TRUTH and FAITH:
How Credible is Christianity
In an Enlightened Age of Science
and Reason?
By John Ed Robertson
Contents
Introduction: Identifying the Three Key Questions
I. The Nature of Truth: Determining What Truth Really Is
II. The Search for Truth: Choosing a Final Authority
III. The Content of Truth: Evaluating the
Credibility of Christianity
1.
Science and Faith
2.
A Personal Note
3.
The Question of Origins: How Did We Get Here?
4.
The Resurrection: Did
Jesus Christ Really Rise from the Dead?
5.
Sources: Is the Bible
Reliable?
6.
Is All This Too Good to Be True?
IV. The Challenge to Truth: Addressing the
Question of Pain and Suffering
CONCLUSION
BIBLIOGRAPHY
© 2005 John Ed Robertson
|
INTRODUCTION: Identifying
the Three Key Questions |
One
of the most interesting questions in the Bible was voiced by a Roman Governor:
“What is truth?” Pontius Pilate posed
this question in response to an equally interesting statement made by Jesus
Christ: “For this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to
me.” Although we don’t know the tone of
Pilate’s voice, it’s reasonable to suppose that it was injected with a certain
amount of cynicism, and if we are right, Pilate would be right at home in the
21st century. One of the
dominant characteristics of our age is the considerable cynicism about the existence
of any objective, universal truth
that is always true for everyone, everywhere.
So much like Pilate, the post-modern, post-Christian western world poses
this question more with a cynical sneer than a genuine inquisitiveness.
For
those who believe the Christian faith and who therefore affirm the existence of
an objective, universal truth, they will find their claim inevitably confronted
by three very legitimate questions raised by people who do not share their Christian
faith:
1.
How can
one believe that only Christianity is true in this enlightened age of
tolerance? This is a question that has
to do with the nature of truth as we will see.
2.
How can one
believe that Christianity is true in this enlightened age of science and
reason? This is a question that has to
do with content of truth.
Another way to ask this question is: “If truth exists, how does one find
out what it is?”
3.
How can one believe
in an all-loving and all-powerful God when there is so much evil and unjust
suffering in the world?
The
third question is often a personal question as much as it is a theoretical
one. That is, those who ask this
question have often suffered for no apparent reason. Or, perhaps, someone they love has suffered
in the same way. Often those who ask
this question need empathy in their suffering more than they need philosophical
answers about the nature and content of truth.
The
first question has to do with the nature of truth, and the second has
to do with the content of truth. The
second question about whether or not Christianity is true assumes that some
things are true and others are not, in other words, that the law of
non-contradiction applies. Simply put,
the law of non-contradiction says that if propositions A and B contradict one
another, only one, at most, can be true.
They could both be false, but they can’t both be true. This is the nature of truth assumed in the
world of science, as we will see.
The
first question which has to do with the nature of truth, however, tends to
contradict the law of non-contradiction in that it implies that two
contradictory propositions can both be true.
This question reflects the post-modern idea that reality is created
as much as, or even more than, it is discovered. For example, when someone asked Jacques
Derrida, arguably the world’s foremost post-modern philosopher, if he believed
in the existence of God, he replied: “Look at all the people who believe in
God. Therefore, God exists, even if He
doesn’t exist!” In other word, belief
creates reality. This is the
quintessential post-modern idea, and it trivializes truth claims by reducing
them to just one among many “truths.”
This is often expressed as: “There are many truths. You have your truth and I have mine. Your truth is true for you, and mine is true
for me.” For this reason, it will be
helpful, perhaps, to examine the nature of truth, especially in the
world of science.
|
I. THE
NATURE OF TRUTH: Determining What Truth
Really Is |
The
fundamental question posed by post-modernity is whether or not there is any
universal, objective philosophical truth that is always true everywhere for
everyone. The fundamental assumption of modernity was that there is such a
universal truth, and we can find it by human reason alone. The problem was that philosophers never could
agree on what it was, so that by the mid-19th century philosophers
like Nietzsche and Hegel began to question whether such a thing as a universal,
objective philosophical truth even existed.
