welcome to the Veritas Forum engaging University students and faculty in discussions about life's hardest questions and the relevance of Jesus Christ to all of life so welcome everyone it's wonderful to be with you yeah the way the format is for this evening is we're going to begin by asking Dr Lennox to say a few words for uh for 20 25 minutes and then we're going to go into a time of q a I'll begin by asking some questions and then you'll also have the opportunity to be asking questions was that already explained it was okay good so feel free as you hear things to be sending in your questions and we'll try to incorporate that within the Q a Time so without further Ado Dr Lenox well ladies and gentlemen thank you very much for the invitation to Harvard Medical School you may think it rather strange that a mathematician would come to medical school the fact that a mathematician would dare to come to a medical school but I need to explain to you that I come from Oxford where I'm professor of mathematics but perhaps more importantly than that I am a fellow at Green Templeton College it was originally two colleges one green one Templeton so we merged them and we didn't call it Templeton green because that sounded too much like a London subway station so we called it green Templeton and green College was founded by Cecil green the the founder of Texas Instruments to be a home for medicine so in fact I've been very privileged to work with countless Medics surrounding me and they even got me persuaded so far that I did a degree in bioethics and I think I'm the only professor of mathematics in England who has a degree in bioethics but it's a wonderful privilege to be invited here and particularly to be honored by being interviewed by someone who is in the very sensitive area of medicine and that is in palliative care because the topic we have before us tonight is one of the most difficult questions that any of us face whether we're Christians whether we're atheists agnostics or whatever particular worldview we have we're all faced with the questions of pain and of suffering now I want to just set it up so we can get the real mate of the evening because I look forward to the questions much more than they do to my old talks I can find myself considerably boring um so we'll set up a few ideas that you might want to think about that will form a framework for our discussion and the the first thing is of course there are two problems here there's the problem of moral evil 9 11 for instance and there's a problem of natural evil Ebola for instance those are logically distinct problems although of course they can intermingle for example problems of malnutrition can be created by deforestation caused by very greedy exploiters so you can't always separate the problem of moral evil and the problem of natural evil but they have to be fought about together the second thing is there are two different perspectives I suspect many of you will be studying oncology and you will become and time professors of oncology it's one thing to study cancer as a professor of oncology it's another thing to have cancer and be told that you've only two or three months to live now I'm very sensitive to this because one these are very difficult questions they've got two sides the professor of oncology must have a certain Detachment must be intellectually rigorous if he's going to help the patient who's suffering but the patient who's suffering may need a great deal of empathy of emotional Counseling of care and help and therefore when we approach this question we're approaching something that's not just like the mathematics that I do in my work it's not like algebra it involves the deepest resonances of humankind and I'm very sensitive to that and I hope you will appreciate that as we go on I'm starting by telling you I find this a very difficult question but I know everybody else does because we're faced with a world that sends mixed signals to us and we have to try to interpret them we see in our world Beauty and love and have marvelous experiences like I've had in the last couple of days seeing for the first time in my life the leaves in New England turning gold and brown I I could not have imagined it could be so beautiful but at the same time I watch people being shot to pieces in Ukraine people being beheaded in the Middle East Ebola reaching North America it's a mixed picture that we're being sent and so each of us in this room has a world view we have our way of handling it now that worldview may be it will be if you're a student it will be just developing and the various ideas of how we cope with these things well in one sense there's many ways of coping with it as there are individuals in another sense there's only three or so major families of World Views because as we approach the problem of suffering and Evil we have to ask ourselves what do we believe Ultimate Reality to be and how is the problem to be seen against the background of Ultimate Reality and in the ancient world you had people that believe that mass energy was Ultimate Reality you have many people in the academy today that believe that they are materialist naturalists there are others in the ancient world like my hero Socrates and Plato and Aristotle who believe that there was Transcendence there were the gods there was God there was a a creator who created the universe and who upholds it in being and then there were the Skeptics the ancient postmoderns and so on and a third family of World Views is a family of pantheism where God of the universe coalesce into something fundamentally impersonal and in a sense those are the three or four major options there are many sub-options within them but they can um help us navigate our way at least into the beginnings of this uh very difficult problem so suffering coming from two logically distinct sources and the intellectual response first of all has been well expressed by David Hume I quote epicurus's Old questions are yet unanswered is he that is God willing to prevent evil but not able then is he impotent is he able but not willing then is he malevolent Izzy both able and willing quence then this evil now I find among my friends and I mean my friends not just my acquaintances I have many people who look at the mixed signals that the Universe sends to us and experience does and they become atheists they don't become agnostics so much as atheists and I never forget meeting two people from Israel in Austria at one stage and we were talking about these things and they they said we are atheists and I said I'd be very interested to know why because part of the reason I believe in God is your history as a nation and they said well we don't want to tell you and I said well that's okay I said why don't you want to tell me well they said you seem to be a very nice young man it was a long time ago you seem to be a very nice young man and we wouldn't like to disturb your faith and I said that's very kind but you know I believe in evidence-based Faith as much as you guys believe in evidence-based medicine and if my faith cannot meet objections it's not worth believing in any way so in the end they made up their minds to tell me and they said this husband and wife they read books to each other and they've been reading a book by the Israeli Nobel Laureate for literature bashevitz singer called the slave and in the book he describes how at one stage in Russia Jewish women and children were buried alive and I don't know whether it's a singer or not I've read the book but I my memory Fades slightly here but what they said to me was in that instant the light went out and we haven't believed in God since I sympathize with that ladies and gentlemen