God vs. The Existence of Pain

God vs. The Existence of Pain

“It is one thing to pray for new Lexus and not get one; it is quite another to pray for relief from agonizing pain. Certainly you would have to be delusional to expect a new Lexus, unless maybe you belong to Joel Osteen's Prosperity Church. However, the pain issue is totally different. Any god who would allow such pain is either sadistic and the equivalent of a terrorist or powerless.”


The short answer is that pain exists, despite the existence of God, because The Kingdom of God is not yet with us. John the Baptist, Jesus, St. Paul and John of the Book of Revelation all were apocalyptic preachers. Their message was things may be tough now, but hang in there baby, the Kingdom of God is nigh, and everything will be perfect then. Problem is, their perspective of “everything” and “nigh” was a bit (excuse the term ) “parochial.”

Going “quasi-scientific” on you once again, the universe is a really, really big place and it has existed for a really, really long time. Two “forces” account for the existence of the universe as we know it. One is the force of randomness, or chaos, which is indifferent to pain and suffering. The other is consciousness, or God, which seeks order and perfection, a result of which pain and suffering will cease. Now God may (or may not) be infinitely powerful (infinity is a difficult concept to grasp for us humans) but God also has an infinite area of responsibility, and an infinite amount of time to act. As a result God’s power is spread pretty thin at any particular point and time. In an analogy I used before of Signal-to-Noise ratio, at any given time the God-to-Chaos ratio is pretty, pretty low. From our human perspective, God will probably not achieve his goal of perfection anytime soon, and almost certainly not in our lifetime, as John the Baptist, Jesus, St. Paul and John of the Book of Revelation all expected. This is not God’s problem; this is a problem of our very, very limited perspective.

Now, if you and I are not going to experience The Kingdom of God on earth during our lifetime, what hope is there for us? Because all of the arguments about the existence or non-existence of a good God boil down to “Is there hope for us as individuals or not?” This is where the promise of the resurrection and of eternal life offers us hope. We are not going to see the cessation of pain and the establishment of perfection in the microcosm of our earthly existence. But eternity is a long, long, long time and over that time scale God will achieve his goal, which we humans have named “Heaven”.

So, what does this have to do with the effectiveness of prayer? Earlier I stated: “People are sometimes disappointed when their prayers are seemingly unanswered, and they conclude that God does not exist or that he does not love them or that he is powerless.” While prayers for the immediate cessation of pain may seem to be unanswered, this does not necessarily lead to any of the above conclusions, and while I may not have “proved” my thesis with the argument above, I think it is plausible, if not convincing.