– Suppose it's all true and you walk up to the Pearly Gates
and you are confronted by God what will Stephen Fry say to Him?
– I will basically..
– I think I'll say – Bone cancer in children?
What's that about?
How dare you!
How dare you create a world in which there is such misery
that is not our fault?
It's not right,
it's utterly utterly evil.
Why should I respect a capricious mean-minded stupid God
who creates a world which is so full of injustice and pain?
– That's a very emotionally charged and rhetorically powerful
articulation of the problem suffering.
To be honest I think from Islamic perseption
specifically the answer is easy it's not difficult
and I think even historically it's been a much larger debate
in the European tradition, the Christian European tradition than it has been in Islam.
The reason there's suffering in the world and I'll get two specific examples as well
but the reason there's suffering in the world is a function number one of Freewill,
number two of the fact that Life is a test
and number three of the fact that Life is a pathway to an Afterlife
which is not only to a certain trajectory
but also to say that this life is relatively less important than the Afterlife.
So let me unpack that a little bit.
You can't have Freewill without the possibility of suffering,
people have to be able to do the wrong thing
and a lot of the suffering in the world is caused
by human actions in fact I would argue from an Islamic perspective
that evil in the world is by and large function of human actions not acts of God.
I should recognize that explanation explains
what some people call Moral Evil
actions done by humans but not natural evil
there's another category called natural evil
things that are that cause suffering and had nothing to do with human beings or human actions.
But those are also explained by the other two things that I mentioned.
Number one life is a test so you can't have a test without suffering.
Again people will tend to say – yeah okay that's true,
someone's individual child passes away that's a test for them but you know what about tsunami comes
and kills 10 000 people so what type of test is that?
That brings us to the third point as well there's an Afterlife.
I think this point is probably the most important one
because a lot of times an atheists bring up this problem of suffering.
They're doing something which is logically fallacious.
Why? Because for them the problem of suffering is an argument to say
that your view of God is incoherent, your theology your worldview is incoherent,
incoherence is a different type of argument than an argument
that says you haven't got evidence for something.
This is like regardless of whether you have evidence or not the ideas absurd doesn't make sense, it's incoherent.
But when you're making an argument from coherence
or against coherence you need to consider the propositions within that worldview,
I can't take a few aspects and then put them into my own notion of the world
and then go – Oh that doesn't make sens, of course doesn't make sense like that.
What atheists do is they take a few religious premises
about the idea of God put it within their naturalist worldview
and then go – that doesn't make sense.
Let's demonstrate that with this example of bone cancer in children.
Let's say hypothetically that 5 years old child,
10 year old child, 15 year old has bone cancer,
struggles with it for two or three years, suffers a lot,
the family suffers, passes away.
At one level that's a test for the family,
for a lot of people
and if he died in a car accident the result's the same,
it shows that there's more suffering.
But nevertheless the point is can we judge that to be evil?
Now the bone cancer wasn't caused by human beings,
so is this in case of natural evil, why is it evil?
Well the assumption seems to be person suffer,
didn't get to live life, very young, struggled,
died, end of it.
It's not the end of it.
If that was it I can I tell you that sounds a bit that seems evil
but what if I say same scenario exactly the same thing
same factors child suffers with bone cancer two three years struggles
passes away as a child from an Islamic tradition
they're going to spend the eternity in Paradise.
Is that evil?
Because this is where there's a lot of unknowns
and I'm not suggesting we know the unknowns but I'm saying all I need to show is that
there's various unknowns and it's very arrogant of you
to not consider them or to think you know them
and then say – well why is this and how dare you and the rest of it.
But getting back to my point what I'm trying to say is obviously Stephen Fry's
not going to consider the afterlife but when he's doing that it's a logically fallacious
way of making an argument about some other wordview being incoherent,
he can't do that and from that perception it's very simple,
there is suffering in the world sometimes there's more, sometimes is less,
we understand at this broad level as I said Freewill, Life is a test
and there's other details around them
and there's an Afterlife where justice is served but the specifics only God knows,
in any particular case we don't know the unseen,
we don't know the details of various things,
God knows them so but there's no case there to be made
that the concept is fundamentally incoherent,
or absurd and so really as I said Stephen Fry he's being more
rhetorical in the manner of the new atheists
than truly bringing new substance to this debate.