Walking with God through Pain and Suffering

by Timothy J. Keller

For years, Lewis rejected the existence of God because he believed the logical argument from evil against God worked. But eventually, he came to realize that evil and suffering were a bigger problem for him as an atheist than as a believer in God. He concluded that the awareness of moral evil in the world was actually an argument for the existence of God, not against it. Lewis describes his awakening to this point in Mere Christianity,192 but he gives a longer exposition in his essay De Futilitate. Lewis explains that “there is, to be sure, one glaringly obvious ground for denying that any moral purpose at all is operative in the universe: namely, the actual course of events in all its wasteful cruelty and apparent indifference, or hostility, to life.”193 So the existence of cruelty and evil in the world was the reason Lewis could not believe there was a good God, a “moral purpose” operating behind the universe. But then he began to realize that evil in the world was “precisely the ground which we cannot use” to object to God. Why? “Unless we judge this waste and cruelty to be real evils we cannot . . . condemn the universe for exhibiting them. . . . Unless we take our own standard to be something more than ours, to be in fact an objective principle to which we are responding, we cannot regard that standard as valid.”194 Here was the conundrum for Lewis as an atheist. His objection to the existence of God was that he could perceive no moral standard behind the world—the wo...