I stood in Auschwitz many times that I've wept every time many times and you will know people who have been injured my own brother was nearly killed by a terrorist bomb in Northern Ireland I come from a country where there's been violence in the name of religion in the name of Christianity actually we may want to get to that at some stage so I can understand and deeply sympathize where the person that says to me as a scientist okay you talk to me about evidence for God and the rational intelligibility of the universe and the fine-tuning of the universe in its mathematical describability etc etc etc okay the god of the philosophers may exist in some distant realm but please don't talk to me about a personal God who cares for us don't insult me because my experience of life has been so negative and so horrible that I cannot possibly bring myself to believe in such a god now I I would like to bring up the fact that looking at it just a moment from the intellectual side if I may many of my atheist friends feel that they've solved the problem of suffering and evil now what do they mean by a solution well what they mean is the universe is Bleak you just have to accept it as it is the extreme version of that is given by Richard Dawkins whom I've debated as some of you may know and Richard Dawkins view is that in a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replications some people are going to get hurt other people are going to get lucky and you won't find any Rhyme or Reason in it nor any justice the universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is at the bottom no design no purpose no evil and no good Nothing But Blind pitiless indifference DNA neither knows nor cares DNA just is and we dance to its music now it's important to take atheism seriously I do very seriously and I want you to notice about this analysis which is a reductionist taking Dawkins naturalism to its logical conclusion did you notice exactly what he said that there is no good and no evil DNA just as and we danced to its music now of course that means that the people that flew the planes into the Twin Towers of 9 11 were dancing to the music of their DNA as was Paul Pott and Stalin and Hitler and of course you know if people are simply dancing to their DNA how can you blame them well Dawkins can't because there's no good no evil now what I find very odd about that ladies and gentlemen is that it is obvious logically that this is a consequence of their world view but secondly what's not obvious to me is how they can then start making moral criticisms of God or moral criticisms of anything else because they're saying there is no morality there is no good there is no evil well if there is no good there is no evil that's it and the problem of evil vanishes intellectually and you say I'm not satisfied with that well good I'm not either and the reason I'm not is this that when we logically analyze it from a philosophical perspective taking this hard atheist view that there's no good there's no evil the trouble is we are moral beings and we see Good and Evil now from where I sit as a Christian that makes perfect sense because I believe that every person in this room whether they believe in God or not is made in the image of God that there's therefore a moral being capable of seeing good and evil and that's why even when Dawkins logical philosophical arguments leads him to deny the existence of both he still makes a moral diatribe against God because he's a moral being it at least explains that curious inconsistency now the second thing is this atheism is not a solution in that it doesn't remove the suffering the suffering's still there if you feel that atheism is the right intellectual solution to the problem of evil please notice what your solution doesn't do it doesn't alleviate the suffering and indeed I will want to argue a little later on that it can make it ten thousand times worse because of course atheism by definition death is the end and so there's no hope of any putting things right there's no hope of any compensation there's no hope of any moral compensation if you have been a victim of moral evil so there is to my mind a very major problem and it's very interesting you know I deliberately went two years ago to Ground Zero I happen to be staying very near but I thought I'd listen to the reading of the names you all know what the reading of the names is very moving but you know as I listened for hour after hour to the reading of the name something struck me there wasn't an atheist mention there were many mentions of faith in God against the background of 9 11. and indeed most moving of all was listening to parents or young people saying happy birthday dad when they lost their dad and talking as if their dad was still alive I I found that almost heartbreaking but it was so interesting in the face of consummate evil moral evil nobody was talking about the non-existence of God the people actually in the suffering appeared to be drawn nearer to God they weren't denying the existence of God of course that didn't prove anything it's simply an observable of a fact that struck me very very um uh clearly if we go down the atheist route of course we find this curious contradiction that I've mentioned because any mentioning of the problem of evil we all react similarly to these atrocities and the interest in that is we behave as if our judgment was objectively true that is we expect everybody else to condemn we're at 9 11. why because we believe it is absolutely wrong we believe in absolute moral values in some areas I know nobody who doesn't except people who are very seriously mentally Disturbed and J.L Maki was a famous Oxford philosopher who was an atheist but he said if there are objective moral values in the universe and there appear to be there's a direct line from there to the existence of God because it's very difficult and even Dawkins confess that up until relatively recently when Sam Harris changed his mind that you cannot get objective morality without belief in God Charles Taylor is one of the interesting commentators in our age of public intellectuals and he says you know the Modern Age more or less repudiating the idea of a Divine Law Giver has nevertheless tried to retain the ideas of moral right and wrong noticing that in casting God aside they've also abolished the conditions of meaningfulness for moral right and wrong as well thus even educated persons sometimes declare that such things as war or abortion of the violation of certain human rights are morally wrong and they imagine that they've said something true and significant educated people do not need to be told however that questions such as these now this is Charles Taylor questions such as these have never been answered outside of religion and I spent a lot of time in Russia and in the behind the Iron Curtain I'm old as the hills you see so I used to go behind the Iron Curtain in those days because I was very interested in what atheism does to a society and one of the things that I was told again and again is nature was right when Nature said if you get rid of God you'll ultimately get rid of value for human beings and many a Russian intellectualists said to me you know we thought we could get rid of God and retain a value for human beings we discovered we couldn't so there's that connection if we're asking about a source of moral evil Alexander Sal jalitson when he gave his address when he turned up in North America some years ago said if I were to sum up what it is that's caused the moral evil of the 20th century and a hundred million of my fellow citizens in Russia died I would say we have forgotten God so there are people joining dots in