By Mano Singham

Any defense of god has to confront a tough question: Why would a benevolent and omnipotent god allow suffering? The Greek philosopher Epicurus (341-271 BCE) posed the essential and, to my mind, ultimate contradiction that believers in god face: How to explain the existence of evil.

Is god willing to prevent evil but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is god both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him god?

Collins has nothing really new to say about this age-old problem but to his credit he does not avoid it. On the question of suffering to people caused by other people, he blames free will.

[We] have somehow been given free will, the ability to do as we please. We use this ability frequently to disobey the Moral Law. And when we do so, we shouldn't then blame God for the consequences. (p. 64)

Collins seems to give a curious excuse for the evil caused by religious people, the very people who should be acutely able to distinguish between right and wrong.

In some unusual cultures the [Moral Law] takes on surprising trappings -- consider witch burning in seventeenth century America. Yet when surveyed closely, these apparent aberrations can be seen to arise from strongly held but misguided conclusions about who or what is good or evil. If you firmly believed that a witch is the personification of evil on earth, an apostle of the devil himself, would it not then seem justified to take such drastic actions? (p. 39)

He also points to the suffering caused by non-religious people throughout history, as if that explained anything. I hear this argument often and always find it an odd one for religious people to make, even accepting for the moment the dubious proposition that throughout the course of history nonbelievers have caused more suffering than religious people. Is it really considered an argument in favor of a benevolent and omnipotent god that his followers have caused less suffering than non-believers?

On the more difficult question of suffering caused by natural disasters that god presumably has the power to avert and in which free will is not involved, Collins gives a confused answer, suggesting that these occur due to 'natural' laws and causes, and for god to prevent such events would require him to make repeated interventions in contravention of these laws. He says that this, for some reason, would be bad.

Science reveals that the universe, our own planet, and life itself are engaged in an evolutionary process. The consequences of that can include the unpredictability of the weather, the slippage of a tectonic plate, or the misspelling of a cancer gene in the normal process of cell division. If at the beginning of time God chose to use these forces to create human beings, then the inevitability of these other painful consequences was also assured. Frequent miraculous interventions would be at least as chaotic in the physical realm and would be interfering with human acts of free will. (p. 65-68)

The notion that people prefer suffering to the 'chaos' caused by repeated intervention by god in the world is a specious argument. If parents had a child who was dying of cancer, I bet that they would want more than anything for god to intervene and cure her, and wouldn't give a damn if that caused 'chaos' for anyone else, including those scientists doing cancer research. In fact, religious people are always praying for god to intervene in such ways. That is when their need for god is greatest. If the people god supposedly created and whom he supposedly loves deeply want god to intervene to do a manifestly good thing and don't care about chaos, why does god care? Or if he really wants natural laws to work but also cares about curing people of cancer, why doesn't he whisper in Collins's or other scientists' ears the mechanism he used to cause cancer cells to emerge and how they can cure it?

Recognizing that saying what is effectively "Hey, stuff happens!" is weak consolation for massive and widespread suffering due to natural disasters or the actions of people, Collins inevitably retreats to a reliable refuge and plays that old get-out-of-jail-free card, the 'mysterious ways clause'.

[If] God is loving and wishes for the best of us, then perhaps His plan is not the same as our plan . . . We may never fully understand the reasons for these painful experiences, but we can begin to accept the idea that there may be such reasons. (p. 65-68)
. . .
Recognize that a great deal of suffering is brought upon us by our own actions or those of others, and that in a world where humans practice free will, it is inevitable. Understand, also, that if God is real, His purposes will often not be the same as ours. Hard though it is to accept, a complete absence of suffering may not be in the best interest of our spiritual growth. (p. 305)

In other words, suffering might be good for us. But while pleading ignorance of god's intent when it comes to suffering, like all religious believers, Collins seems to have extraordinary knowledge of god's character and nature when it works to his advantage, like when he knows which act is a miracle of god and which isn't or how god has chosen to act. For example, when arguing against young Earth creationism ideas, he says "Is this consistent with everything else we know about God from the Bible, from the Moral Law, and from every other source -- namely, that He is loving, logical, and consistent?" (p. 237)

Eventually this is what all believers in god end up doing: Defining god in such a way that it suits their own personal emotional needs, adding ad hoc assumptions to deal with any and all problems created by their definition, and invoking the mysterious ways clause as a last resort when even the ad hoc additions aren't sufficient.

Francis Collins, for all his sophistication and scientific expertise, is no different.

(This series of posts reviews in detail Francis Collins's book The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, originally published in 2006. The page numbers cited are from the large print edition published in 2007. The complete set of these posts will be archived here.)