Mary Jo is reflecting on the question “Does suffering disprove the existence of a good God?” over at Biblegateway.com
Here’s a Preview:
The heart is more deceitful than all else
And is desperately sick; Who can understand it?
—Jeremiah 17:9, NASB
As I tried to imagine the depth of pain, the horror of suffering that so many humans have inflicted on each other, I began to have that most unwelcome feeling of having my paradigm shifted. Humans are not good. It’s the average member of society that commits genocide. I didn’t want this to be true, and to this day I don’t want it to be true.
These ideas go against everything I believed growing up and into my young adulthood. But what if I were to be a defense lawyer in a trial of humanity where the judges were some alien race? As the prosecution brought forth the massive amounts of human suffering caused by other humans, what would I have to say? “Well, you see, Your Honor, I can tell you that at least I’m not like that . . . and neither is my family.”
I could hear the alien judge: “You seem to forget yourself. The probability of your goodness is so infinitesimally low in light of human history, that I have no reason for judgment in your favor. Or perhaps you can prove that you are better than every human who has ever lived?”
“Well, no, I don’t think I could do that, but there are some great humans in time and history: Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King Jr., Mahatma Gandhi . . .”
“And what percentage of humankind do they represent? Less than a percent? Less than half a percent? Less than half of a half of a percent? And can you prove that even those humans never did anything to hurt another human? You would do well to offer more realistic statements in your defense.”
“But what explains all this? We have accomplished amazing things!”
The alien judge, looking unimpressed with my plea, says, “You seem to have an internal error.”
There it was. Dr. Clay Jones’s statement that we all suffer from original sin. And if he’s right, no matter how averse our generation has become to the word sin, the answer to the problem is not more education, more opportunity, or more resources. None of these things can, or have, cured the lack of goodness in human beings. For all of the Enlightenment’s work to show religion as false, or the language deconstruction that has relegated everything to the subjectivity of the individual, or the experimental drugs trying to release us to higher realities, or the sexual revolution trying to give us ultimate autonomy, or the new atheism movement that says we can be good without God . . . we are still full of selfishness, envy, hatred, racism, sexism, objectification, self-interest, and yet, self-loathing. We are not getting better. We can pretty-up the terminology all we want, but the ugliness still rears its head in all of our lives.
Wow. I feel like I just raised a glass to toast my generation and gave the worst speech of all time. Honestly, I really do fit in better with the crowd that believes we should all “follow our dreams.” But what is the cost of ignoring what I see? To blindly cling to a belief that humans are good despite the evidence? I had been raised with such humanistic optimism! We all just need to respect each other, and the world will finally come together. However, the empirical evidence, found in human history, suggests the complete opposite conclusion.
No matter how good we think we are or how far along we think we’ve come, we’re still doing horrible things to each other and to ourselves. I don’t need to go to the historical atrocities to come to this conclusion. Becoming an adult was sufficient for me to understand that humans, on a daily basis, do not do what is good to each other. This idea was becoming plain as day through my experiences in church ministry. Even the people who professed the moral teachings of God as binding on their lives practiced nearly the worst of human behaviors and attitudes. Read the rest over at BibleGateway.com