that particular way which You may wish to question as we go through so I'm just going to mention a word because it came before because very often when it comes to moral evil people will say but just a moment isn't belief in God part of the problem look at you coming from Northern Ireland what on Earth right of you to talk of all people that belief in God actually is a protector against moral evil when in your country there have been atrocities of Protestants fighting Catholics and so on and so forth I know all about that let me tell you something personal but it'll illustrate it my parents were Christian but they weren't sectarian that was very unusual in my country how did it manifest itself it manifests itself in my parents employing equally across Protestant and Catholic they believed and they taught me that every person is made in the image of God and therefore of equal value no matter what they believe secondly they allowed me to think which is why I'm staying standing here now and why I haven't rebelled against what I learned from my parents but you see if I'm asked in the face of the moral evil and the people left widowed by having their husbands murdered by terrorists either Protestant or IRA on that side what do I say about it well I say I'm utterly ashamed of it utterly ashamed of it utterly ashamed that the name of Christ has ever been associated with an AK-47 but the important thing for tonight is not that I'm ashamed of it is why I'm ashamed of it and why I'm ashamed of it is that Jesus stood in our world and said my kingdom is not of this world otherwise my servants would be fighting so that people who take up guns or bombs to defend Christianity are not followers of Christ they're denying him and disobeying him so they're not Christian and that's part of the problem that I as a Christian have to face that accusation but I believe the history shows of Christ himself and here's the irony of the whole thing as I pointed out to the late Christopher Hitchens who was accusing religion in general and Christianity of all kinds of Abyss I said Christopher listen if you actually had read what Jesus taught and the way he behaved to the underdog to people who were exploited and suffering and so on you'd be on his side you wouldn't be fighting him you'd be you'd be on his side so you obviously haven't read this stuff because Jesus was tried on the charge that Christianity his message was fermenting political violence it was causing suffering it was causing evil he was exonerated from it because pilate was sufficient of an intelligent person and a military General to see that someone who said my to this end was I born and to this end I came into the world that I should bear witness to the truth was no threat to him because the one thing ladies and gentlemen you cannot do by violence is impose truth you just can't do it so it seems to me that point number one is if you espouse atheism as a reaction to the problem with suffering you're not over the story isn't over yet because you're left with the suffering and you're left without any hope because all you have is death and that's it the Christian has a massive problem with it as epicurus and whom put it and we come to that in a little while but let's just see that it's not as simple as one thinks that the atheists obviously have a massive solution we can all go home because it doesn't work that way indeed I don't like even talking about solution I prefer to talk of a window into a way of dealing with it and living with it that's what I prefer to do and we so come to that way uh eventually the final question that I want to deal with before I sit down is the question look could a good God not have made a world in which there was no suffering I am sure all of us have asked that question I've asked it many times my answer to it is of course he could of course he could but you wouldn't have lived in it nor would I because it would empty the world of something most precious to our humanity and that is the capacity to love because is it not fair to say that our capacity to love depends on our capacity to choose we've got a certain freedom of will the creator has endowed it with us with endowed us with it if we believe in a Creator but we've got it and it gives us the most precious thing we have as human beings and the problem is if you create a world like that then choice to be real has to go in two directions you can choose the good either you can choose the evil and that has consequences now we may want to tease that out a bit but it seems to be enormously important for us to realize that if we say could God not have made a world in which these things didn't exist the answer is yes but none of us would have been in it God took a risk in making this world that's true but you know I'm old enough to be a grandfather I took a risk in having children I'll never forget it holding the first little girl well I've only got one girl in my arms I'm thinking you know this child could grow up to say no to me perfectly possible oh why have a kid you see it's interesting when you drop it from the Divine level just to the ordinary human level because we cannot insist that our kids are pre-programmed to behave as we would like them to and as they grow up we see that we've got powerful personalities emerging in our house over which we've got no control anymore you'll Discover it you folks you know you wait you'll see um it's a very real thing but it helps me get into this a little bit because God isn't a theory or a person we're not talking about Robotics and really what it boils down to is this would I prefer a robotic way for a real wife you know a way for the kind of iPad here and you come home and there's a big k for kissing you go kiss and you get a robotic kiss it'd be no fun would it 'd just be a pre-programmed response it would have no meaning now therefore I think C.S Lewis was right long ago when he pointed out that we can dissolve meaning out of the world and rationality and all the things we love of course we can't say God you should have made a world like that but we're left in a world where real choices of consequences and unfortunately some of them are absolutely disastrous so instead of saying well Goodwood should a good God have done this we can argue and many of us have done till midnight and later day after day after day and none of us have ever come to a satisfactory conclusion of that sequence of arguments so perhaps we ought to ask a different question and the different question would be granted it's like that is there evidence any evidence anywhere in the universe that God can be trusted with a real answer to it and that's what we're going to explore thank you very much ladies and gentlemen well good I'd like to um I have a couple questions and then I'll eventually will get a an iPad with some of your questions so I'm waiting for those and if you want to send those in keep on sending them in now I want to pick up Dr Lennox with this question of if there's no good and no evil uh the points you were making with regarding the so-called new atheists and you know my thinking is that they've been people like Dawkins have been very popular but I'm not so sure how many people find them really convincing and they may not be convincing but their position isn't the only position that might help explain morality and religion without having to turn to God so I want to engage that a little bit yes perhaps God is the foundation for Morality but that doesn't mean that God isn't still a social construction so hear me out for a minute and then I'll let you let you respond I think many within Psychiatry as well as within palliative care recognize that religion plays a