This idea “hit the streets” in the 1960’s in the U.S. with the
anti-Vietnam war movement, and has being formalized by post-modern philosophers
like Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean-Francois Lyotard and Richard
Rorty. In other words, the nature
of truth has been called into question by post-modernity.
Before
examining the nature of truth, we should acknowledge that Christians have often
come across as arrogant in their insistence on absolute truth. This is repulsive to many who do not share
their belief in absolute truth, not because of the nature of the absolute truth
itself, but because of the absolute certainty with which many
Christians express it. This is perceived
as arrogance leading to intolerance or even violence, as in the events of
For
this reason, universal truth is perhaps a better term. In addition, those who believe in universal
truth need to hold that conviction with a certain humility and not be like a
particularly arrogant Christian about whom Winston Churchill once remarked,
“There, but for the grace of God, goes God!”
In response to the idea that there are many truths and “Your truth is
true for you and mine is true for me”, one can respond, “There is only one
truth, but no one holds it perfectly.”
This
is precisely the view held by most men and women of science. Underlying the development of science is the
conviction that a universal, objective truth exists and is always true
everywhere for everyone. Science argues
that we are getting closer and closer to this objective truth, but we are not
there yet. It was once believed, for
example, that
Science
is thus guided by the conviction that the universe is coherent, that “God
doesn’t play dice with the universe,” as Einstein put it. Scientists believe in the existence of
universal, objective truth about the physical universe, and they believe that truth
that can be discovered and verified by the scientific method. Moreover, non-scientists share this conviction
about the physical universe. It is
common sense that the law of gravity applies to everyone whether or not they
believe in it. Not even Jacques Derrida
would have flown in an airplane designed by an engineer who did not believe in
the proven principles of aerodynamics, nor let himself be operated on by a
surgeon who didn’t bother to “scrub in” because he didn’t believe in the
existence of germs.
Scientific
research, therefore, consists in searching for objective, universal truth which
is always true everywhere for everyone.
The earth revolved around the sun long before Copernicus figured it out,
and universal gravitation was a fact long before
With
the advent of modern physics, however, several misunderstandings spread among
the general public, such as:
a) Einstein’s theory of relativity has shown that truth
is relative.
b) Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle proves that
nothing is certain and that we can’t know anything with certainty.
c)
Thomas Kuhn’s
book The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions has shown that we can create a new reality by a “paradigm
shift”.
An illustration of how this works would be the
presidential election in
Many believe that Kuhn said that we can create a new
reality by a paradigm shift, but that isn’t what he said. A paradigm shift doesn’t change reality; it
only changes our perception of
reality. In other words, reality is
objective, but our perception of it is subjective. Scientific truth exists independently of any
and all ideas about it.
But
how does all that apply to philosophical truth?
Is there an objective, universal philosophical truth, and if so, how
would one go about finding it? The
history of philosophy is the history of the search for this kind of truth, but
philosophers have never been able to agree on what it is, which is why
post-modern philosophers say that there is no one universal truth for everyone,
but many truths established by sincerity of belief.
One
problem, of course, is that it is much more difficult to test philosophical
ideas than scientific ones. The
scientific method consists of forming a hypothesis and conducting experiments
to prove or disprove the hypothesis. If
the hypothesis succeeds in predicting without fail the results of numerous
experiments, the hypothesis is accepted to be true. Unfortunately, it is much more difficult to
test philosophical hypotheses than scientific ones.
In
addition, there is a problem of objectivity.
