If God is good, why is there suffering?

Cold open

Daniel: November first, 1755. Lisbon. It's All Saints' Day, a holy day, so on a Saturday morning the churches are packed. Candles burning on every altar. And at about twenty to ten, the ground starts to shake.

Clara: Three shocks, wasn't it? Over several minutes.

Daniel: Three shocks. One of the most powerful earthquakes Europe has ever recorded. The churches come down on the people inside them. The candles start fires that burn for days. And the people who run down to the harbor to get away from the flames — — a tsunami comes in after them.

Clara: Hm.

Daniel: Historians think somewhere around thirty to forty thousand people died. On a holy day. In church. And a French writer named Voltaire sits down and writes a furious poem asking the question people have been asking for as long as there have been people. If God is good, and God is in charge — why?

Clara: It's the question I hear every week. In a hospital room. Usually at three in the morning.

Daniel: And that's why you're here. I'm Daniel Voss. Joined by pain scientist and palliative care physician Dr. Clara Whitaker, this is Episode 17: Why, God?

The Bible Asks It First

Daniel: Okay, I want to start somewhere people don't expect. Everybody assumes the problem of suffering is the skeptic's question. The thing atheists throw at believers.

Clara: Isn't it?

Daniel: It's the Bible's question. Before it was anybody else's. Listen to this. Habakkuk, chapter one: "How long, Lord, must I call for help, but you do not listen? Or cry out to you, 'Violence!' but you do not save?" That's a prophet. Talking to God. In Scripture.

Clara: Huh. That's — that's angrier than I thought the Bible was allowed to be.

Daniel: Oh, it gets angrier. Roughly a third of the Psalms are laments. Complaints. Psalm thirteen: "How long, Lord? Will you forget me forever?" Psalm eighty-eight ends — it literally ends — with "darkness is my closest friend." No happy ending. That's the last line.

Clara: Wait, really? It just — stops there?

Daniel: It just stops. And then there's a whole book about it. Job. A good man loses his children, his money, his health, in about two chapters. And his friends show up and say, basically, "you must have done something to deserve this."

Clara: I've met those friends. They visit my patients.

Daniel: Everybody's met those friends. And here's the twist. At the end of the book, God shows up — and he says the friends were WRONG. Job forty-two: "You have not spoken the truth about me, as my servant Job has." The man who yelled at God got it more right than the men who defended him.

Clara: Okay. I did not know that.

Daniel: And the last one is the one that gets me. On the cross, Jesus quotes Psalm twenty-two. "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" He asks it too. The word "why." From the cross.

Clara: Hm.

Daniel: And one more, because it's my favorite. Lamentations. Somebody's sitting in the ruins of Jerusalem after the Babylonians burned it. Starving people in the streets. Chapter after chapter of grief. And then, right in the middle of the rubble: "Because of the Lord's great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning."

Clara: In the rubble.

Daniel: In the rubble. Not after it was rebuilt. That's where the most famous hope verse in the Old Testament was written.

Clara: So you're saying the question isn't — it isn't disloyal.

Daniel: I'm saying it's in the Book. God put the question in his own Book. Whatever the answer is, it isn't "stop asking."

The Gift Nobody Wants

Daniel: Okay. Your lane. You study pain for a living. Which — honestly — sounds like the worst job in the world.

Clara: People say that at parties. And then they don't talk to me for the rest of the party.

Daniel: So what IS pain? Physically.

Clara: It's an alarm system. You have nerve endings all over your body called nociceptors — they're danger detectors. Heat, pressure, chemicals from damaged tissue. They fire, the signal goes up the spinal cord, and the brain decides: this matters, pay attention. Pain is the brain saying "stop doing that."

Daniel: And what happens to people who don't have it?

Clara: That's the part people don't expect. In 2006, a team published a paper in Nature about families in northern Pakistan who couldn't feel pain at all. One gene, called SCN9A — it was broken. And the case that led them there was a boy in Lahore. A street performer. He'd push knives through his arms and walk on burning coals. And he felt nothing.

Daniel: Okay, that sounds almost like a super —

Clara: — a superpower. That's what everybody thinks. He died just before his fourteenth birthday. He jumped off a roof to impress his friends.

