Many have tried to understand why there is suffering in the world. Bethany Sollereder has been working on this topic for many years, and though she hasn’t come up with a perfect answer, her new book, Why is There Suffering?: Pick Your Own Theological Expedition, does provide a new way of contemplating this perennial question. The book allows readers to make their own choices, to see how theological decisions might bring a person to a certain set of beliefs about why there is suffering and how to deal with it. In the second half of the episode, Bethany has a chance to choose her own adventure through the conversation.
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I really enjoyed this discussion.
Here’s another thought about the problem of pain that I found intriguing, though I’m not totally sold on it:
God has so ordered things that we will never find a reason, because then we could just accept it fatalistically, instead of actively working against the causes.
Here’s an example of what this argues against:
A friend of fundamentalist views argued that we shouldn’t bother to develop an asteroid shield for the Earth, “because if God wants to destroy us, there’s nothing we could do about it.”
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Welcome to the forum! I’m sure many people here will have a lot of thoughts about this that you mentioned 