It is pretty clear that a scientific experiment can be conducted
objectively; the problem is to do a broad enough range of experiments to ensure
that the results are universal. But what
experiment could be conducted to prove the veracity of a philosophical
proposition? We can test it in our
personal lives, but others could say that our conclusions are subjective. In fact, this is why many say, “To each his
own truth”. Since the only way to test a
philosophical proposition is by personal experience and because the interpretation
of the results is necessarily subjective, many have a hard time believing in
the existence of a universal philosophical truth.
|
II. THE
SEARCH FOR TRUTH: Choosing a Final
Authority |
Historically,
in the west at least, there have been two “authorities” in the search for
universal philosophical truth: divine revelation and human reason. Up until the scientific revolution and
especially the Enlightenment in the 18th century, the “final
authority” in determining truth was divine revelation. Over the past 500 years and especially the
past 200 years, however, human reason has dethroned divine revelation as that
final authority. In fact, human reason
was even pronounced the “state religion” in
As
a matter of fact, Solomon made a very similar criticism of the ability of human
reason to discover universal truth 2500 years before the advent of
modernity! He wrote:
“'Look,’ says the Teacher, ‘this is what I have
discovered: adding one thing to another to discover the scheme of things –
while I was still searching and not finding.’”
Ecclesiastes 7:27-28a
“When I applied my mind to know wisdom and to observe
man’s labor on earth – his eyes not seeing sleep day or night – then I saw all
that God has done. No one can comprehend
what goes on under the sun. Despite all
his efforts to search it out, man cannot discover its meaning. Even if a wise man claims he knows, he cannot
really comprehend it.” Ecclesiastes 8:16-17
These
two statements summarize the futility that Solomon experienced in searching for
truth using human reason as his final authority. The phrase “under the sun” appears 26 times
in the book and the word “vanity” (also translated “meaningless”) appears 39
times in the book. He therefore
concludes the book by suggesting that we reconsider divine revelation as the
final authority in the search for truth:
“The words of the wise are like goads, their
collected sayings like firmly embedded nails – given by one Shepherd. Be warned, my son, of anything in addition to
them. Of making many books there is no
end, and much study wearies the body.
Now all has been heard, here is the conclusion of the matter: Fear God and keep his commandments, for this
is the whole duty of man. For God will
bring every deed into judgment, including every hidden thing, whether it is
good or evil.” Ecclesiastes 12:11-14
By
“firmly embedded nails,” Solomon is referring to divine revelation (“given by
one Shepherd”), suggesting that divine revelation is not exhaustive (all truth
has not been revealed) but that it is true.
Moses put it like this:
“The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but
the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we
may do all the words of this law.” Deuteronomy 29:29
After
Solomon has spent 11 ½ chapters searching for truth “under the sun” (an image
that suggests using human reason as the final authority), he suggests divine
revelation as a more reliable authority in this search. Why does he make such a claim? How can we know that divine revelation even
exists? The answer is that we make that choice
by faith, which begs another question:
How can one live by faith in an age of science and reason? And the answer to that question is one that
most don’t acknowledge: we all live
by faith, either by faith that divine revelation is the final authority, or by
faith that human reason is the final authority, or by faith that the autonomous
self is the final authority. The real
question is which one is most reliable, and to answer that question, we need to
address the question of the content
of truth.
|
III. The Content of Truth: Evaluating
the Credibility of Christianity |
1. Science and Faith
How
can one believe that Christianity is true in this enlightened age of science
and reason?
In
examining the nature of truth in the previous section, I used science to
support the idea that truth is objective, independent of man’s ideas about
truth. In addition, we saw that
non-scientists share this view of truth in the physical universe, and it is
worth repeating the thrust of the argument:
Science . .
. is guided by the conviction that the universe is coherent, that ‘God doesn’t
play dice with the universe’ in the words of Einstein. Scientists believe in the existence of
universal, objective truth about the physical universe, truth that can be
discovered and verified by the scientific method. Moreover, non-scientists share this
conviction about the physical universe.
It is common sense that the law of gravity applies to everyone whether
or not they believe in it. Not even
Jacques Derrida would have flown in an airplane designed by an engineer who did
not believe in the proven principles of aerodynamics, nor let himself be
operated on by a surgeon who didn’t bother to “scrub in” because he didn’t
believe in the existence of germs.
Some
(especially some scientists) might cry “Foul!” at the use of science to
buttress the Christian idea of the nature of truth on the basis that scientific
theories must explain by using natural
law. In other words, only naturalistic
explanations should be permitted by science.
