Why Do We Ask Why?

Stanley Bamberg

Stating the Dilemma

Over four hundred years ago the English poet, John Milton, wrote a poem seeking to "justify the ways of God to man." He gave us the great classic of English literature, Paradise Lost, whose central theme is why God tolerates evil in the world. People seem to consider the problem of evil or undeserved suffering the greatest objection to belief in a good, loving God. After all, how can a good God allow cancer or other lingering illnesses? How can God allow the deaths of thousands of people in natural disasters or hundreds of little children dying from napalm raining down from the skies? The skeptic declares, "Either God is all-powerful and he does not care about us so he is not worthy of worship or he cares but is impotent to combat evil and, therefore, also not worthy of our worship." Either way, the Christian feels the force of the argument. Philosophy calls this the problem of theodicy.

Of course, neither we nor John Milton were the first to recognize the power of this objection. More than a thousand years before Christ the book of Job dealt with the question of undeserved suffering. Why do the innocent suffer calamities that would be more appropriate for the wicked? Job's "answer," if it can be called that at all, is that we cannot really know why, since we would have to be God. This is not altogether satisfying for people who deny the existence of God altogether. The point here is that believers have long faced this objection. It is not a new challenge to the faith or the product of the enlightened, modern era.

But is this all that can be said on the subject? Is the Christian believer left to say, "I believe in spite of what my reason tells me. I accept God's goodness on blind faith!" I think not.

Another Way of Seeing

There is another consideration that puts the matter in an entirely different light. Why do we ask why? The materialist (and we believers as well) asks, "Why?" We feel, or perhaps our intuition informs us, that things are not in order. Something in the world is out of kelter or not as it should be. If we were making the world, we would make it a better place where things worked.

This point was brought home forcefully in the movie Grand Canyon. Danny Glover, playing the role of the tow truck driver named "Mac," arrives to pick up Kevin Kline's stranded auto. A gang of street toughs hassles him as he tries to do his job. Mac engages the leader of the gang in the fundamentals of a Reformed worldview. "Man, the world ain't supposed to work like this. Maybe you don't know that, but this ain't the way it's supposed to be....Everything's supposed to be different than what it is here." [1]

The question, "why?" indicates we have an awareness, independent of our own natural, empirical existence, that there should be something better. For the materialist, whatever "is" is, by definition, "natural" and therefore, right. In the nature of the case notions of right and wrong

are inherently irrelevant. If what is natural is right, then death and suffering must also be natural and right. Yet we, both naturalist and Christian, rebel against this conception. We feel something must be wrong with reality. From this predicament we ask: From where does this feeling come?

Where the Argument Leads

Asking the question, "why?" cannot be explained by the beliefs of the naturalist. If we ask, "why?" then we are measuring what "is" by a standard independent of what "is." This standard cannot arise from nature[2] or experience because they can tell us only what is--not what ought to be. This standard of justice and morality, by which we arraign God, can only come from beyond nature, in other words, from God.

This turns the "problem of theodicy" on its head. The naturalist can only argue against the biblical view by assuming a biblical worldview. On his/her own terms there can be no problem of evil since there is no real evil, only some vague idea of misfortune. At the same time, the Christian freely admits that this world, with its calamities, is not the world that God created; its the one that humans perverted. We know that things are not right because "in the beginning it was not so." So the Christian can explain the origin of the question "Why?" whereas the naturalist cannot. [3]

In philosophy we refer to this kind of reasoning as a transcendental argument. That is, to explain what we find true in our human experience we must resort to knowledge that comes from beyond our human experience; i.e., that "transcends" human empirical knowledge. As Dr. Greg Bahnsen was fond of saying, "What are the preconditions of the intelligibility of human experience?" To make sense of the question "why?" we must posit a transcendent God from whom we receive a transcendent standard to judge and understand human temporal experience.

Conclusion

The Christian really has no "problem of theodicy." The materialist, however, has the problem of explaining the origin of the question, "Why?" [4] For believers, the problem of theodicy leads us to the God who created all things good. Seen in this light, the question, "Why?" is a powerful witness for the existence of the God of the Scriptures.

Stanley Bamberg, Drs., is a CAPO Fellow and Assistant Professor of Bible and Philosophy, Montreat College.

Endnotes

[1]Cornelius Plantinga also uses this episode in his book, Not the Way It's Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin, Eerdmans, 1995.
[2] Think of Alfred Tennyson's great phrase from his poem, In Memoriam, "nature writ read in tooth and claw." The point is that when we watch The Discovery Channel and see the hungry lioness down the hapless gazelle to get a meal for her starving cubs, we do not say the lioness is evil.
[3] Notice the careful wording of the sentence. The origin of the question, "Why?" is on a different level than the origin of evil itself. There are, of course, arguments from a biblical viewpoint here as well. See Jay Adams, The Grand Demonstration: A Biblical Study of the So-Called Problem of Evil, EastGate Publishers, 1991.
[4] The all too common response for many postmoderns is not to think about the problem at all. Perhaps this is best illustrated by A. E. Houseman's poem from the last century, "Terence, This Is Stupid Stuff."

And malt does more than Milton can
To justify God's way's to man.
Ale, man, ale's the stuff to drink
For fellows who it hurts to think:
Look into the pewter pot
To see the world as the world's not.

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