If God Doesn't Exist, Why Are There So Few Atheists?

Many atheists regard religion as nothing more than fairytales invented to explain the unexplainable or fantasies of hope in a hopeless world; “the opium of the masses” goes the popular quote. They claim religion defies logic and rejects reason, resting on beliefs which could appeal only to the hopelessly stupid, the desperate or the manipulative. They tend not to give religion very much thought, because they assume its adherents have given it virtually no thought at all.

They ask questions like, “If God exists, how can there be so much suffering in the world?” and because they cannot provide an answer, they assume there isn’t one. Indeed, like the Sam Harris piece I linked to earlier this week, they triumphantly tout their unanswered questions with a distinctly defiant “A-ha!” tone of voice. “You Christians never thought of that, did you?” goes the subtext.

Compounding this problem is that (especially in America) there are multitudes of Christians who frankly have not given such important questions sufficient thought, and who spew forth copious nonsensical verbiage blaming natural disasters on homosexuals, for example. Primetime Christianity is not, alas, an intellectually serious or theologically coherent movement. Fundamentalist Christians, for all their protestations of belief in Biblical inerrancy, are often ignorant of what Jesus said about tragedy and suffering.

But that doesn’t mean no Christian has ever pondered tough questions and come away with faith intact. John Stott wrote, “The fact of suffering undoubtedly constitutes the single greatest challenge to the Christian faith. Its distribution and degree appear to be entirely random and therefore unfair. Sensitive spirits ask if it can possibly be reconciled with God’s justice and love.”

At the heart of the misunderstanding is anthropomorphism, the old “If I were God” conundrum. “If God is omniscient,” they want to know, “then how come (fill in the blank)?” Are you claiming omniscience? The answer (forgive my snark) is that God knows what you don’t. Just as a good parent often makes decisions that a child will reject as unfair, God acts in our lives in ways that often do not become clear until we have gained perspective with the passage of time and the accumulation of experience and wisdom. Good parents sometimes have to let their kids stumble and fall, so they learn from their errors.

That dismissive atheists like Harris have not really put much thought into their judgments on religion is readily apparent in issues like suffering. If the question is “How can God permit so much suffering,” I have a couple of questions in return.

First of all, what is suffering? If I plan a trip to the beach but it rains, I am unhappy. Would you say, though, that I am suffering? Probably not. If I am a teenager in Darfur who has just witnessed his village burned and his family massacred in the middle of the night and I am fleeing for my life naked into the desert, you would probably say I’m suffering. Fair enough. But where is the dividing line between unhappiness and suffering? In order for a loving God to exist, must we never be unhappy?

How much suffering is “so much” that God could not possibly exist? People often point to the Holocaust, in which 13 million people were exterminated. How could God let that happen? (The better question, which God would like an answer to, is how did we let that happen?) If the Nazis had only killed 12 million, might there be a God? Six million? A hundred-thousand? Ten? One? Where is this line we cross between enough suffering that God is a possibility and too much? This is a difficult question to answer, especially since we’re not even clear on where mere unhappiness ends and suffering begins.

Here’s a question for atheists to answer, one posed by St. Augustine in the 4th century: “If there is no God, why is there so much good in the world?”

The fact that even atheists like Harris claim to be able to identify a distinct difference between the way the world is and the way it ought to be means there is a universal supposition of a standard of supreme good to which we should all aspire. Is that merely a byproduct of evolution? Frankly, the desire to kill others we judge different from ourselves sounds like the more Darwinian instinct.

Why didn’t God create a world without suffering? The simple answer is, He did. But he also gifted humanity with free will, which would be meaningless without the freedom to choose to do harm. Free will is either unconstrained or it is an impossibility.

Imagine a world without suffering. Really imagine it. It would be a world devoid of any of the human traits we value the most. What is generosity without poverty? What is heroism without danger? What is altruism without imbalance? What is sacrifice without cost? What is justice without cruelty? What is acceptance without bigotry? Courage without fear? Could we define sweetness without bitterness? For that matter, how could we prize unconditional love so highly if there were no hatred?

And if we have never suffered, how would we learn compassion?

We must also consider that even grotesque evil and senseless tragedy contain within themselves the potential for good. How many of us can say we have been through difficult periods in our life but are nonetheless better for having learned from the experience? Suffering gives us insight and earns us credibility.

Let’s go back to the Holocaust. It is likely the civil rights movement of the 1960s could not have taken place without the perspective that humanity gained from the racism of Nazi Germany. We learned – well, some of us did – that when we classify people merely according to arbitrary characteristics such as ethnicity, nationality, skin color, religion, gender or sexual orientation, when we group them by random categories of our choosing, we stop seeing them as individuals, and we stop valuing them as humans. Before we know it, we’ve killed 13 million of them.

When we start to consider these factors, it becomes clear that a life without suffering is a life without meaning. And if anything suggests the absence of God, it would be a meaningless life.