Part Three: First Steps Toward the Light of Reason

In the first two articles in this series, I used a metaphor that I want to “spin-out” a bit more for you here. What I said was that Jesus our Savior is not just a hand to hold onto in the pitch darkness of our trials and tribulations. Rather, He is also a Light shining in the midst of that darkness, lighting the way home.

What I meant was: Jesus does not ask us to face the sorrows and sufferings of this life just with “blind faith,” for He is, as He said, “the Light of the world.” So, we walk through the darkness “in the light of faith,” guided by the light of the revealed truths of the faith that can help us at least begin to understand the mystery of evil and suffering in God’s world.

In fact, we can not only walk in the light of the truths of the faith, but also (a two-for-one deal here!) in the light of the truths of reason. The Catholic Church teaches in the Catechism, entries 31-35, as she has always taught, that God our Creator gives us the capacity to reason, in part, so that we can see that our faith is not just based on fantasy, fairy-tales, or wishful thinking, but rests on a solid rational foundation. St. Paul said much the same thing in his epistle to the Romans, chapter 1, verses 19-21: “For the invisible things of God are clearly seen through the things that are made, even his eternal power and deity.” In other words, just by using our God-given reasoning capacity to think clearly, and just by looking at human life and at nature all around us — all that God has made — we can begin to discover the truth about God, and about evil and suffering in His world. In Protestantism this is sometimes called God’s “general revelation”—“general” here meaning universally manifest, and accessible to all. And this is surely the teaching of Scripture: “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament shows his handiwork” (Ps 19:1).

Of course, this does not mean that everyone who tries to search for truth with the use of reason will actually find it. Such is the corruption of human nature by sin that many will not succeed, especially if they ignore or disdain the wisdom of those who have gone before them (and especially if they turn their back on the wisdom of those engaged in this quest with the help of that other, more comprehensive light of truth: the “special revelation” that God had given to the world through Jesus Christ). But the light of reason at least can help point the way to that greater light.

To help us take the first steps here, I am going to share with you part of the last chapter of a book I wrote, published last year by The Chartwell Press, entitled Letters to a College Student: on the Light of Reason and the Search for Truth. The back cover of this book helps set the stage for us:

A girl named Krystal goes off to university for the first time, and she is immediately dazzled by all the different philosophies, religions, and world-views on display there. What can she make of it all? So she writes to her uncle Robert, the only professional philosopher and theologian that she knows, sharing her struggles at university to find the truth about herself, her world … and her God. And he writes back — again and again. These are his letters.

When we get to the last chapter of Letters, the last letter to Krystal, we find that she has been wrestling with the message of a novel she read in French Literature class by the author Albert Camus called The Plague (a book about a dreadful plague that kills many thousands of innocent people). My response to her wrestling with the problem of evil and suffering in this world goes like this:

You shared with me your struggles, Krystal — which have evidently been going on for months now — with the powerful message of a novel you read in French class by Albert Camus, The Plague. Now I see more clearly why you said that our dialogue, helpful as it has been to you so far, has not really addressed the “core doubts” that you struggle with. Despite all the evidence and arguments I have marshalled for the existence of God, and for the reality and immortality of the human spirit, the protest against God put forward in that book seems unanswerable to you at the moment. Nobody can put it better than you did in your last letter to me, Krystal:

“If there really is a God — the Reason for everything that exists, as you said — then how can He permit so much innocent suffering to go on in His world? I mean, how could he sit back and watch millions of people — helpless peasants mostly — get wiped out by the bubonic plague that killed 1/3 of the population of Europe in the 14th century, and do nothing to stop it? How come he permitted Auschwitz and Dachau, Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Why does he let little children die of leukemia, young mothers die of cancer, leave millions of families to die of starvation in Africa, do nothing as he sees wives beaten, unborn children killed in their mothers’ wombs, husbands and fathers slaughtered in senseless wars, whole towns swept off the map by earthquakes, tornadoes, volcanoes and tsunamis? In short, if there really is a God, why is all this happening on His watch?”

