Veritas Forum discusses faith and suffering

By Tina Nazerian     2/20/13 6:00pm

 

God and faith were the focus Tuesday night when University of Oxford professor of mathematics John Lennox spoke at The Veritas Forum, a multi-campus organization which seeks to create dialogue among students and faculty about the difficult questions in life and Jesus Christ's relevance to life. 

Lennox, an adjunct lecturer at the Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics and a senior fellow of the Trinity Forum, centered his talk on faith and the attempt to find reason in how God and suffering can coexist in the world. Lennox said that because God sacrificed his son for humanity, he became a part of suffering.

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"Jesus - I believe he's God incarnate ... was crucified .... If that is God on a cross, what is it telling you?" Lennox said. "At the very least, it's telling you this - it's telling you that God has not remained distant from the problem of human suffering, but has become part of it."

For Lennox, the problem of suffering and evil is the most difficult that he faces. He said there are two distinct problems: moral evil, which is the evil people commit against one another, and pain, which does not necessarily involve people and can be caused by natural phenomena such as earthquakes. There are two ways of looking at these problems - an intellectual and a pastoral side - depending on whether you are the spectator or the one suffering.

Lennox said God could have made humans non-sinners. 

"We make them in laboratories. We call them robots," Lennox said. "Of course you can make beings that are non-moral. They're making robots that are very similar to human beings ... but you know that it wouldn't be real because there's no choice in the mind .... Of course God could make a universe with creatures that [cannot sin] - there are loads of them - animals." 

For there to be potential for love, there must be potential for hate, Lennox said.

"C.S. Lewis helps me a great deal here," Lennox said. "I don't think it's the final answer, but it's a way in to see that in order to make beings that have the capacity to love, they must have the capacity to hate. If you're going to have the capacity to say yes, you must have the capacity to say no." 

Lennox said that although atheism seems to give a solution, it does not actually give a solution at all, and makes situations even more difficult. According to Lennox, if atheism is true, there will be no justice for the majority of people in the world, and removing God removes hope. Richard Dawkins' analysis about reality's nature - naturalism - needs to be faced because it is increasingly prevalent in academia, and that type of attitude does away with good and evil, Lennox said. 

"There is no good, there is no evil, but ... do I hear Richard Dawkins complaining that God is evil? I do," Lennox said. "But if there's no good and no evil, that is a meaningless statement. The logical consequence of Dawkins' attitude is to abolish the categories of good and evil, but if you do that, it's idle to talk about God being evil or the world being evil because there isn't any good or evil." 

God's given hope will survive, Lennox said.

"The biggest thing in my life, by far, is that God so loved me, that he gave his only son for me, to bring me forgiveness and peace and everlasting life and hope ... a hope that will endure when planet earth has gone," Lennox said. 

A conversation with John and Ann Doerr Professor of computational and applied mathematics and Director of the Center for Engineering Leadership Mark Embree, in which some pre-submitted questions were read, as well as an open question-and-answer session with the audience, followed Lennox's speech. 

Baker College sophomore Kimberly Akano said the speech was a positive experience. 

"I really enjoyed it," Akano said. "I think we don't always have opportunities to get the intellectual side of religion."

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