Daniel: Oh.

Clara: His relatives they found had bitten into their own tongues and lips. Broken bones they never noticed. And there's a related condition, CIPA, where kids can't feel pain and can't sweat. About one in five of them die before age three. Mostly from fevers they can't feel and can't cool down from.

Daniel: So a world without pain —

Clara: — is a world where you die young and don't notice it happening. Pain isn't the opposite of being healthy. It's what keeps you healthy.

Daniel: There's a doctor I have to bring up here, because you'll know him. Paul Brand.

Clara: Oh, of course. Every pain person knows Paul Brand.

Daniel: A surgeon, a Christian, worked with leprosy patients in Vellore, in India. And everybody assumed leprosy just — rotted fingers and toes away.

Clara: And he showed it didn't. Mostly. The disease kills the nerves. People lose feeling. And then they get hurt and don't know it. They'd grab a hot pot, walk on a nail, and keep walking. The damage was mostly injury they couldn't feel.

Daniel: He wrote a book with Philip Yancey. The title says it all. "Pain: The Gift Nobody Wants."

Clara: Great title. Terrible gift.

Daniel: And there's a line in Psalm one thirty-nine, "I am fearfully and wonderfully made." I used to read that as a nice greeting-card verse. Now I read it and think about nociceptors.

Clara: Mm. Okay — but I have to stop you before you make this too tidy.

Daniel: Go.

Clara: Pain as an alarm explains a hand on a hot stove. It does NOT explain most of what I see. About a quarter of American adults have chronic pain, according to the CDC. Pain that goes on for months. Often it's not warning you about anything anymore. It's an alarm stuck on. And cancer pain at the end of life? That alarm isn't saving anybody.

Daniel: Yeah. That's fair. The alarm explains why pain exists. It doesn't explain why it breaks.

Clara: And that's — honestly, that's the difference between my textbook and my patients.

The Planet That Shakes

Daniel: Okay, let's go back to Lisbon. Because what happened there isn't a person doing evil. It's the ground. Philosophers call that "natural evil." Earthquakes, floods, disease. Nobody chose it.

Clara: And for a lot of people that's the harder one. You can blame a murderer. Who do you blame for a fault line?

Daniel: Right. So here's something I learned getting ready for this. Earthquakes happen because the Earth's crust is broken into plates, and they move. Plate tectonics. And scientists who study what makes a planet livable — they keep coming back to plate tectonics as one of the things Earth NEEDS.

Clara: Wait — needs? The thing that killed Lisbon?

Daniel: Needs. The way it was explained to me: carbon dioxide gets pulled out of the air by rain and rock, washed into the ocean, ends up on the sea floor. And the plates carry it down into the Earth and volcanoes eventually breathe it back out. It's a thermostat. Over millions of years it keeps the planet from —

Clara: — from freezing over. Or cooking.

Daniel: Exactly. And the same churning brings up nutrients — phosphorus — that life runs on.

Clara: Hm. So the same machine that kills people in a city —

Daniel: — is the machine that keeps the whole planet alive. You don't get one without the other. At least not on any Earth we know how to build.

Clara: I'll be honest, that's — clever. But a grieving mother in Lisbon doesn't care about the carbon cycle.

Daniel: No. And she shouldn't have to. But there's a second thing. After Voltaire wrote his poem, a younger writer wrote him back. Jean-Jacques Rousseau. And Rousseau said — I love this — "it was hardly nature who assembled there twenty thousand houses of six or seven stories."

Clara: Oh, that's sharp.

Daniel: His point was, a lot of the death was us. How we built. Where we crowded.

Clara: And modern data backs him up, actually. In 2010 there were two big earthquakes, weeks apart. Haiti, magnitude seven. Well over a hundred thousand people died. Then Chile, magnitude eight point eight — hundreds of times more energy —

Daniel: — hundreds of times —

Clara: — and about five hundred people died. Different distances from the cities, different depths, yes. But Chile had building codes and drills. Haiti mostly didn't. Poverty killed a lot of people in Port-au-Prince. Not just the fault.