major and important role within the experience of illness it is I think from the perspective of some a psychological phenomenon that can be seen both in the individual experience of illness as well as within societies by providing both individuals and societies a general meaning for life and it explains it gives a a rationale for suffering and comfort and Hope so for example within a patients facing life-threatening cancer myself and colleagues interviewed cancer patients at four Boston Harvard teaching hospitals in Boston Medical Center and we interviewed consecutively patients asking them a host of questions around religion and spirituality and 84 percent of those patients here in Boston which is not known to be the the Bible Belt 84 percent of those patients indicated and agreed that religion was helping them specifically cope and handle their cancer we also found that religious coping as other Studies have shown religious coping was strongly correlated with a higher psychological quality of life and higher quality of life in general and it was interesting as we interviewed these cancer patients considering the old adage there's no atheists in foxholes it appears to be mostly true not entirely true as we looked at uh and interviewed these patients 78 percent indicated that religion or spirituality was important to their experience of cancer in a positive and constructive way and even among the 22 percent who said that religion and spirituality wasn't important two-thirds of those indicated within uh various questions that were they were wrestling and struggling uh with with uh with spiritual questions um all told only seven percent were really consistent atheists within their terminal illness so that's a just a snapshot of individual patients here in Boston but I'm also interested in uh epipenoruses and engelhart's thesis which is looking uh it's based on the world value survey which is a representative National survey of beliefs and values in 76 Nations uh done in six waves over the last 25 years and they argue that societies turn to or away from religion based on security and measures of social of Social Security within their cultures and so when they measure things like economic equality education literacy income and affluence Health Care Health and social welfare all of these factors play a major role on whether that Society is more religious or less religious and those with lower human security caused by things like poverty War systematic corruption poor health inadequate education all have statistically significant higher religious values versus those countries that have much higher measures of security and they have much lower religious values so human insecurity and suffering I would suggest based on these theses both on an individual and Collective basis have a fertile ground provide fertile ground for for believing in Morality as well as in religion our characteristics as species work in tandem with our environment so it's not a all social construction there's there are the biological dimensions of our species and how we relate with one another and these things work together and so that individually or collectively we have greater levels of security or lower level levels of security and that explains a lot of why religion and morality exists we don't have to say that the idea of God is something that we've constructed and you can you can see that there are many players in this for example the producers of morality and religion have many potential self-interest consider clerics who by producing religion and morality gain power prestige money cultures governments can construct morality and religion in order to create and this is durkheim social cohesion authorization of Institutions their own power in light of insecurities on the other side the consumers of religion and morality have their own interests in believing it gives meaning an explanation in the face of the unknown sense of control and Order when life is chaotic hope and endurance despite overwhelming odds it creates a merit system that motivates our actions based on reward and Punishment so religion can be a good and I think many of my colleagues would argue that uh and recognize that religion is an important factor within many patients lives it should be something that's supported by the medical system sure that's I think that's most are willing to grant that because it provides a level of support and Hope but that doesn't actually make it true and I hear you indicating that it's true and I wanted to hear your response to that well you know less thing to to you it's fascinating I just put religion aside and come to Medicine I mean disease and poverty are a very fertile ground for medicine and can generate a whole structure of Medical Care people find that Medical Care enormously helpful and of course governments get involved and create all kinds of structures about medicine and so on so it's pretty clear that medicine is very helpful but it's that doesn't say it's true I would say that argument doesn't work at all but what you're pointing off here is the truth question is a separate question now I want to say several things about that the first thing is because something is helpful doesn't make it false secondly because we desire something powerfully doesn't make it false for instance and again it was Lewis pointed eight years ago we all have a desire we get thirsty it would be very curious to get thirsty said Lewis in a world in which water didn't exist it would be very strange to sexual feelings and work where sex didn't exist and he points out well it might be very curious therefore for people to have these religious feelings for God in a universe where God didn't exist so that I would agree with you entirely but the flip side of it is you could apply exactly the same arguments all of them to the institutions of medicine as I've said and none of you here at Harvard Medical School I hope would argue that because your medicine was helpful to people who are impoverished and poor and at the end of their wits and disease that there was no objective truth to your mentioned you wouldn't consider that for a moment and I would apply that there because why is that because there's a separate evidence base for medicine and the important thing is to realize that the psychological arguments don't answer the truth question let me go one step further because Freud waves behind all this as you know because he was the one who first probably well not the first they said it in the ancient Greek world of course but Freud rediscovered it that religion is an illusion and I'm very interested in that because you see I've a vested interest in it because when I got to Cambridge somebody asked me in week one do you believe in God and then he said oh dear sorry I forgot you're Irish all you Irish believe in God and you fight about it in other words it's Irish genetics don't go any further it's just you know that's it so that's why I spent most of my life exposing my faith in God to its opposite but the most important thing is and there's a wonderful book if you read German I recommend it to you it's called einaign a brief history of the great one written by Germany's top psychiatrist and it's very interesting because he said this if there is no God the Freudian argument that religion is helpful it's a crutch it's projecting our wish fulfillments and so on so forth It's brilliant for as an explanation of religion as you've given it brilliant if there is no God of course he said if there is a God the very same argument shows that atheism is the wish fulfillment the desire never have to beat God never to have to be accountable as one of the most brilliant polish