Since Christianity contains supernatural elements, some consider that it
is forcibly unscientific, at least by this naturalistic definition of science.
For
example, in the debate over the teaching of intelligent design (i.e. creation)
alongside evolution in the public schools as an alternative theory of origins,
secularists have argued that intelligent design is not scientific. The primary argument against intelligent
design can be summarized as follows: “Scientific theories must explain by
natural law. Because design or creationist
theories do not do so, they are necessarily unscientific.”
This
raises an important question: What is
the purpose of science? Is it about
finding natural materialist explanations or accurate
explanations? One can argue that
limiting the field of possible explanations to only natural materialist ones is
a truncated view of science, which is supposed to consider all the possible
explanations of a particular phenomenon.
If intelligent design is a possible explanation, it should be considered
alongside evolution and then either accepted or rejected based on the
scientific evidence available.
In
addition, it can be observed that “common descent” (better known as evolution)
does not explain natural laws either, but by postulating a hypothetical pattern
of historical events that, if actual, would account for a variety of presently
observed data. Common descent is
therefore no more “scientific” than intelligent design by this definition of
science.
Christianity
is admittedly a supernatural religion.
The Gospels record 35 specific miracles that Jesus performed. In addition, there are accounts of several
miracles performed by the apostles in the book of Acts and by prophets (in
particular Elijah and Elisha) in the Old Testament. Is Christianity therefore incompatible with
science by definition? I would argue
that it is only incompatible with a truncated view of science that admits only
naturalistic explanations. Science that
is open to all possible explanations in its search for accurate explanations is
not by definition incompatible with Christianity.
In
his book Modern Physics and Ancient Faith,
the physicist Stephen Barr tackles this question head-on. He writes:
“I should
emphasize that this book is not about proofs.
The materialist’s story had a moral, but it did not constitute a proof
of materialism. There was no experiment
that proved that only matter existed, nor was there any calculation that proved
that the universe had no purpose. Nor
did the materialist really ever claim that there was. What he claimed was that there were two
pictures of the world, the religious and the materialist, and the progress of
science has revealed a world that looks more and more like the materialist
picture. It was a question, in other
words, not of proofs but of expectations.
Science, it was claimed, had fulfilled the materialist’s expectations
and confounded the religious believer’s.
In this book, I am making the same kind of claim, but in reverse. I am claiming that, on the critical points,
recent discoveries have begun to confound the materialist’s expectations and
confirm those of the believer in God.”
Another
eminent scientist who has written on the subject of the relationship between
science and Christianity is Dr. Henry F. Schaeffer, whom U.S. News and World Report has speculated to be a five-time Nobel
nominee in chemistry. In his book, Science and Christianity: Conflict or
Coherence? Dr. Schaeffer shows that science and Christianity are
compatible, and agrees with Dr. Barr that “recent discoveries have begun to
confound the materialist’s expectations and confirm those of the believer in
God.”
So
how can one believe that Christianity
is true in this enlightened age of science and reason? Now that we have argued the validity of using
the same approach scientists use, we can address questions such as:
a) What credentials back up the claims of
Christianity? Is there any good evidence
to support it?
b) How can we know that God even exists?
c) How do you reconcile faith with the fact that the
Bible is full of errors?
d) Hasn’t evolution shown that the Bible is
unreliable?
e) How can one believe in miracles in an age of science
and reason?
These
questions boil down to three critical issues, which we need to address in order
to answer the question of Christianity’s credibility:
a)
The universe and
the human race exist and they exist in their present form and complexity. Where did they come from?
b)
Did Jesus Christ
really rise from the dead?
c)
Is it reasonable
to believe that the Bible is a reliable document?
As
noted before, Christianity is a supernatural religion, which causes some
difficulties in an age of natural explanations for many phenomena which were
imperfectly understood in the past. There
are two statements in the Bible, however, which, if believed, reduce the other
supernatural events in the Bible to mere details:
a)
“In the
beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” Genesis 1:1
b)
“On the
third day, he [Jesus Christ] rose from the dead.” I Corinthians 15:4
If
one believes these two statements, the other miracles recounted in the Bible
are not difficult to believe. Since they
recount the two foundational supernatural events, I will treat each of them in
detail. Finally, I will consider the
question of the trustworthiness of the Bible as an authority in the search for
truth.