I hope you won’t be shocked by what I have to say this time, Krystal, but the truth is: Philosophy [reason alone] cannot give us a complete answer to your question. Human reason can only go so far.

But we also need to set what Philosophy cannot tell us against all that it can. If what you wrote, Krystal, is all that we can know about human misery and innocent suffering in this world, then that would indeed be a decisive objection against either the existence or the goodness of God; your doubts would be fully justified.

Happily, it isn’t all that we can know. Philosophical reason can shed at least some light on the mystery of human suffering.

First of all, Philosophy can show us, beyond a reasonable doubt, that there is an all-powerful, all-seeing, infinitely good Creator….

 Now, permit me to depart from my letter to Krystal for a moment. The Catechism of the Catholic Church puts it this way in entry 31:

The person who seeks God discovers certain ways of coming to know him. These are also called proofs for the existence of God, not in the sense of proofs of the natural sciences, but rather in the sense of converging and convincing arguments, which allow us to attain certainty about the truth.

 In fact, in my Letters to Krystal earlier in that book, I outlined for her a number of rational arguments for the existence of God. For example, I said that every human heart has a longing for something that nothing on earth can ever satisfy. The most likely explanation for this transcendent longing, this unsatisfiable desire in every human heart, is that it is a longing for God Himself.

I also argued in this book that the only sufficient and reasonable explanation for the order and design we find in the universe — the incredibly intricate mathematical order discovered by modern science — is that the natural world was fashioned by a supernatural Mind, a super-intelligent Designer.

I also said that we find in every human heart an inner voice of conscience, a voice which makes an absolute claim of loyalty upon us (and leaves us feeling guilty and under judgement when we fail to live up to that claim) — and the only convincing explanation for that absolute voice of conscience within us is that it is the echo of the voice of the Absolute Being who made us.

Finally, I gave Krystal several reasons for believing that the answer to the ultimate philosophical question — “Why is there something rather than nothing at all?”—the only answer that makes any rational sense, is that the world received its existence from a Power to exist that can give existence away. That self-existent Creative Power can only be God Himself.

We don’t have the time and space here to go into all of these arguments — you can read about them in Letters to a College Student — but I hope you can now see what the Catechism means by “converging and convincing arguments” that point us to the reality of God’s existence. Nor is this solely a Catholic way of approaching the reality of God. In the 18th century Protestant philosophers such as Christian Wolff and Gottfried Leibniz in Germany, and the Scottish “Philosophers of Common Sense,” used versions of some of these same arguments, as have some of the greatest Protestant philosophers of the 20th and 21st centuries, such as Ronald Nash, William Lane Craig, and the Christian apologist C.S. Lewis.

OK, back to my letter to Krystal:

All that you wrote about innocent suffering, Krystal, does not show that there is anything logically amiss with any of the “pro-God” arguments that we discussed in our previous letters. In other words, to be rationally consistent we do not need to reject the existence of God in the face of all the innocent suffering in the world. To begin with, we just need to admit the limitation of our human perspective on these things. We can honestly say, “I don’t understand why God permits some of the things He does; I definitely don’t have the complete answer to these things. But His knowledge and wisdom must be infinite, whereas mine are finite. If He exists — as Philosophy can show — then He must know all the answers! A God of infinite knowledge and benevolence could only permit innocent suffering to happen for the sake of at least the possible attainment of some greater good which we cannot fully see — or at least, not yet.” To adopt this view, Krystal, allows you to do justice both to the strong arguments in favor of the existence of God, and at the same time to the awful reality of innocent suffering in His world.

Again, from our limited vantage point we may not be able fully to see what that “greater good” could be, but that does not mean it does not exist, or that Philosophy cannot provide at least some insights into what God may be up to here.

Robert Stackpole, STD

Mere Christian Fellowship

Next Time: The Free-Will Defence, and Humanity’s God-given “Immune System”