Nobel Prize winners for literature ceswath mayor has pointed out and then Lutz gives his bottom line he said as to the question of whether there's a God or not neither Freud Frankel or young can help you you've got to go elsewhere and I'd say exactly that of this if Christianity is true I would expect all those results you've got I would expect them that doesn't prove it's true you'll have to get evidence that is independent of that but it's not evidence that it's false that's where I think the the flow goes in that argument that it all flows one way I can give you the same argument as I've tried to do for the Institute of medicine I can also give it at the level of belief systems for the belief system of atheism you can reverse everything and when I see a reversible argument I know immediately that the truth isn't there so that would be my first reaction to that okay good well let me turn to another question and and these are more theological uh explanations for why there's illness and hence suffering Bart ehrmann's book New Testament scholar at the University of North Carolina his book entitled God's problem he argues in that book that the that within the Bible it features two primary explanations of suffering or within illness so the first one is what he would call divine retribution that severe illness can be at least a punishment for our sins so this is widely held in almost every major religion Hinduism Buddhism animism Islam Judaism and Christianity we find strains of that Jesus himself said after healing a paralyzed man in the Gospel of John chapter 5 he said to the man who he healed see you are well sin no more that nothing worse may happen to you when we've interviewed patients we asked them here in Boston whether they felt that they were being punished so listen to this question sometimes God disciplines or punishes using illness and I'd like to we'll take a little straw poll here of the audience sometimes do you agree disagree or are you not sure sometimes God disciplines or punishes using illness how many would agree with that statement okay how many would disagree with the statement it's like we have a two-thirds majority there how many are unsure okay we've got some unsures too well when we asked cancer patients here in Boston 22 percent said that they believe that their cancer was a punishment from God that's one out of five Boston cancer patients we've also uh in a in the National clergy project on end of Life Care uh we've been asking them this very that very same question sometimes God disciplines or punishes using illness and among all U.S clergy and this is uh just over 600 responding so far we're still collecting the data 35 percent of clergy agree with that statement so the fir the first being divine retribution that we can understand illness and hence suffering as just punishment the second is this and this is back to Urban that illness is caused by what he calls Cosmic evil forces you know such as we can lay blame on on Satan or on demons again this is a view that's found in every major religion it's very prominent in in many countries including Judaism and Christianity interestingly when it considered the Book of Job where the cause of job's illness is the infliction from a spiritual Power by Satan as it begins in the beginning of the Book of Job begins that way uh and we see when Jesus heals many people in the gospels many of their illnesses are being caused by demons so two very prominent beliefs held by many patients across many cultures divine retribution and Cosmic evil forces and I'm wondering as a Christian scholar do you believe that these are in any way viable explanations and that we can seriously take any of these things seriously I think we can but it's a bit more complicated than that I feel so I would answer yes and no to the question which is not very helpful is it so let me try and spell it out a little bit I do take seriously what scripture says about these things and I noticed two strands of thought the first is that you cannot hold God responsible for all disease and our Lord himself made that perfectly claimed to his disciples who had believed this view this is the interesting thing because they came across a man blind from birth and the disciples asked Christ who did Sin this man or his parents that he should be born blind now that's a very interesting thing he had they attributed it according to popular thinking either to the man or to his ancestors it was a kind of incipient doctrine of karma and Christ said neither neither so I believe that that it is false to say that all illness is a result of God's discipline or anything else secondly it is massively dangerous to say that because if you tell someone as people are want to do who think they know better that this is the case you can damage them very profoundly psychologically as you may be aware in your own discipline now having said that it's clear that there is an element of the other side that God can allow people to suffer illness and disease as to teach them a lesson to discipline them that's absolutely clear in Scripture and um you know to the church at Corinth the uh Paul the writer said look your church is in an absolute mess and you've behaved so badly that some of you have become uh ill and some have died no it may be more complicated than saying it's directly divine retribution we have been built in a certain way by Nature I have a stomach that's a very nice instrument and it gets very nice ice cream into it sometimes it enjoys it but if I constantly fill it with methyl alcohol I ruin it because it wasn't built originally it wasn't designed to take 20 pints of Beer a Day you see and some of you may have discovered that already but you see so it seems to me that in the fabric of our bodies they're not neutral there are certain Behavior patterns that will conduce towards flourishing and health uncertain that do not now the the trouble is that we're all too ready or some people are too ready to see the direct intervention of God when of course it simply may be the indirect but very painful outworking of us being stupid and it's a very wonderful mechanism that if you if you boost too much you get sick that can save you from from poisoning yourself so I see two strands in scripture but I also see a third one and it's a very important one the Apostle Paul wrote more than half the New Testament and was a senior Christian Missionary he had eye disease that made it very difficult for him to write and he asked God to remove it and God said well my grace is enough for you Paul and therefore I'm going to teach you to Bear it and I think that's enormously important because God wasn't for curing it didn't guarantee a cure indeed told Paul there wouldn't be one that in his attitude to that disease he was going to learn things that would develop his character and so on and you and I know this we've watched people who've borne disease in a way which would shame us getting upset about the trivialities that bother us and those lessons can be absolutely and vitally important so I see a mixed picture and I think a perfectly Fair picture you say Do you believe these things yes I do but I'm very wary of the extremes because the danger is that somebody comes in from the outside and you're ill and says what have you been sinning about last week and this kind of stuff that is totally unwarranted it says it seems to me and very dangerous but also the other thing which is perhaps relatively rare but people get themselves possibly in a spiritual tangle and God uses some illness to bring them to their sense I've known that happened many times now your other question is to do with where evil comes from ultimately and