Book Review: The Problem of Pain

Gregory Rummo recently shared a review with us of The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis. He is back this week with another of Lewis’s works, The Problem of Pain.

SUMMARY

The Problem of Pain by C. S. Lewis is an attempt to explain, intellectually, why a good and all-powerful God allows pain in the world. He writes, “If God were good, He would wish to make His creatures perfectly happy, and if God were almighty, He would be able to do what he wished. But creatures are not happy. Therefore, God lacks goodness or power or both. He provides a convincing argument to the reader why this assumption is wrong.

Introduction

At the outset, Lewis posits the atheist’s case for the non-existence of God. Having been an atheist himself, he is an expert, and he is convincing. Man is a conscious being, able to both experience and inflict pain on other rational and irrational beings. History is a record of crime and war. Civilizations have come and gone. Entropy dictates the universe is running down, tending towards a state of increasing disorder. Lewis writes, “All stories will come to nothing: all life will turn out in the end to have been a transitory and senseless contortion upon the idiotic face of infinite matter. If you ask me to believe that this is the work of a benevolent and omnipotent spirit, I reply that all evidence points in the opposite direction” (3). This is the hole Lewis digs for himself. He spends the rest of the book climbing out of it.

Lewis paints a picture of man’s ascent from barbarism to Christianity. He takes us on a three-point journey from natural revelation to special revelation starting with the ability to sense the invisible things (Rom. 1:20) or the spirit world which he calls the numinous. He then introduces a general sense of ought which all men have as morality. He posits the Jews in the Old Testament as the best example of the linkage between the Cause of the numinous and the Person who demands obedience to a moral standard. The final element in his argument is the historical Incarnation of Jesus Christ, which Lewis compares to a strange myth, something “not transparent to reason’ that we could not have predicted ourselves” (15). He then explains that rather than solving the problem of pain, Christianity created the problem of pain, “for pain would be no problem unless, side by side with our daily experience of this painful world, we had received what we think a good assurance that ultimate reality is righteous and loving” (14).

Divine Omnipotence

Lewis defines divine omnipotence not as the power to do everything but to do “all that is intrinsically possible” (18), meaning that God should not be expected to engage in nonsense. Miraculous interventions, Lewis explains, do occur albeit infrequently and in fact occasionally “modify the behavior of matter” (25)—a floating ax head, a talking jackass, a cruse of oil that never runs dry for example. But to expect God to modify all matter to correct for painful abuses of free will would be a world where wrong actions were impossible, making all freedom void (24). Hence, God self-limits His omnipotence to allow for freedom of choice, however painful the consequences might be.

Divine Goodness

In order for us to understand the goodness of God, His goodness must be what we also recognize as good. If our good is God’s bad and our bad, God’s good, then “God is, we know not what. And an utterly unknown quality in God cannot give us moral grounds for loving or obeying Him” (28-29). Divine Goodness, however, does differ from ours. Lewis explains it is not a black versus white difference but a standard of perfection which he compares to a child’s first attempt to draw a circle to that which we all know to be a perfect circle (30).

Lewis then characterizes Divine Goodness in the context of love. Lewis’s understanding is a love that can rest “well-pleased” in man. God already loves us, and because of this, “He must labor to make us lovable” (41). To experience God’s love involves “our surrender to His demand, our conformity to His desire” (44). If love is merely making someone happy with no concern for a person’s character this would be deficient love. But God “wills our good and our good is to love Him’ and to love Him we must know Him and if we love Him, we shall in fact fall on our faces” (46).

Human Wickedness

Lewis wrote during a time when men no longer feared God as the early Christians, when “the Gospel brought news of possible healing to men who knew they were mortally ill” (48). But now, men’s perilous state, “the diagnosis,” first must be explained before the cure can be offered (48). This resulted in a “lopsided ethical development” (49), a culture (much as today’s) where shame had disappeared, and where kindness and benevolence were elevated, to the point where complacency was no longer recognized as a sin of omission (Jas. 4:17).

What is necessary to Christianity, Lewis writes, is the recovery of “the old sense of sin” (50) and the acceptance that we are responsible as individuals for failing to keep God’s moral Law. (59). Our guilt for not having done so is not reduced over time but by “repentance and the blood of Christ” (55). Lewis concludes this section by noting that man’s depravity is not total depravity, since man can recognize his own depravity. And this is critical to his thesis, for if we are to understand the problem of pain, we must realize the desperate state we are in: man is a creature that is not only a horror to God but a horror to himself (62).

The Fall of Man

It is the abuse of free will given to us by God that resulted in man not being fit for the universe that God originally designed. Free will, to be truly free, must be capable of allowing for the possibility of evil (63). Had God stepped in and removed the penalty of Adam’s sin by some miraculous waving of hands, this would have done nothing to change man’s nature and the cycle of sin, and miracle would continue making the “world a place in which nothing important ever depended on human choice” (65). In describing this first sin, Lewis borrows from Augustine who characterized the fall as a sin of pride against God himself (69). Laying aside Lewis’s discussion of what appears to be theistic evolution, he makes a frightening case for the fall:

[Adam’s sin] was transmitted by heredity to all later generations, for it was not simply what biologists call an acquired variation; it was the emergence of a new type of man—a new species, never made by God, had sinned itself into existence’ it was a radical alteration of his constitution, a disturbance of the relation between his component parts, and an internal perversion of them. (79).