Daniel: So even "natural" evil has a lot of human fingerprints on it.

Clara: A lot. Not all. A tsunami's a tsunami.

Why Not Just Stop Us?

Daniel: Okay. Moral evil. People hurting people. This is where I think the oldest argument still works best.

Clara: Free will.

Daniel: Free will. The challenge goes back to the Greeks, and David Hume put it famously: "Is he willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent." And in 1955 a philosopher named J. L. Mackie said God and evil are flat-out logically contradictory. You can't have both.

Clara: That always seemed pretty airtight to me.

Daniel: And then in the seventies, Alvin Plantinga — a Christian philosopher at Calvin College, later Notre Dame — wrote a short book, "God, Freedom, and Evil." His point, really simply: if God wants creatures who can really love, they have to really be free. And if they're really free, they can really choose evil. Even God can't make a free choice that isn't —

Clara: — free. Hm.

Daniel: And here's the thing. Today, most philosophers — including a lot of atheist philosophers — agree that argument works against the "logically impossible" version. Mackie's version is mostly retired.

Clara: Okay. As a doctor, I'll give you that one. Love you can't refuse isn't love. It's — anesthesia.

Daniel: That's going on a mug.

Clara: You can have it. But — and you knew this was coming —

Daniel: I knew.

Clara: — free will explains a man with a gun. What free will does a fawn have?

Daniel: A fawn.

Clara: A philosopher named William Rowe, 1979. He asks you to imagine a fawn caught in a forest fire. Badly burned. It lies there for days, in agony, and then it dies. Nobody sees it. Nobody learns from it. Nobody's free choice caused it. What's that for?

Daniel: Yeah.

Clara: And Darwin felt this. In 1860 he wrote to his friend Asa Gray — who was a Christian, by the way — and said he couldn't persuade himself that a good and all-powerful God would have designed a wasp to lay its eggs inside living caterpillars, so the larvae eat them from the inside. "Or that a cat should play with mice."

Daniel: And Darwin had lost his daughter.

Clara: Annie. She was ten. 1851. A lot of historians think that, more than any theory, is where his faith really went.

Daniel: Yeah. I don't have a neat answer for the fawn. I'm going to say that out loud.

Clara: Thank you. That's — honestly, that's rarer than you'd think.

The Porch

Daniel: Can I tell you something I haven't really told on the show?

Clara: Of course.

Daniel: I've talked before about my dad's jacket. The one in the box in my closet. What I didn't say is how much I prayed. When he got sick. My whole church prayed. We had a list going. People fasting. And every scan came back worse.

Clara: Hm.

Daniel: And near the end, he's on the porch in that jacket, and I'm in the kitchen, and I just — I put my hands on the counter and I said, out loud, "Are you even listening?" Not a nice prayer. Not a church prayer.

Clara: That's Habakkuk.

Daniel: That's exactly Habakkuk. I didn't know it then.

Clara: What happened?

Daniel: He died. In March. And for about a year I went to church and sang the songs and I felt — nothing. Like praying into a pillow. And the thing that got me through wasn't an argument. It was C. S. Lewis. But not the Lewis everybody quotes.

Clara: Not "The Problem of Pain."

Daniel: No. He wrote "The Problem of Pain" in 1940. Very confident. Brilliant. Then twenty years later his wife, Joy, dies of cancer. And he writes another book — "A Grief Observed" — and he was so raw he published it under a fake name. And in it he says, when you go to God in desperate need, you find "a door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside."

Clara: Wow. The apologist wrote that?

Daniel: The apologist wrote that. And then — this is the line — he says he's not really in danger of —

Clara: — of losing his faith?

Daniel: Of ceasing to believe in God. He says that. "The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him." And that was me. Exactly me. I didn't stop believing. I was afraid of what I believed.

Clara: And now?

Daniel: Now I think God was in the kitchen. I just couldn't feel him. Your turn. You must have a hundred of these.

Clara: I have one I think about. A man in his forties. Pancreatic cancer. Three kids. He wasn't religious and neither am I, really, so we never talked about God. And one night, about two in the morning, he says to me, "I've stopped asking why." And I said, "What do you ask now?" And he said, "Who's going to sit here with me."

