Any attempt to explain why a good god would allow suffering in the world has to account for why Almighty God allows a 3-year-old boy to suffer and die of cancer.
It serves no good to ramble intellectually from 35,000 feet if you can’t account for a toddler dying of a debilitating disease.
The way God ordered existence, healing the little boy has to be the responsibility of the living. Nurturing life is the foundation of all human existence and the reason that anything of meaning has come into being.
That order of existence applies the same to children and to everyone else in our daily devotion to stay alive and to keep those we care about well and healthy. It is the sacred endeavor of life. It doesn’t just make life interesting, it is essential and defining to living, the platform from which humankind learns everything — about ourselves, nature and especially God. That’s what I explain in my ebook, The Endeavor of Life and the Wisdom of God. Tending to sacred life doesn’t itself provide the pathway to knowing God. That pathway is in the Bible. What the endeavor does is provide the infrastructure, if you will, to make the pathway possible at all.
The plaintive reply from all of us would be, why couldn’t God make an exception for this boy?
And what about for my younger brother and only sibling, who died when he was 17? And the next person? An exception for one would be an exception for all. The only thing that differentiates the exceptions I want from the ones you want is the limited knowledge that we each possess and our own prejudices. Why would God just answer to your prejudice? Or mine?
Of course, we should always pray anyway as we nurture, because God does hear us and does perform miracles. I explain in my ebook why there is at least one reason for God to perform miracles, but it’s much more important than satisfying my preferences or yours and it is not meant to be an alternative to human care.
The second prong of my argument that addresses the skepticism of atheists is just as important: It would not make sense for God to guarantee health and life. For every nonbeliever who says, “Well, why couldn’t God just…,” or “Why didn’t God just [fill in the near-sighted suggestion here],” tell them that ordering life in a way that we could take it for granted would not be nearly as compassionate as they think. And it most certainly would not be wise. Be glad that God ordered existence and not atheists. Whatever divine “fix” they have in mind to guarantee health, it is as naïve as all other Utopias people have ever attempted.
We don’t have to assume any meaning or purpose to anyone’s suffering or death. To us, childhood cancer is an accident of nature, one of many types of accidents that claim lives when we don’t have the foreknowledge to prevent them, and sometimes, the means with which to stay death. But we can nurture those who are afflicted, learn from their experience and share our knowledge towards saving lives in the future. That’s the sacred endeavor.
Any meaning or purpose to tragedy is the business of God, not mortals. As God would have it, our role is the endeavor of life, in which we cherish our lives, the lives of children and all others who are ill and that we do all that is within our power to make them better. Part of what motivates us to pour ourselves into nurturing is that we are not guaranteed to succeed. A defining part of our essence is that we live as mortals, and that we can and do fail.
Three years of anyone’s life, which all originates from inanimate substances, is precious and miraculous, especially when they are as beautifully lived as a child’s. That there was not more of the child’s life does not serve as evidence that there is no good god. The same applies to people of all ages. The fact that a miracle does not endure indefinitely does not prove that there’s no god. After all, we only needed one resurrection.
God knew us before we were born, and has a place for us in eternity. It is none of our business whether a child was meant to live or die, or what plan of God it might serve. Our duty is to the sacred endeavor of nurturing life. God takes care of the rest, and His role is far bigger than our roles by eons.