you know it's curious actually because when I say as I would say that Satan does exist there is a personal evil malevolent force in the universe people say how absurd if I ask them if there's any extra intelligence outside the earth oh masses of it all over the place oh really so when the Bible claims there's some you poo poo it but you believe it's all over the place why couldn't some of it be evil that's an inconsistency actually in an intellectual reaction but look at this just for a moment this is a huge subject we can talk about it all night probably not too much profit but it is interesting that the Bible doesn't blame everything on Humanity that's the Striking thing to my mind you mentioned job whose disease was not caused explicitly in that book which is the biggest Treatise almost in all of literature and the problem with suffering and evil it was not caused by his Disobedience or his sin he behaved perfectly it was that God withdrew a certain level of protection and the enemy was allowed to attack him and attacked him incidentally jobs are very subtle book I wish he understood more of it because his attacks came both from physical natural evil that is the wind blew and the house fell and all this kind of thing and fire and it was also due to moral evil the sabians came and and fought them that the two problems are raised in the very same breath but behind it in his case there was a malevolent evil power and I find that in one sense depressing but nonsense very encouraging God doesn't blame the whole thing on me or us but of course it has a corollary and here's the important thing to my mind if that's true if that analysis is true it would be idle for me to think that I'm going to put the problem right and it raises a very deep and important question in the other direction if that is the case what provision has God made to do anything about it that's that's a question I want to know the answer to keep on sending in your questions let me ask another question this is based on a quote from C.S Lewis which I've heard often uh when it comes to suffering he he wrote in his book the problem of pain we can ignore even pleasure but pain insists upon being attended to God Whispers to us in our pleasures speaks in our conscience but shouts in our pains it is his megaphone to Rouse a deaf world now I can understand why Lewis made the statement and it certainly seems to imply that somehow God's love is reaching out to us in and through illness reaching down to us in order to to somehow get their attention to I would assume a loving a loving benevolent God in and through the illness but there are a number of instances in which to say this to someone in their suffering or maybe even to think that this way of approaching illness or explaining it um it it strikes me as potentially being awful and I want to just give three examples first consider Rider a four-year-old boy with dipg which is an inoperable brain cancer he will likely die in 12 to 16 months he lives in Orlando Florida in what way can illness be a megaphone to him or consider ho a 27 year old female with borderline personality disorder which is a serious mental illness characterized by pervasive instability in moods instability and relationships self-image poor self-image and behavior H.O had recurrent suicidal Behavior self-mutility mutilating Behavior like cutting and pulling out her hair and and she wrote in her blog these words I cut because pain of being borderline is so intense and so unbearable that the little kick of endorphins in reaction to acute physical pain is the only thing that brings relief from this horrific mental pain how bad would you have to feel she writes to want to to kill yourself I feel like it most of the time sometimes I prefer I had cancer Instead at least then the whole world would not blame me for desperate efforts to blunt the pain brought about by my biological vulnerability and abuse I suffered as a child and what's striking to me about certain types of mental illnesses is that it it afflicts the person it strikes them at their very emotional and rational States how can that be a megaphone third example consider Kelly a 74 four-year-old female with severe dementia she no longer regularly recognizes her daughters and despite having grown up and for most of her life being deeply faithful from childhood she has forgotten God how can these types of illnesses be claimed to encourage a person to seek God is this God's megaphone how can one claim that God is loving in God's Providence when he allows this level of Affliction to the person how is God loving to writer or ho or to Kelly in these bitter sufferings how can you as a Christian scholar intellectually claim that God's intention is love in these types of cases it was great difficulty and I may not sincerely ladies and gentlemen I think Lewis had a point but he wasn't right in the absolute sense much as I I used to listen to C.S Lewis many years ago and he's taught me a lot but I think within the context in which he intended it he was right but the examples you give it's not a megaphone I agree with your verdict it's awful and so how do we begin to come to terms with it let's start at the other end pain is enormously important I'm glad that I have nerves so that when I stick my hand Into the Fire by accident it tells me that something's going wrong and um I noticed that even ball players in this country have nerves and sometimes they're not very pleased with them but they do tell you when you need a bit of Chiropractic or something done in your back to make you fit for the next season so pain has a very practical and you all know that you don't need me to tell you that as Medics that's absurd I shouldn't even have said it but pain is very important we are equipped with nerves that give us pain that's the interesting thing and they are vastly important to the way in which we live and so on what troubles me about these things and troubles that anybody including you who thinks about them is it seems so out of proportion doesn't it just so out of proportion now we can go one of two ways as I said before but what what you're raising now is the problem of natural evil and there's a sense in which we can understand or not completely people who walk into a classroom and shoot people to death and so on we can see it's moral evil and we can blame X for doing it but when it comes to tsunami or these horrific diseases that you mentioned you Can't Blame a person for it so you say okay well blame God for it because after all if this is God's Universe he is ultimately responsible and that's true absolutely true you can't I can't avoid that I just cannot avoid that point there's no philosophical sophistry that gets you around that so here's what I'm faced with laughs those mechanisms that normally are very useful and healthy for us in our bodies those mechanisms that give us pain the response in the brain and so on when something goes very badly wrong and everything just goes viral to use the the current word and the pain is inordinate and unacceptable and has to be dealt with by fairly serious doses of palliative care and all this kind of thing we can alleviate pain and I'd like to say something because you mentioned that you were in a palliative care into the side of things I have been so impressed uh palliative doctors that I've got to know who are in the business of trying to alleviate some of that pain not all of it so we're faced with what appears to be an intractable problem and I just want to come to briefly I don't have a solution to it for the simple reason that we've lived with this after all we live for centuries without anesthetics I I you know I I don't like the dentist