Daniel: Hm.

Clara: And I sat there. Not as a doctor. Just — sat. Until he fell asleep. I think about that more than any paper I've written.

Daniel: You know what Job's friends did right? Before they opened their mouths?

Clara: What?

Daniel: Job chapter two. They sat with him on the ground for seven days and seven nights, and "no one said a word to him, because they saw how great his suffering was." Best thing they did in the whole book. Then they started talking.

Clara: And ruined it.

Daniel: And ruined it.

Okay, but let's be honest

Clara: Okay. Now I get to push. Properly.

Daniel: Please.

Clara: I sit with dying children sometimes. And I've heard every line. "Everything happens for a reason." "God needed another angel." "God won't give you more than you can handle." And from where I sit — some of that does real —

Daniel: — damage.

Clara: Real damage. People think their cancer is a punishment. Or a test they're failing.

Daniel: I'm with you. Can I give you the Bible against those lines?

Clara: I'd love that, actually.

Daniel: Luke thirteen. A tower falls in Jerusalem, at a place called Siloam, and kills eighteen people. And Jesus says — do you think they were worse sinners than everybody else in Jerusalem? "I tell you, no!" And John nine — his disciples see a man born blind and ask, who sinned, him or his parents? And Jesus says: neither.

Clara: So Jesus rejects the "you deserved it" answer.

Daniel: Flatly. Twice. And "God won't give you more than you can handle" isn't even in the Bible. Paul writes the opposite in Second Corinthians — they were "under great pressure, far beyond our ability to endure." The point wasn't that they could handle it. It's that they couldn't, and God carried them.

Clara: Okay. That's — honestly, I wish more chaplains said that. But here's my real push. The fawn. Darwin's wasp. A child with leukemia. You can explain some suffering. Pain as an alarm, plates as a thermostat, freedom as the price of love. But not all of it. Not how MUCH there is. A scholar named Bart Ehrman — he was an evangelical, went to Moody and Wheaton — he left the faith over exactly this. He wrote a whole book about it. "God's Problem."

Daniel: I know. And I've read it. And I'm going to concede it. I can't explain every case. Nobody can. Job never got his why. God never tells him about the conversation in heaven in chapter one. He gets a tour of creation and a question back — "Where were you when I laid the earth's foundation?"

Clara: That always sounded to me like "I'm bigger than you, stop asking."

Daniel: I get that. I read it differently now. It's "there's more going on than you can see from where you're sitting." Which — honestly — is what you'd say to a four-year-old in a hospital getting a shot. She can't understand why. She CAN understand that you're holding her hand.

Clara: Hm. Okay. That's a better picture than I expected.

Daniel: And can I push back once? Gently?

Clara: You've earned it.

Daniel: When you say the fawn's suffering is wrong — and it is — where does "wrong" come from? Lewis again. He said when he was an atheist, his argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. And then he asked himself, "But how had I got this idea of just and unjust?" A line is only crooked if you have some idea of a straight line.

Clara: Mm. Okay. I'll give you this much. Without God, I don't have a "why" either. A universe of particles doesn't owe the fawn anything. My worldview doesn't answer the question. It just — dissolves it. And I've never been comfortable with that.

Daniel: And I'll give you this. Mine doesn't dissolve it. It makes it hurt MORE. Because I believe somebody's in charge.

Clara: So we're both stuck.

Daniel: We're both stuck. Just facing different directions.

The God Who Weeps

Daniel: In Episode 14 we talked about the scars. The idea that God didn't watch suffering from a distance — he walked into it. I won't redo that. But there's one small moment I want to add.

Clara: Go ahead.

Daniel: John eleven. Jesus's friend Lazarus has died. And Jesus is on his way to the tomb, and — in the story — he already knows he's about to raise him. Five minutes from now this is a party.

Clara: Right.

Daniel: And he gets there, and he sees Mary crying, and the shortest verse in the Bible: "Jesus wept." Why cry, if you know the happy ending is five minutes away?

Clara: Because the grief is real, even if it's not final.

