​How can the presence of suffering be reconciled with God’s existence?

Answer Podcast

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
How do we justify the existence of suffering in this world with God’s existence? Two different things are there over here. First is, there is the fact of suffering. There is the fact of inequality and suffering in this world.
So now, we have three broad explanations for this. One is, it is by chance. So, life becomes like a lottery, and some people are winners, some people are losers.
We are the major bad luck for today. It’s a very disempowering world. It creates great insecurity.
It’s just chance. Today I am lucky, tomorrow I might just become unlucky. What to do about it? The other alternative is to say that God has caused this.
Which actually is, in some ways, even more distressing. Because if God is discriminatory, God makes some people wealthy, some people poor, some people healthy, some people sick. How can I worship a God? So, some people will say that no, but God’s justice is different.
This is an exam from God. This is a test from God. Yeah, the idea of testing is fine.
But suppose after you do a course, you are given question papers. And all of you get different question papers. Some get an easy question paper, some get a difficult question paper.
The question will not be why we have an exam, but why we have testing. The question is, why do we have differential testing? Different testing for different people. So, the idea that God is testing us, it doesn’t explain why God tests us differently.
So now, when people are just faced with these two alternatives, either believe in chance as the explanation for this, or God as the explanation. It’s often people choose chance, not because they really don’t believe that there is no order, but rather the idea of worshipping a God who is so discriminatory, that doesn’t just sit well with our head in the heart. Could there be a third explanation? Suppose we saw, this is a cricket match.
And there is one team which starts with a score of 0, another team that is starting with a score of 200. Hey, what’s going on? One is starting with 0, the other is 200. How would you explain that? One could be, the scoreboard is jinxed.
Scoreboard is messed up. Some people get a good score, while some people get a bad score. The other explanation could be that, the scorekeeper is biased.
The scorekeeper has given this team a higher score. A third explanation could be, maybe this is a test match, and the second team is going on. So, a team which seems to have a score of 200, that is the lead which it has accumulated from its previous innings.
Team which has less score, that’s because from our previous innings, they didn’t do so well in the previous innings. So, if we see life as a multi-life progression, then where we are right now, is determined by what we had done in our previous lives. So, the inequities that we see in life, they are a result of our own actions from previous lives.
And God is not their cause. We ourselves are the cause of where we are. This is a very empowering worldview.
Because that means, wherever I am, if I work right, I can live forever. This view actually redefines the universe as a university. Wherein, somebody might be a postgraduate student, and somebody might be a kindergarten student.
But the postgraduate student knows that I also had to go to kindergarten sometime. And the kindergarten student knows that if I keep studying, I’ll get there also. So, we all can grow and evolve from where we are.
And this is a worldview which reconciles the goodness of God with the presence of suffering in this world. Most important thing is that God is not the cause of the suffering. God is the cure for the suffering.
That means, when we come closer to God, when we absorb ourselves in devotion to God, when we pray to God, that gives us inner strength to deal with life’s issues. Say, it’s very cold outside. And the cold outside is there, but as soon as we come into a room where there is temperature accumulation, where there is artificial heating, we feel relief from the cold.
Similarly, in the world, there is suffering. But when we connect with God, at that time, we experience inner relief, inner strength. So, I’ll conclude with an anecdote.
Once a person who was a believer, he went to a doctor. And the doctor happened to be an atheist. He said, you believe in God? He says, come.
How can you believe in God? So many people are suffering. So many calamities happen. So, this person, this devotee, he didn’t say anything.
He took his prescription and went. After a few minutes, he came back into the doctor’s clinic. He says, there are no doctors in the city.
What do you mean? He says, come out. He took the doctor out. And just outside, on the footpath, there was a beggar.
He was coughing piteously. And he says, the very fact that he is sick proves that there are no doctors in the city. Isn’t that crazy? He says, he is sick because he is not coming to me.
I said, exactly. People are suffering because they are not coming to God. When they come closer to God, they truly become godly.
Suffering in this world is substantially reduced. So, God is not the cause of suffering. He is the cure for the suffering.
If I understood your question, thank you. Just a quick follow-up.