attention.
Second, pain “shatters the illusion that what we have, whether good or bad in itself, is our own and enough for us.” People naively believe they can find happiness in all sorts of earthly things, yet they are always left disappointed. Only by removing these false sources of happiness can God teach that true happiness lies only in him.
Third, when people do something God wants them to do, but for their own reasons, it is mere happenstance that their will coincides with his. It is only possible to know that the will is fully surrendered to God if an act is painful but is performed anyway because it is God’s will. “The full acting out of the self surrender to God therefore demands pain: this action, to be perfect, must be done from the pure will to obey, in the absence, or in the teeth, of inclination.”
Once the will is fully surrendered to God, pain still serves the function of helping develop virtues such as fortitude and courage. Christ clearly wants his people to develop these virtues. The predictability afforded by the uniform laws of nature makes this moral growth possible. In order to learn which actions are moral or immoral, bad acts must uniformly lead to bad results and good actions must uniformly lead to good results. It would be impossible to learn that murder is wrong if sometimes a bullet killed but other times it gave pleasure.
Therefore, starting from the premise of free will, Lewis argues that four-fifths of the suffering in the world is the result of humanity’s abuse of its freedom while the remaining pain is God’s effort to transform people into lovable creatures who will surrender their fallen wills to him and develop virtue.
Evaluating Lewis’ Theodicy
Lewis admirably demonstrates the interrelationship between the free will, natural law and soul-making theodicies. Free will requires the existence of natural law and the abuse of that freedom necessitates a type of soul-making. However, Lewis' theodicy is open to several criticisms.
First, in The Problem of Pain Lewis never defends his opening premise that people are free creatures. His entire argument hinges on the assumption of the reality of free will, but he never defends his philosophy against the claims of determinism. Despite his affection for Kant, Lewis also does not cite Kant’s argument that even though freedom is an antinomy of pure reason its credentials can be derived through pure practical reason as an outworking of the moral law.
Even though Lewis did not support the existence of free will in The Problem of Pain, he has elsewhere acknowledged the complexity of the question.
The difference between Freedom and Necessity is fairly clear on the bodily level: we know the difference between making our teeth chatter on purpose and just finding them chattering with cold. It begins to be less clear when we talk of human love (leaving out the erotic kind). ‘Do I like him because I choose or because I must?’ … When we carry it up to relations between God and Man, has the distinction perhaps become nonsensical? After all, when we are most free, it is only with a freedom God has given us: and when our will is most influenced by Grace, it is still our will.
Despite this complexity, though, in his book Miracles Lewis argued that determinism is irrational. If all things were caused by prior influences, then this would apply to mental processes as well. The determinist’s own belief that all things are determined would itself be pre-determined. But by presenting an argument for determinism, the determinist implies that non-determinists should abandon their contrary opinion. This assumes that non-determinists have the ability to change their minds; i.e., their opinions are subject to their will, not determined by pre-existing causes.
Lewis’ starting assumption is a necessary presupposition. While determinism may be advocated, it cannot simultaneously be affirmed to be true. Just as someone who utters the phrase “I cannot speak a word of English” has contradicted the statement in the very act of making it, the statement “determinism should be accepted as true” is similarly unaffirmable. Saying that determinism “should” be accepted is implying that the listener has the ability to do so. But this is precisely what determinism denies. It appears that Lewis is on solid ground in basing his theodicy on the premise that humanity enjoys free will.
Demonstrating that people have free will however is different than showing that God should grant free will. This distinction opens up another potential criticism of Lewis. He argues that God permits pain in order to teach virtues. Uniform laws allow people to predict the outcome of their actions. They then use their free will to choose the morally desirable result. Over time, they develop moral habits and develop a virtuous character.
But this reasoning makes freedom only a means to an end. If the end were unnecessary there would be no purpose for the means. According to Lewis, people must learn to choose virtuous behavior because they are fallen. But prior to the Fall Adam and Eve were not fallen. Yet God still gave them free will. Adam freely chose names for the animals. Adam and Eve both freely chose to eat the forbidden fruit. If freedom is nothing more than a means to the end of training our fallen will then God would have had no reason to grant freedom to Adam and Eve.
The resolution to this dilemma lies in the acknowledgement that freedom itself has inherent value. It may also serve as a means to an end, but freedom is a desirable end regardless of whether it helps accomplish any ends other than itself. If free will has value then some degree of pain will be acceptable in order to preserve that value. Lewis’ theodicy fails to recognize the inherent value of freedom.
Finally, Lewis may be accused of overlooking some types of pain. For example, on January 12, 2010, a 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck Haiti killing hundreds of thousands of people. Clearly their suffering was not the result of human abuses of free will, nor could it help them learn to surrender their will once they were dead. Lewis’ theodicy appears, at first glance, to overlook this apparently meaningless suffering.
Ironically, the resolution to this problem may lie in another apparent oversight: Lewis’ omission of any reference to the suffering Christ experienced on the cross. Believers clearly can find some solace during their pain in the knowledge that Jesus has “been there.” But the cross provides more than mere comfort. It can also build upon Lewis’ theodicy. Jesus died for the benefit of humanity even though he did nothing to warrant his suffering. He had already perfectly surrendered his will to God, yet he still suffered so that others could learn to surrender theirs. The seemingly meaningless deaths of those people in Haiti may not have been meaningless after all. People do not always need to be the direct recipient of suffering in order to feel its impact. Witnessed suffering may rouse the conscience as much as that which is suffered personally. Tragedies like Haiti may be the direct result of the Fall, but perhaps God permits them in his infinite wisdom because of the souls they will ultimately save.
Conclusion
In responding to the argument from suffering that plagued him in his youth, C.S. Lewis offers a theodicy that begins with free will but incorporates natural law and soul-making elements. The Problem of Pain may not present a comprehensive theodicy, but many of its holes are plugged in Lewis’ other works or through extrapolation from his express arguments.