Daniel: That's it. That's exactly it. He doesn't skip the funeral to get to the —

Clara: — the resurrection.

Daniel: He cries at the funeral.

Clara: Can I give you something from my side? There's research on what's called post-traumatic growth. Two psychologists, Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun, coined the term in the nineties. A lot of people who go through terrible things report, later, that they grew. Deeper relationships. A changed sense of what matters. Sometimes a deeper faith.

Daniel: That's beautiful.

Clara: But I'm going to be strict. Not everyone. Growth isn't guaranteed. And it doesn't make the trauma GOOD. Nobody should hear that research and say "cancer was a gift."

Daniel: Agreed. Paul's word is "groaning." Romans eight. Creation groaning, like a woman in labor. We had that in Episode 11. It's not "this is fine." It's "this hurts, and it's going somewhere."

Clara: And Viktor Frankl — the psychiatrist who survived Auschwitz — he liked to quote Nietzsche: "He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how."

Daniel: And the Bible's last word on the "how" is Revelation twenty-one. "He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain." Not "there was no reason to cry." Wipe every tear. Which means he sees every single one.

A Listener Asks

Daniel: We got a message I want to read, because it's a sharp one. A listener writes: "If Satan is responsible for evil, why does God let him operate? And if God can stop him but doesn't, isn't God responsible?"

Clara: Oh, I'm handing that one straight back to you. That's your lane.

Daniel: Fair. Okay. First, the Bible doesn't blame everything on Satan. A lot of evil is just us. "The heart is deceitful above all things," Jeremiah says. Satan is real in the story, but he's not a second god. In Job he has to ask permission. He's on a leash.

Clara: So why not pull the leash?

Daniel: Here's the picture that helps me. A theologian named Oscar Cullmann compared it to the Second World War. D-Day — June 1944 — was the decisive battle. After D-Day, the war was —

Clara: — basically decided.

Daniel: Decided. But the fighting didn't end until V-Day, almost a year later. And real people died in between.

Clara: Hm.

Daniel: The New Testament says the cross and the empty tomb were D-Day. First John three: "The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil's work." It's done. But we're living between D-Day and V-Day. And — honestly — part of why God waits, Peter says, is patience. Second Peter three: he's "not wanting anyone to perish." Every day V-Day doesn't come is a day somebody else can still come home.

Clara: I can't evaluate the theology. But as a picture — that's honest about the "in between." It doesn't pretend the shooting stopped.

Daniel: And the second half of our listener's question — God's responsibility. God doesn't sit outside the war. He landed on the beach. That's the Christian claim. He's not the general in a bunker. He took the bullets.

What Do We Do with a Story Like This

Daniel: Let me try pulling it together. Tell me where I'm overreaching.

Clara: Always.

Daniel: The Bible doesn't hide from suffering. It asks "why" more often than any skeptic does — Habakkuk, the Psalms, Job, Jesus on the cross. Pain itself is a protective alarm — people who can't feel it die young. The planet that shakes is the planet that stays alive. Much of what we call natural evil carries human fingerprints. Freedom is the price of love, and even many atheist philosophers concede that answers the "logically impossible" charge. Jesus rejects "you deserved it." And God's answer isn't a theory. It's presence. He sits on the ground with Job, he weeps at the tomb, he takes the wounds.

Clara: My refinements. One — pain as an alarm is real, but chronic pain and the pain of dying aren't alarms. Don't tell my patients their suffering is "useful." Two — the evidential problem, the fawn, the wasp, the amount of it — that's still standing. Daniel admitted it, and I respect that. And three...

Daniel: Three?

Clara: Three is that the man who stopped asking "why" and started asking "who's going to sit with me" — he was asking a better question than I was. I'm still not sure who the answer is. But I've stopped being sure it's no one.

Daniel: That's the most honest thing anybody's said on this show.

Clara: Thank you for having me, Daniel.

Daniel: Dr. Clara Whitaker, thank you. To everyone listening at three in the morning, in a waiting room, on a porch: you're allowed to ask why. The Bible asks it with you. You might not get the reason. But you're not sitting there alone. This has been Dust & Starlight.