2. A Personal Note
Before
going any further, I should admit that these questions are more than merely
academic to me. I became a follower of
Jesus Christ as an electrical engineering student at the
During
the first 13 years of my Christian experience, whenever my faith in objective
truth was challenged, my “fall-back” position was that I knew it was true
because it had changed my life. Many
would say, “That’s just psychological!
It changed your life because you believed it was true.” To that I would reply, “Well, you didn’t know
me before. Nothing that was merely
psychological could have changed my life the way faith in Jesus Christ
has.” Even my friends would occasionally
chime in, “Yeah, you didn’t know him before!”
One
day, however, after I had been a believer for thirteen years and a missionary
for four years, I found myself wondering, “What if it is just psychological? How
can I know for sure if Christianity is objectively and universally true?” At first I hoped that these questions would simply
go away, but I soon realized that I would have to deal with them. For the next several months, I devoted all
the time and energy I could to reading and studying in pursuit of answers to
questions like those above. The two
sources that were probably the most helpful were the book of Ecclesiastes in
the Bible and the book He Is There and He
Is Not Silent by Francis Schaeffer.
The remainder of this section is, by and large, what I found.
3. The Question of Origins: How Did
We Get Here?
The
universe in general and human life in particular exist, and they exist in their
present form and complexity. How did
they get here? There are three
possibilities:
a) Necessity: The laws of
physics and chemistry made the appearance of life inevitable, and the laws of
biology (i.e. natural selection) made the evolution of human beings inevitable.
b) Chance: Statistical
mechanics, then quantum mechanics, led many scientists to conclude that chance
could not be eliminated. Reduced to two
chemical-type equations:
Matter + time + chance yielded life.
Life + time + chance yielded human life.
c)
Design: The
universe, from hydrogen atoms to human beings, was created by an
infinite-personal Creator.
The
first two explanations are obviously naturalistic explanations and the third is
a theistic, (i.e. supernatural) explanation.
If we do not arbitrarily eliminate the third explanation on the basis of
it not being a naturalistic explanation, which of the three best explains what
we can observe? I would suggest that the
third explanation, intelligent design, best
explains what we observe in nature, for the following reasons:
a)
The Second Law of Thermodynamics. According to this law, things left to
themselves always go from order to disorder and that entropy (i.e. randomness)
always increases. This is a powerful
argument against both necessity and chance.
Any engineer who has ever tried to make anything happen in the real
world is intimately acquainted with the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Left to themselves, things do not go from
disorder to order, yet evolution insists that they do, or at least they have
done so in the past. As noted above,
even naturalistic science (statistical mechanics and quantum mechanics) has
concluded that chance could not be eliminated, and therefore that necessity
alone is inadequate to explain our origins.
To believe that chance is responsible for the complexity of the physical
universe and human existence in the face of the Second Law seems to require
more faith than intelligent design does.
For example, some have likened it to the probability of 500 monkeys
producing the works of Shakespeare by randomly typing on 500 typewriters or a
tornado passing through a junkyard and assembling a Boeing 747. It is theoretically possible, but highly
unlikely.
b)
Irreducible Complexity. This law is defined as a single system composed of
several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function,
and where the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively
cease functioning. The human eye, for
example, is an example of irreducible complexity. Irreducible complexity is a real problem for
naturalistic evolution, because an irreducibly complex system cannot just
evolve. One example would be the
necessity for fish to develop lungs in order to evolve into birds. If they developed lungs before leaving the
water, they would drown, but if they left the water before developing lungs,
they would do what fish do when they are pulled out of the water, i.e. die.
c)
The Anthropic Principle. The universe appears to have been
“fine-tuned” to make it hospitable to human life. For example, there are over 30 physical
constants that, if any one were slightly modified, would make human life
impossible. Scientists have calculated
the probability of human life coming to be by chance alone to be on the order
of 1 in 10 to the 150th power.