much um and I I have a little theory that there are only two kinds of people in the world people who like people who don't like dentists and Liars but that's another matter I think of the centuries where people believed in God and millions and there were no anesthetics I mean that is just a no palliative care nothing it's almost unbelievable to me but it did happen it's not proof of anything it says it's just a fact historically so let me come to the heart of this as I see it and and you can think about this I have no simplistic Solutions I wouldn't insult you by having a simplistic solution but my approach to it in a way is is this that I'm faced with beauty as I said and the wonderful potentiality and capacity of medicine to affect the Cure and I sit here and I'm sitting in this room because of medical intervention at the last second of my life so I know what that means a cardiac surgeon saved my life and I wasn't expected to live no hope whatsoever so I'm sitting here and people say well thank God for that I said be careful because in the very same few weeks that that happened to me my sister's daughter of 22 was carried away by a massive brain tumor and she didn't get cured how do I cope with that well I see it like this if you reject God I'll understand you two cents because you just say there isn't a God forget it the universe is like it is it's Bleak for some people it goes well but for the vast majority it's pretty horrible and certainly for the vast majority of people have ever known but they're the suffering remains I know that little boy who's got this disease that's going to kill him in a few weeks he nothing damn nothing atheism is nothing to say to him that's positive now what can I say to the young mother of cancer that's going to die in a few weeks I can't cure cancer it's inoperable and so on but you see let me put it this way you know probably many of you that at the heart of Christianity there is a cross and since I can't solve the philosophical problem why a good God allows this level of suffering I ask another question and I asked it before in my talk now I'm going to come to how I reflect on it and that is granted that it's messy granted let me put it this way this world is full of two things beauty and barbed wire is there any evidence anywhere that there is a God you could trust with at ultimately now the heart and the main reason I'm a Christian is because the heart of Christianity there's a cross and on it Jesus died as you know but the big thing is that he claimed to be God encoded in humanity do I believe it yes I do as a scientist yes I do but that's another story so the question in this context is what is God doing on a cross and my answer to that is it shows me at the very least that God has not remained distant from the problem of human suffering but has himself become part of it now the pragmatic level I see not bring healing to many many people if they begin to see that God actually understands our suffering you know often when you're standing along somebody who's suffering you'll know as doctors that if they're weeping and You Weep to you you're far bigger effect than if you take out a stethoscope and give them more antibiotics because they looking for somebody that understands now you see ladies and gentlemen let me go one step further and that was the end of it it would be nothing but the god that suffered on the cross rose from the dead and that opens up a whole world of possibility it opens up at the level of moral evil not only the possibility but to my mind the certainty that there's going to be a final judgment that terrorists are not going to get away with it that the bombers of 9 11 are going to face it that is what backs up your conscience and tells me that is not an illusion that morality is not an illusion because it's got a backup but secondly I do believe as I sit here that God is a god of compensation does I think of that little boy and think of my own grandchildren and think of children I I have known who have suffered to death with these degenerative diseases this is a this is a big thing to say but I'm going to say it to you asthmatics I believe firmly that if you could see what God has done with people like that ultimately your questions would stop that's what I believe but it depends crucially on the fact that there's someone in space-time in history who's suffered and risen from the dead atheism doesn't have that it is nothing and you see that 22 year old niece of mine with her brain tumor and I sat with her she knew she was going to die I see near death her confidence and got increased because she knew where she was going she had real hope I've watched atheists die and they don't have that hope and you see that goes back Michael to your earlier point of those statistics people who are secure tend to be less religious but you see a statistical analysis of a group of people who are secure at the moment if you're sitting there feeling secure financially and you lose all your money tomorrow you're not secure anymore or you lose your health tomorrow that may be true at a given stage because we life hasn't hit us in reality we feel wonderful or like people sitting on a beach enjoying the Sun and somebody up in the cliff can see that the tides coming in it's all around us we feel terrific we feel secure but actually we need saving desperately although we don't see it so that's how sorry to take so long about that but it's such a big thing and it's not an answer in the sense of oh well that's at X Plus y equals that therefore we're also no but you see from me ladies and gentlemen my Christian faith is not an abstract belief in a theory it's a living relationship with a person and it's that relationship that I take into all these engagements and talking to people and I arrived in Christchurch I finished with this two days after the earthquake hit I had to speak of the biggest church Gathering I had many years and sitting in front of me were people had lost their husbands because a wall fell on them in their office and people that felt guilty because the wall fell on their colleague and didn't fall on them this awful terribleness and I spoke along the lines I've spoken to you and one of the most moving things to me was the letter I got from a lady who lost her husband she said I couldn't stay to see the people but she said I just want you to know that in what you said about Christ the cross and the resurrection I see the first glimmer of hope one of the questions uh from the audience is Raising about other major world religions oh yes and their belief about suffering and this isn't in the question but uh you probably know that Buddhism for example it's four noble truths truths are all about suffering yes they are um the first Noble Truth is life is suffering and the second Noble Truth is that's is that suffering is caused by misguided desires and so on and at least that question raises for me and is a question of certainty you know when I listen to you you seem so certain and yet we live in a world in which there are many theories there's nearly a billion people who follow Buddhism for example in a very different Theory grounded on on the idea of suffering and I just and I wonder um you know as we look at the evidence that exists how can we be certain how can you know when I listen to you you sound like a mathematician talking about religion and if we went to um places like Harvard Divinity School and uh you know the the people who teach religion at Oxford and we did a survey about how certain they are about their own religious beliefs I think they would be very uncertain especially in Oxford yes well here too and what crowns are you so certain when things