The Problem of Good: When the World Seems Fine without God by

Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781596388727
Publisher: P&R Publishing
Published: 2014-10-13T04:00:00+00:00

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How Should We Then

Live in the World?

David Skeel

THREE DECADES AGO, two college girls spent the summer before their senior year working with the migrant farm workers who harvest lettuce, tomatoes, and other crops in rural North Carolina. The girls helped to coordinate first aid, legal support, and other services for the workers, most of whom came from Central America. They slept in the same wooden shacks that the workers lived in. They didn’t exactly take a vow of poverty, but it was close. During the summer the two girls, both of whom had grown up in the upper middle class, promised one another that they would never buy a sofa or chair made with natural fibers. A year after college both enrolled in the master’s program in social work at Bryn Mawr College as their first step toward careers in social work and in the nonprofit sector.

These friends were my first face-to-face confrontation with the problem of good—the puzzle of why those who reject Christianity often seem better, and contribute more, than Christians do. I had become convinced of the truth of Christianity at about the same time that my friends were giving up natural fibers. The problem of evil did not trouble me a great deal then. The origins of evil might be a mystery, but its pervasiveness certainly was not. As I looked at myself and the world around me, the Bible’s claims that each of us is sinful and that human social and political structures are tainted by sin seemed indisputably true.

The problem of good was far more troubling. My friends did not have any particular interest in Christianity, but each had a passionate desire to “visit orphans and widows in their affliction,” as the epistle of James puts it (James 1:27). They were committed to meeting the needs of those around them, and in neither case has this passion dimmed. Although I concocted reasons to the contrary, by any plausible yardstick my friends were much better people than I was, and I cannot claim to have surpassed or even equaled them since.

The puzzle has two different sides. The dark side is the behavior of us who call ourselves Christians. Why, as C. S. Lewis put it, can bad or disagreeable people still be found in our churches? And why have Christians been responsible for so many atrocities throughout the course of history? These are important questions, and they have generated a great deal of thoughtful discussion, particularly in recent years. Lewis pointed out, for example, that it would be misleading simply to compare the goodness or badness of a Christian to that of a non-Christian, even if we could perfectly assess their relative goodness. The more relevant question is whether a Christian has improved since embracing Christianity, not what kind of person she was when she first came to church.1 Jesus himself said that the sick are the ones who most need a doctor, not those who are well. Defenders of Christianity acknowledge that

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