4.
The Resurrection: Did Jesus
Really Rise from the Dead?
Why
would anyone believe in the resurrection
of Jesus Christ? We can see two
reasons:
a)
The credibility
of the eyewitnesses. Most of those who
claimed to be eyewitnesses of the risen Christ were persecuted and some were
even martyred for sticking to their story.
Some would argue that men have always been willing to die for something
that they believed to be true, even if it wasn’t. The problem with that is that if the
resurrection were not true, these guys would have known it. In fact, they had a hard time believing it themselves. As Charles Colson has put it: “Men may be willing to die for something they
believe to be true, but they won’t die for something they know to be false.”
b)
The life of
Jesus Christ, and the phenomenal claims He made about Himself. In John 5:18, for example, it says that the
Jews “tried all the harder to kill him; not only was he breaking the Sabbath,
but he was even calling God his own Father, making himself equal with
God”. Most men would bend over backwards
to clear up a misunderstanding that was causing people to want to kill them,
but Jesus then goes on to talk about all the ways in which He is equal to the
Father in the next 29 verses. He not
only left their impression that He was claiming to be the Son of God intact, He
reinforced it significantly. In another
place, He said “I and the Father are one”, which caused the Jews to want to
stone him. (John 10:30-31)
If His claims were not true, either He knew they were
false, in which case He was a fraud or He was deluded, in which case He was a
lunatic. A simple reading of the Gospel
accounts is sufficient to see that His life directly contradicts those two
possibilities.
5.
Is the Bible Reliable?
There
are many reasons for believing that the Bible is at least as reliable as any
other book from antiquity. According to
Nelson Glueck, a well-known archeologist, “No archeological discovery has ever
controverted a Biblical reference.” The
manuscript evidence that we have substantiates that the Bible we have today is
faithful to what was originally written.
For example, our present-day New Testament has been translated from
hand-written manuscripts dated from the third and fourth centuries. By contrast, the oldest manuscript we have of
Caesar’s Gallic Wars has been dated
at 900 AD, and no one questions its authenticity. Extra-Biblical accounts, such as that of the
Jewish historian Josephus substantiate many of the details of the life of
Jesus. In addition, the fulfillment in
the life of Jesus of hundreds of Biblical prophecies concerning the Messiah
attests to the authenticity of the Bible.
Most
significantly, perhaps, is the fact that the Bible has unbelievably accurate
insights that explain life and the world around us the way they really
are. The Bible does indeed “tell it like
it is” when it comes to human nature.
When I interpret the world around me and my life in light of the Bible,
it makes sense. In his book The God Who Is There, Francis Schaeffer
has an excellent illustration of how this works. Imagine that you found a book out of which a
chunk had been cut so that all that remained was the bottom one inch of each
page. Although it would be impossible to
reconstruct the book from these fragments of text, there could be no doubt that
they were the product of an intelligent being.
Now, imagine further that a pile of fragments of pages were found in the
attic, and that it turned out that each of these fragments fit with one of the
one-inch fragments of pages that we had in the beginning, so that when placed
properly, they told a coherent, even riveting story. There would be little doubt that these fragments
were the missing parts of the book, and that the two sets of fragments had a
common author.
This
is the case of Christianity. In this
image, the mutilated book corresponds to the universe and the human race in its
current state, and the fragments of pages found in the attic are the Bible, by
which God speaks to man in an intelligent manner, not only with respect to
“religious” truth, but also concerning the cosmos and history, domains
susceptible to verification. The world
around us and the human race in their current abnormal state are inadequate in
and of themselves to make sense out of our existence, but they are important in
understanding that the Scriptures, by which God speaks to man, are what they
claim to be. In other words, when I
interpret my humanity and the world around me in light of the Scriptures, they
make sense. Without the Scriptures, they
don’t.
6.
But Is It Too Good to Be True?
