I too held rather abstract beliefs regarding free will and the nature of suffering before experiencing the illness of a child, along with being diagnosed with colon cancer at a young age. It is easy to criticize Lewis for his former work, and for being out of touch when he referred to pain as “God’s megaphone to the world”. It was only when his partner Joy developed cancer, and subsequently died, that his abstract thoughts became grounded in reality, followed up by his book A Grief Observed. Lewis wrote what was considered an abstract approach to the problem of suffering in his book The Problem of Pain. Debates around the nature of suffering and pain are routinely construed as academic and abstract, unrelated to real physical and existential suffering, and this can certainly be the case.Ĭ.S. As will become apparent as this article progresses, even the Christian tradition has had numerous and quite different reflections on these problems. As one who has found myself broadly within the Christian tradition, I have been informed by the questions and answers that have been put forward within that stream for understanding theodicy. It appears that even our cousins homo neanderthalensis had certain burial rites for their dead, but that’s as much as we know.ĭifferent religions approach the question of suffering and evil uniquely.
It’s impossible to know at what point homo sapiens began to worship Gods, let alone when they began to question their suffering and how it is related to the nature and reality of God. Evil might be too strong a word to explain what happened to creatures in evolutionary history, but the notion of suffering and pain would not be. The problem of evil, or the problem of evil in relation to God (theodicy), takes place against the background of the reality and all too apparent suffering that has been synonymous with human life from time immemorial. Indeed, a process theodicy enables us to dismount the omnibus in search of a more holistic, and realistic, alternative to dealing with the problem of evil and suffering. By refashioning God as neither all-knowing nor all-powerful, process theodicy moves beyond the dead ends of both the free will and soul-making theodicy. In what follows I will contrast a process theological response to the problem of evil and suffering, and how it is better placed in dealing with both omnipotence and omniscience. Neither is effective in dealing with two key issues that underpin both responses – omnipotence and omniscience. John Hick offers a ‘soul-making’ response to the problem of evil as an alternative to the free will response. The free-will response to the problem of evil, with its roots in Augustine, has dominated the landscape in its attempt to justify evil and suffering as a result of the greater good of having free will. The Christian tradition has offered numerous and diverse responses to the problem of evil. Each in their own way has sought to address this problem, whether driven by the all too present reality of suffering or from philosophical and religious curiosities. The nature of suffering and the problem of evil have been perennial issues for many of the world’s religious traditions.