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WHY SUFFERING? – PHILOSOPHICAL
& CHRISTIAN REFLECTIONS Version 1.0 Dated: |
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“If ‘the nightingale sings best with a thorn against her
breast,’ why not we?” Susan Gilbert Dickinson in a
letter to Emily Dickinson [1861] To live is to suffer, to survive is to find
meaning in the suffering. Roberta Flack “For he knows the way that I take; when he has tried me, I shall
come forth as gold” Job |
HOW SUFFERING CAN
AFFECT OUR VIEW OF GOD AND TRUTH The following are great and famous men over the years who had had to struggle with pain and suffering: some
triumphed over it while others succumbed. Acknowledgements are indicated
whenever materials are abstracted from other sources. 1. Charles Darwin (www.answersingenesis.org/docs2002/death_suffering.asp) Charles Darwin, the originator of
evolution thinking, rejected the idea of a God of love after the death of his
daughter Annie. “Annie’s cruel death
destroyed Charles’s tatters of beliefs in a moral, just universe. Later
he would say that this period chimed the final death-knell for his
Christianity,’ says a recent biography of Charles Darwin. “…Charles
now took his stand as an unbeliever.” Darwin is only one of thousands of
famous people who have struggled with this issue, trying to reconcile belief
in God with the death and suffering he observed all around, that he believed
had gone on for millions of years. When Charles Darwin wrote his landmark
book On the Origin of Species, he was in essence writing a history of
suffering and death. In the conclusion of the chapter entitled On The
Imperfections Of The Geological Record, 2. Friedrich Nietzsche (www.ilstu.edu/~kfmachin/IDS254Fall02/Nietzsche.htm) Friedrich Nietzsche is a famous, wild,
disorganized, sometimes infuriating, but sometimes amazingly insightful 19th
Century thinker. He is notoriously opposed to “religion”
– especially the versions of Christianity he was familiar with, since
Christianity seemed to him to be far too weak and simpering in its approach
to life. Nietzsche apparently thinks religion in general can be understood
most deeply as a response to just one question – the question of
suffering (and death?). Nietzsche claims that religion
redirect the resentment that typically goes with suffering. 3. Robert R. Ingersoll (http://thewaronfaith.com/aq_ingersol.htm) Robert R. Ingersoll,
a 19th Century thinker, philosopher and prolific writer, has these
to say about pain and suffering, in relation to God: “Tell me there is a God in the
serene heavens that will damn his children for the expression of an honest
belief! More men have died in their sins, judged by your orthodox creeds,
than there are leaves on all the forests in the wide world ten thousands
times over. Tell me these men are in hell; that these men are in torment;
that these children are in eternal pain, and that they are to be punished
forever and forever! I denounced this doctrine as the most infamous of
lies.”
Ingersoll, “The
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