That’s
a good question—one that many people ask, and one that was at the origin of
many of my own doubts. I began to wonder
whether the Gospel claim—that I could be restored to a personal relationship
with God solely by believing in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ as the
ultimate solution for my own sin and guilt—was simply too good to be true. In the final analysis, however, I realized
that the alternative was “too bad to be true,” because life ultimately has no
meaning if man is autonomous in the universe.
To put it another way, human reason is inadequate to discover the
ultimate meaning of life, so either God must reveal the meaning of life to us
or we must live without ultimate meaning.
The book of Ecclesiastes was written to show the “vanity” (or futility,
a word which appears 39 times in the book) of searching for ultimate truth and
meaning “under the sun” (meaning using human reason as my ultimate authority in my search), a phrase which appears 26 times
in the book. The author concludes:
“Look, says
the Teacher, this is what I have discovered, adding one thing to another to
discover the scheme of things – while I was still searching but not finding –“ (Ecclesiastes 7:27-28a)
“When I
applied my mind to know wisdom and to observe man’s labor on earth – his eyes
not seeing sleep day or night – then I saw all that God has done. No one can comprehend what goes on under the
sun. Despite all his efforts to search
it out, man cannot discover its meaning.
Even if a wise man claims he knows, he cannot really comprehend
it.” (Ecclesiastes 8:16-17)
The
author of Ecclesiastes (King Solomon) was one of the wisest men who ever lived,
yet he says that he was unable to find life’s ultimate meaning and purpose,
using human reason as his ultimate authority.
He concludes by returning to divine revelation as his ultimate authority
in the search for truth, as we saw in an earlier article on “What Is Truth?”
“The words of the wise are like goads, their
collected sayings like firmly embedded nails – given by one Shepherd. Be warned, my son, of anything in addition to
them. Of making many books there is no
end, and much study wearies the body.
Now all has been heard, here is the conclusion of the matter: Fear God and keep his commandments, for this
is the whole duty of man. For God will
bring every deed into judgment, including every hidden thing, whether it is
good or evil.” Ecclesiastes 12:11-14
In
conclusion, we can believe in the objective truth of the Christian story based
on three things:
1.
The intricate
design that we see in nature is best explained by the objective existence of a
Designer.
2.
The historicity
of the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
3.
The
trustworthiness of the Bible, which explains life and the world around us in
ways that make perfect sense.
|
IV.
The Challenge of Truth: Addressing
the Question of Pain and Suffering |
How
can one believe in an all-powerful and all-loving God when there is so much
evil and suffering in the world?
This
is a difficult question to answer, not because there are no answers, but
because it is often both a
theoretical question and a personal
question. It is difficult to answer with
both lucidity and sensitivity, and to give a theoretical answer to someone who
is suffering can be very insensitive and even cruel.
There
are at least four kinds of suffering:
a) Suffering that results from our own bad choices, such
as bankruptcy resulting from extravagant spending or addiction resulting from
substance abuse.
b) Suffering that results from the bad choices of
others, such as being a victim of crime or an accident caused by a drunken
driver.
c)
Suffering that
is common to the human condition, especially sickness.
d) Suffering that doesn’t make sense:
a.
Either because
it seems so random and capricious, like natural disasters or losing a child to
illness or accident
b.
Or because it
occurs in spite of good choices, such
as rebellious teenaged children of loving, conscientious parents or the failure
in business of an honest, hard-working business person.
Of
these four kinds of suffering, the easiest to explain theoretically is the first, but
that can be little comfort to the person experiencing it. Although this kind of suffering may be
relatively easy to understand for an unaffected bystander, it is still very
painful for the person experiencing it.
In fact, being angry with oneself for the bad choices that brought about
the suffering can significantly aggravate it.
Similarly,
the second type of suffering is relatively easy to explain theoretically, but
that is even less comfort to the victim.
Even though one can readily see that this is a result of the sinfulness
of man, it doesn’t alleviate the victim’s suffering.
