Honest Doubt Part 18 - Darkness made visible

This program was on God and the existence of evil and suffering. The 18th century philosopher David Hume  formulated the eternal questions about God and the presence of evil: "Is he willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?"

The program also looked at the work of the Jewish poet and Holocaust survivor Paul Celan, and the French Resistance writer Andre Schwartz-Bart.

John Stuart Mill ''To say that God's goodness may be different in kind from man's goodness, what is it but saying, with a slight change of phraseology, that God may possibly not be good?''

Of course there isn't a simple answer to the question of God and evil, and any attempt to explain away evil or justify it or legitimise it seems morally unacceptable, yet this isn't a simple QED end of argument as we still have to deal with the existence of good and with the possibility that things may just be a lot more mysterious than we can actually comprehend. It takes some sort of faith either way - whether to believe in God and the good, or to believe in meaninglessness and nihilism.

Tim Keller quotes Tolkien when he asks "is everything sad going to come untrue?" - I guess we have all had the experience when we heard some bad news or imagined something terrible had happened only to discover that what we originally believed was not really the case, what we feared to be true in fact never was.

The whole Christian (and not only Christian) idea of the God who suffers, who takes suffering into himself, who dies yet who returns from death seems to point to a mystery at the heart of suffering perhaps bound up with the mystery of God.

The message of compassion, forgiveness and loving your enemies is all caught up in the experience of suffering and evil - there is some sort of message of love shining brightest in the deepest darkness.

Beyond that, when we have finished contemplating the monotheist responses to suffering and evil we still have not yet started on all the other various religious responses - the pagan, polytheist, Buddhist, Hindu, Taoist, Jainist etc - Hume himself believed in God, just not in the Christian God, so the question of evil may change our conception of God or the Gods, it does not have to destroy it.