seem so fuzzy on what grounds am I certain that my wife loves me after 46 years married I would say I was certain she loves me I think this may seem very strange to some people I think God wants us to be certain indeed that's explicit in the New Testament these things are written that you might know that you have eternal life writing to people that have trusted Christ and you see I think part of the problem with the question is that people sometimes get the impression that I exude a certain amount of certainty because I've like a mathematician I've absorbed all kinds of high-powered arguments and they're totally conclusive and so on that is not the case at all the arguments to me are very important but think of my wife again I cannot prove to you by mathematics that my wife loves me no I can't and that certainty that we get in mathematics that intellectual certainty occurs in no other scientific discipline apart from mathematics now mathematics said it's problems at The Logical level but leaving those aside you don't get that certainty in the physical science you don't get medicine and so on so forth you don't get it anywhere else but you can talk about and of course this is the pet phrase these days evidence-based medicine don't you that's very much the buzzword what's your evidence now I'm an evidence-based Christian I don't see any difference here except that the stakes are higher but my faith is based on evidence just as your faith in a particular cure a course of medicine will I hope be based on evidence and that's what he's studying doing systematic studies to see where the evidence leads and therefore what can we do about it so there's a great deal of commonality between my science and my response to God but my response to God is Not response to a theory merely but to a person now where does this certainty come from it comes from this that I do believe that God as Roger Bacon put it the father founding father of modern science the goddess two books the book of nature of which we can read something about God as fingerprints all over it but secondly the book of his word and you see if the arguments at the beginning of this discussion were correct and my response is simply a Freudian social socially constructed God who's a projection of my wish fulfillment I would join the crowd to say don't you be so arrogant don't you you cannot be certain at all but something else might be true you see the Christian claim is it's not so much us looking for God but God looking for us and the central claim is that God became human and Jesus Christ and has revealed God to us now if I want to get to know you I could submit you to a pet scan couldn't I and I could attach all kinds of horrible things to your brain and so on and so forth I'd never get to know you but the way I can get to know you and be confident is if you reveal yourself to me as a person you talk to me and you can achieve a wonderful degree of confidence and that's what a lifelong partnership between me and my wife is but I have many other friends who made that degree of confidence in what gives me the confidence they do they do you see what I mean it's it's not it lies in me I have to work up all this confidence but if I get to know you as a person of character of Integrity reliability and so on you are actually giving me the confidence you see now that's exactly the way I respond to Christ that God gives me the confidence the more I get to know him and you're quite right I do seem to be confident I am confident but my confidence is not based in myself Wilbur take me if it were because the whole essence of the Christian message is it is not like the religions you mentioned much good in them of course and they're in their analysis of morality and what suffering means and so on I'm not decrying that but all of them including some versions of Christianity are Merit systems where I have to try and keep the rules keep the path keep the book keep the way in the hope that one day I will be accepted by God and so therefore your question has a deeper sting actually to it how could you possibly be so confident of God after all who are you you're a Wretch like all the rest of us and I admitted absolutely I'm in a mess like everybody else but the secret of my relationship with God is precisely that that Christianity is not like a Harvard Medical School exam system you're in this medical school how do you know you're going to get a degree well you can't if you said I'm absolutely confident to your professors well they'd say well we'll see we'll see and you can't be confident not only that the professors cannot tell you you're going to get a degree why it's a merit system and so many people this is the mistake they make and I'm so glad you asked the question because it reflects on it they think it's the same with God that you try your best in the hope that one day God will forgive you and therefore it will be utterly arrogant to say that you had Assurance but now let me illustrate this just for one second from my marriage I met my wife on day one at University and she was 16. well there we are and she was a beautiful Vision so what I decided to do was to propose marriage so I I brought her a cookbook and I gave it to her you to say and I said look at page 123 there's a law for making apple cake Thou shalt take 100 grams of flour and thou shalt take 200 grams of mail and usual take so much sugar and water and mix them together and thou shalt heat it up the citizen says you make an apple cake very good you see that yeah wonderful now I said I of course I wouldn't dream of accepting you no now if you keep the rules in this cookbook for the next 30 or 40 years I'll think about accepting you will you marry me but ladies and gentlemen why are you laughing that's how millions of people think about God you wouldn't insult your fellow human being by suggesting your relationship with them was based on their Merit would you and yet Millions upon millions of people either think of God in that way and equally millions and millions of people have rejected God because they think it's that way what's the secret of my marriage such as it is it's that well goodness knows why she accepted me at the start I know why I accepted her of course and the point is he will cook brilliantly because he knows that my acceptance offer doesn't depend on her America and you see it's the same with me and God I don't go around giving talks like this and talking to students about by faith in God in the hope that God will say what a good boy you are and I will maybe accept you no ladies and gentlemen let me be absolutely clear I do it because I've got the acceptance not in order to get it and therefore if God gives me the confidence I would be arrogant to refuse it for instance if Christ tells me that if I trust him I already have eternal life I shall not come into judgment and my sins are forgiven and he's the moral governor of the universe and I say no oh no I couldn't accept that it's me who's being arrogant not the other way around and the proof of the pudding is in the eating it actually works it actually works so that's how I'd respond to that well there's been an there are a number of really good questions here we're out of time so I would encourage you to take up the the offer of meeting for dinners and continuing the conversation you've been a very patient audience and we've had an exceptional speaker so uh in that vein let's give everyone a hand I I think ladies and gentlemen you ought to show your appreciation to an exceptional moderator for more information about the Veritas Forum including additional recordings and a calendar of upcoming events please visit our website at veritas.org