In this clip from The Diary of a CEO, Greg Koukl addresses the question of why children get cancer, which atheist Alex O’Connor cites against belief in a loving God. Greg explains that while an accidental, godless universe has no moral grounding or ultimate hope, Christianity acknowledges both natural and moral evil as consequences of human rebellion and provides a coherent narrative that ends in restoration.
Transcript
Alex O’Connor: I’ve been waiting for an opportunity to rewind to the fact that we just brushed over two of what I think are the best available—at least first that came to mind—explanations as to why children get cancer. And I just wondered, as a question, whether you consider whether your explanation sounds to you, as your explanation sounds to you, as I think both of them sound to me—and I don’t know how they sound to you, Steven—but the idea that the thing we are most fundamentally confronted with, I think, on an existential level is suffering. There’s our own suffering, and then there’s the suffering of others—and the seemingly meaningless suffering of a child who’s undergoing cancer and does not survive it. And I’m told that in the face of such existential tragedy, a turn to religion to give us a sort of sense of fulfillment and a sense of explanation. But when asked about the mechanism of how, I’m told it’s because at some undisclosed number of years ago, somebody committed a sin against God, and that’s why your child has now died of cancer. There are millions of people who listen to this show. There will be people listening to this whose children have died of cancer. I wonder if that brings them any kind of consolation. Similarly, the idea that, you know, maybe it’s some disgruntled angels who didn’t want to come down to earth for too long, and so, if anything, you’re actually doing them a favor by killing them of cancer.
Steven Bartlett: What’s your answer to that?
Alex: I don’t think I have one, but I don’t like people professing that they do have an answer, but when it comes down to it, actually saying something which I think will provide the opposite effect—and I don’t mean this personally, I mean as a point of religious explanation.
[PANEL TALKING OVER EACH OTHER]
Steven: Everyone’s going to get a chance to respond to this.
Alex: So, the idea that this even approximates an explanation as to why this happens. I would ask you to consider what you find more likely. If we assume that we are essentially existing here as accidental organisms, just competing in a struggle for survival with no endowed meaning or supervision, what might we expect to find? And I would ask what you would expect to find if we were created with purpose by a loving God who wants us all to come into communion with him but, for some reason, thinks it’s necessary that we exist in this veil of tears, in this material world, first. What would you expect to find? I don’t think—and then look at what you do find. Look at what you do find in the natural world. Even if you just take into consideration nonhuman animal suffering, just an unfathomable amount of negative experience, right, for seemingly no reason, not to mention the fact that children are getting cancer, as you say. And as you’ve already alluded to, there are evils that humans commit, like the Holocaust. But there are evils which they don’t, like earthquakes and tsunamis and the like. I don’t think we would expect to see any of this if we assume that hypothesis.
But if we assume that we are just accidentally existing organisms in a struggle for survival, not only do we explain this, but we also come to expect it. So, I think it provides a much better explanation. That is not to say justification. The idea—we were talking about evolution, and you said that the problem that you have with the Darwinian worldview is that it seems to favor survival of the fittest, and yet there are things which evolution seems to point to that we would morally condemn. Well, of course, because evolution by natural selection is an explanation for how things got the way they were. It’s in no way a justification for behaviors. It doesn’t even function that way. No scientific theory of why things happen are any kind of justification any more than Newton’s laws of gravity are a moral justification for the motion of the planets. Of course it’s not the case. It’s just an explanation.
But I just really want to drive home this point that it has to do more—if you want religious traditions to do what you claim that they do, which is provide existential comfort for people who are suffering—you have to do more in the face of children dying of cancer than some reference to mythical human beings who existed, or, well, in a way that is completely unintelligible.
Greg Koukl: There’s a lot there. Okay? I don’t expect it’s going to be comfort to anybody to say—who’s suffering from whatever—to say that there was a fall. The fall is just the explanation for what went wrong and why there is wrong in the world. Like I said earlier, it doesn’t matter where you live or when you live, everybody knows something’s wrong. And the way they express that concern about something wrong is in moral terms. The world is not the way it ought to be. It should be different. And then when you give examples of it, sometimes there’s natural evil, but generally it’s examples of moral evil—what we would call moral evil. Things that people shouldn’t do.
Alex: That’s why I particularly avoided those.
Greg: No. Right. You didn’t include any examples, but the implication is—and this is where, you know, Richard Dawkins’s famous statement that this is exactly the kind of world we’d expect if there was, at the basis, no design, no justice, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. Well, actually I think this isn’t the world that we find—the one he just described. Yes, it’s a world filled with suffering, and there’s a way of explaining that, which you just did. There’s also another way of explaining it that has a solution, okay?
Alex: What is that explanation?
Greg: That God is in the process of solving the problem of evil over time.
Alex: I mean, the explanation for why the evil’s there in the first place. You said the fall—and I don’t mean to interrupt—but you said it—you’ve referenced the fall twice now, and the last time I tried this, it seemed like you, sort of, said that you don’t really know.
Greg: I wasn’t giving particular details about the ancestry of human evolution.
Alex: What is the fall? Historically, what is the fall?
Greg: The fall is when our first parents—characteristically known as Adam and Eve in the story, in the account of reality—rebelled against God.
Alex: And what did they do?
Greg: They disobeyed him, is what’s important. He had given them a restriction. They disobeyed that, and when they disobeyed that, they broke their relationship with God through rebellion. They broke their relationship with each other. They broke their relationship with the environment. All of that had these, kind of, cosmic effects.
There’s a solution, though. That’s just the first three—
Alex: Do you know what the command was?
Greg: Let me finish the thought, okay? The principal issue is rebellion or disobedience. There are different ways it’s characterized, but that’s the point, in my view. The disobedience. Okay?
Alex: Of what, though? Disobedience of what? Like, what was it?
Greg: God told them not to do one thing—don’t eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil—and they disobeyed.
Alex: Do you interpret that literally? Like, an actual tree and an actual fruit?
Greg: I do take that as a straightforward account, but that’s not the important part. I don’t want to get—
Alex: So, children get cancer because a few million years ago someone ate a fruit?
Greg: Let me just back up and give you the entire account. This would be, I think, more helpful.
Alex: I’m not trying to be difficult, by the way. I just really don’t want to brush over these points when we reference—I mean, people listening might be like, “I’ve never heard of Adam and Eve.” They’ll need to know.
Greg: The point I’m making is that there was a disobedience by human beings that had an impact on their relationship with God, which they were created for, and had an impact on the rest of the world. And since then—that problem of evil, broadly writ—since then, the world’s been broken, and God has a plan for bringing that back together—not only for making the world whole again, but also for bringing human beings back in proper relationship with him when they’re in rebellion with him. And this is where Jesus comes in.
Now, I’ve written a piece called The Story of Reality, a book that’s meant to characterize that in fairly clear terms—in more general terms. It isn’t meant to answer all of these questions, because some of them, frankly, are imponderable. But the larger picture can be understood and is in the story. It’s in the account of reality in the Scriptures—the Hebrew Scriptures and in the Christian Scriptures. They form a unit, okay? And these are the things that Jesus spoke to. And Jesus took these things seriously based on what he had to say about these particular things, okay? So, broadly speaking now, because we live in a broken world, there is an answer that we have to that. We have a possible answer. You know, it was Bertrand Russell who famously said, “How are you going to talk about God when you’re kneeling at the bed of a dying child?” which I think is very emotionally compelling. But I listened to philosopher William Lane Craig—who you also know, I think—who said, “What is Bertrand Russell the atheist going to say when he’s kneeling at the bed of a dying child? Tough luck? Too bad? That’s just the way it goes? There is no answer that he has.”