WHY DOESN’T GOD DO SOMETHING ABOUT THAT?
How often do you hear someone say ‘Why doesn’t God do something about that?’ Or, for that matter, how often do you think that yourself?
That is a question that has been asked since time immemorial. It hangs in the air unanswered: a plea, an accusation, a never-ending source of frustration.
I heard it myself just the other day from a friend as we were discussing pain. The usual answer of our free will came up. God just lets us get on with things and that includes all those unspeakable things that we do to one another. But that didn’t seem entirely satisfactory. Surely there must be limit to what God would put up with?
Anyway, it was too abstract. There didn’t seem to be any direct connection between individual free will and God’s failure to act in those horrendous things that evoke the question. And God answers prayer (sometimes) so why wouldn’t God act to stop what is patently awful.
So God is not above interfering in human affairs. Then why doesn’t God do something about those terrible things that happen, like the Holocaust, and the other genocides that are still occurring. And then there are those terrible natural disasters, such as the Indian Ocean and Japanese tsunamis. Surely God doesn’t actually want these things to happen?
I spoke to my friend about God’s suffering with those who were affected. Not just knowing about the suffering but actually experiencing the suffering with them. Did that somehow mitigate God’s culpability? It seemed to help, but I knew that it wasn’t a really satisfactory answer. After all, the people were still suffering something that God could have prevented.
I tried another tack. Wasn’t suffering just a necessary complement to joy? Without suffering, there couldn’t be any real joy? Joy would just be the ‘natural’ state of things, and without anything to compare it with, we would just think nothing of it.
I wasn’t so sure about that. How could one become immune to the thrill of joy? But then again how do we become immune to the wonder of the sky, and the air, and light, and birth?
It all seemed to be getting rather complicated, so I fell back on good old scripture. Job. That was the answer! The standard answer! God was too big to be questioned. You just can’t understand. ‘My ways are not your ways says the Lord.’ It’s all a mystery.
That seemed rather more satisfactory but, as my friend pointed out, that required a certain amount of faith. What if one didn’t have that sort of faith? People could believe in God and still want an answer that was more than just acceptance. Didn’t we have anything better to say to those people?
How would God do something about that?
So I got to thinking about some other way of looking at the problem.
What if God were to ‘do something about that’? What would that involve?
My friend had been watching a TV program that depicted the awful suffering of Napoleon’s soldiers as they retreated from Moscow. That suffering had evoked anger and ‘the question’. So I imagined, in that particular instance what God might have done.
For a start, the Russians had suffered a great deal also. So simply alleviating the suffering of Napoleon’s soldiers was not an answer in itself. What would be needed would be something wider than that. It would have to include the Russians as well. And not just soldiers but also the civilians who had suffered as much or more. Otherwise God would be playing favourites in suffering.
So really, God would have had to prevent the whole military campaign. In other words, to alleviate the suffering of Napoleon’s soldiers would involve changing the whole course of history.
But that, in itself, creates a quandary. How do we know that ‘history’ hasn’t been changed as a result of God’s interference? The history we have is what it is. We do not have alternatives to compare it with, unless one gives undue authority to sheer speculation. We have no way of knowing what God has done in historical terms (that is setting aside the bible and personal testimonies for the moment).
How do we know that things could not be much worse than they are? All we seem to be saying is that God shouldn’t have allowed the suffering that we are aware of. That is a very compassionate approach but where does one draw the line? Who is going to make the decision about what suffering is admissible and what is not? Is one death too many? A thousand? A million? It all depends on how it affects us. As newspaper editors might say, one death in the family is worse that a hundred in the town, a thousand in the country, and a million overseas. Is the criterion that God should allow no suffering at all?
Whose prayers to answer?
And then we have the problem of conflicting prayers.
In the example of Napoleon and the Russians, one could be sure that there were people praying for the soldiers of both sides. In just the same way, in the Second World War and probably every conflict, people have prayed for opposite outcomes. The answer to one set of prayers must inevitably be the denial of the other set.
While not every prayer is matched by an equal an opposite one, an answer to each prayer almost invariably has effects beyond those immediately involved. If we pray for someone who is ill and they get better, then they go on to do all sorts of things that they would not otherwise do (for good or ill). If we pray for something for ourselves, for example a particular job, and get it; then someone else does not get that job.
It is difficult to think of a prayer that does not have consequences beyond our immediate sphere. In most instances we have little or no idea of the total consequences of answered prayer.
So when we pray we are often praying blindly. We know what we want but we do not know how that might affect others. We have no way of knowing whether an answer to our prayer might ultimately mean a greater pain or loss for someone else.
And how would you check that it was God that was answering prayer
Even now there are scientific experiments going on to check the efficacy of prayer. In typical scientific manner, experiments are set up with groups of people praying for specific things, outcomes being measured, control groups, etc.
One problem is that if it were a truly scientific experiment it would be laughable. Why is that? Well if one considers a truly scientific experiment, all the possible variables have to be measurable, and preferably held constant, while the one variable one is interested in is manipulated. It is no good having the temperature, or pressure, any other variable changing while one is trying to sort out the effect of something else in a physics experiment.
Now, with prayer, in the experiments being conducted, it seems to be assumed that all prayer is the same, even though we know that is not the case. The prayer of Jesus was infinitely more effective than that of his apostles, and that of the apostles was greater than that of the priests of the day. So the efficacy of prayer depends to a great extent on who is doing the praying. Not only that but the state of those around at the time also has an effect. Remember, even Jesus could not preform many miracles in his own town because of the unbelief of those who knew him.
The faith of the person praying and the faith of the one being prayed for are significant factors in the efficacy of prayer.
So if one were to do a proper ‘scientific’ prayer experiment, one would have to be able to measure (and hopefully be able to vary controllably) the faith of all those involved. I can’t imagine how one might do that, since faith itself is essentially unquantifiable.
At its very heart, a scientific experiment about prayer is not possible because the variables (and particularly the essential ones) are not measurable or controllable.
So where does that leave us?
No Answers
My conclusion is that there is an inherent flaw in the question itself. Does the question involve God doing something about what is bothering me, or my friend, or of some group or other? Or is it more generally concerned with the pain and suffering that exists in the world as a whole? Are we questioning why God hasn’t made the world a perfect place or are we being specific and selective? Are we asking God to intervene at some threshold of pain or evil or disaster? None of that makes sense if examined critically, as in relation to prayer.
So what are we supposed to do? Are we supposed to simply ignore the events that cause us to wonder about God’s judgement? Are we to suppose there is no God because these things happen? Or are we to accept the Job position? These are all possibilities but none of them entirely addresses the pain and bewilderment in the question. Perhaps the question might be better put as ‘Dear God I feel for those people in their suffering. Why do these things have to happen? Aren’t you supposed to be more compassionate than that? Surely there is a better way?’
To those questions I have no answers.