And so, we are a “spoiled species” (81). Having spoiled ourselves with Original Sin, true goodness has come to be something remedial or corrective (85) in which pain sometimes plays a part.

Human Pain

Lewis admits that pain as a corrective is not a complete answer for there is much pain in the world that is inflicted by cruelty, leaving us to question “the reason for the enormous permission” granted by God for so much torture (86). Lewis categorizes pain as either biochemical—the result of nerve conduction that produces an unpleasant physical sensation, or pain in the emotional-psychological-physical sense, including “suffering, anguish, tribulation, adversity, and trouble” (88). He then argues that God allows pain to get our attention because “the human spirit will not even try to surrender self-will as long as it all seems well with it.” (90). Lewis writes that God, “whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain” (91). Going further, Lewis argues that pain shows bad men where they are wrong and appeals to our sense of justice that bad men deserve to be punished. Pain also reveals our need for God and reminds us that “God wants to give us everything we need but cannot because our hands are full,” (94). Pain can remind us of God’s love and desire to be involved in our lives. Finally, pain can be a signal that alerts us that we are choosing the good for its own sake, or to gratify our own desires, rather than because it’s God’s will. The ultimate intention, Lewis says for this last type of pain is to realize “all these toys” (106) were never intended to possess our hearts and that the real treasure becomes Christ and Christ alone.”

Human Pain, Continued

Lewis offers six additional thoughts about pain in this chapter. First, he discusses the apparent contradiction between the benefit of pain and the Bible’s command to work to alleviate pain. Next, he argues that political, social, and economic reforms may temporarily relieve pain, but they will never be final solutions as God’s use of tribulation is necessary for redemption and will continue until mankind is redeemed (114). Third, self-surrender and obedience are purely theological and not political (115). Fourth, God does offer joy, happiness, and merriment, but also uses pain to remind us that this world is not our final home (116). Fifth, individual suffering is not magnified by “unimaginable human sum of misery” (116). Finally, unlike evil, pain stops once it has achieved the goal God intended (118).

Hell

Lewis describes the doctrine of hell as that which he would most willingly remove from Christianity (119) if it were possible. But he cannot. It has the full support of Scripture, our Lord’s own words, and the support of reason. “If a game is played, it must be possible to lose it” (120). Lewis describes hell as both “positive retributive punishment” and a state where men who “prefer darkness rather than light” are allowed to remain in that state (124). But he is quick to point out that hell was never made for man but for the devil and his angels (Matt. 25:41). It is not a place of duration but of finality. Lewis concludes this chapter by making a personal appeal: It’s not about someone else—those bad people over there—but about “you and me”(131).

Animal Pain

While it may seem strange on its face to mention animals in a book on Christian apologetics, God created the animal kingdom and therefore we may assume animals are of importance to Him, although lacking eternal souls. The Fall hurt all of creation, which to this day is groaning in travail for redemption from the curse (Rom 8:22). While we should deem important whatever “furnishes plausible grounds for questioning the goodness of God” (132-133), Lewis maintains that it is outside human knowledge to understand the suffering of animals in the same way we can understand human suffering.

Heaven

Lewis writes that on the surface man acts as if he doesn’t desire heaven but deep down inside has desired nothing else. These are “tantalizing glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled echoes that died away just as they caught your ear” (151). If we can understand pain as being spatial and temporal to Earth and time, then the problem of pain is no longer a problem, but an anomaly in eternity, an intrusion into joy and happiness. Thank God, He often uses it to make “all things work together for good” (Rom. 8:28). In the eschaton, it will all make sense. Let us now reframe the atheist’s Problem of Pain from the Christian perspective given Lewis’s explanations: God is good, and that goodness must be understood in terms of a love that desires not only man’s happiness but also his sanctification. And God, being all powerful will effect whatever He believes necessary to accomplish His will, while respecting man’s freedom even if this causes pain.

Conclusion

The apparent contradiction of a loving, all-powerful God who allows pain and suffering in the world is uniquely a Christian problem, especially in Western, Christian culture where modern medicine and technology has delivered mankind from much pain and grief and created an entitlement mentality that we are deserving of a pain and problem-free life. We don’t want God to be our father but our grandfather—always giving us what we want and staying out of the way, despite the realization by most that the parent who gives his children everything they want is not a good parent. Sometimes correction is necessary for the good of the child.

Notwithstanding, pain in its broadest sense is a temporal anomaly, a tear in the fabric of the universe. It is literally the result of the Curse (Gen. 3:17) from Adam’s disobedience to God’s command given in the Garden of Eden. The resulting judgment is the cause of pain, suffering, cruelty, man’s inhumanity to man, evil, wars, famines and even natural disasters. God did not create evil. It is our own doing. The Logos created a Cosmos. We turned God’s creation into Chaos. Pain, suffering and evil were never God’s intention.

One day every injustice will be made right, “He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away” (Rev 21:4-6).