The
third and fourth types of suffering are obviously the most difficult to
understand, because there seems to be no reason
for them. The Bible does not ignore this
problem. Perhaps the best example of
this is the story of a man named Job, who lived over 1500 years before Jesus
Christ. The Bible says that Job was
“blameless and upright; he feared God and shunned evil”. Nevertheless, God allowed Job to suffer as
few men or women have before or since, losing both his wealth and his
children. Job is left to ask the
question we all ask when we suffer for no apparent reason: “Why? What did I do to deserve this?”
The
story goes on to recount how Job has three friends who come to “comfort” him,
but they aren’t much help. In effect,
they insist that Job is really suffering because of his own bad choices, and
all he has to do to turn the situation around is to ‘fess up. This only intensifies Job’s suffering. In fact, the term “Job’s counselors” has become
a euphemism for people who respond insensitively and simplistically to the
suffering of someone else. At the end of
the story, God gives His evaluation of their “comfort’ by saying, “I am angry
with you and your two friends, because you have not spoken of me what is right
as my servant Job has.” Whatever else we
might say about God’s dealings with evil and suffering in the world, this makes
it clear that He does not respond to it simplistically or insensitively.
Since
each situation is unique, it is not possible to give a “one size fits all”
answer to this question. Nevertheless,
there are a few things we can say that can give us some of the elements of an
answer to our specific situation:
1.
We need to
recognize that if God were to deal decisively with evil in the world, He would
have to deal with us as well. As
Alexander Solzhenitsyn has said, “The line between good and evil in the world
is not a line that separates good people from evil people, but a line that goes
right through every human heart.” Part
of my heart is on the wrong side of that line too.
2.
God understands
unjust suffering very well, because His Son, Jesus Christ, suffered
unjustly. In fact, the Bible says that
Jesus’ heart was totally on the right side of the line mentioned by Solzhenitsyn,
and yet He suffered the death of a common criminal.
3.
God understands
and empathizes with our suffering. He
does not take it lightly, nor does He give simplistic answers. “For He heals the broken-hearted and binds up
their wounds, curing their pain and their sorrows”, according to the Bible.
|
CONCLUSION |
When
Pilate asked the question, “What is truth?” he probably had little idea just
how important a question he raised, though he was most likely very
uncomfortable with Jesus’ claim that prompted the question: “Everyone on the side of truth listens to
me.” Over the centuries, Jesus has been
summarily dismissed as a liar or a madman, or simply as just a good man (an ironic
assessment, since if his claims are not true, he was most likely a liar and
possibly a madman, and anything but a good man). But if these arguments about the nature and
content of truth hold water, his claims can’t be dismissed that easily. At the very least, he deserves a good hearing
from “everyone on the side of truth.”
|
BIBLIOGRAPHY |
a)
Barr, Stephen;
“Retelling the Story of Science”; First
Things; March, 2003 www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft303/articles/barr.html
b)
Barr, Stephen; Modern Physics and Ancient Faith; Notre
Dame Press
c)
Behe, Dembski, Meyer; Science and Evidence for Intelligent Design in the Universe; The
Proceedings of the Wethersfield Institute; Ignatius Press
d)
Glynn, Patrick; God – The Evidence; Forum – Prima
Publishing
e)
Lewis, C.S.; Mere Christianity; Collier Books,
Macmillan Publishing Co.
f)
McLaren, Brian; Finding Faith; Zondervan
g)
Schaeffer,
Francis; He Is There and He Is Not Silent;
Tyndale House Publishers
h)
Schaeffer,
Francis; The God Who Is There
i)
Schaeffer, Henry
F.; Science and Christianity: Conflict or
Coherence?
j)
Strobel, Lee; The Case for Faith
k)
Strobel, Lee; The Case for Christ
John
Ed Robertson
March
2005
This
article is the compilation of three articles that originally appeared
separately.
John
Ed Robertson formerly worked as a nuclear power engineer and is now serving as
a Regional Field Leader with the Navigators, an interdenominational Christian
organization whose focus is on helping those with questions about Christianity
figure out not only what Christianity means but also what it means to live out
the Christian faith as a follower of Christ.
John Ed is a highly respected writer and thinker, and his articles have
a wide circulation.
He
can be reached at jnrobertson@ix.netcom.com.