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Stephen Fry on God

"Children with bone cancer - what's that about?  How dare you?  How dare you create a world in which there is such misery that is not our fault?"

http://fullist.co.uk/2015/01/interviewer-asks-staunch-atheist-steven-fry-hed-say-met-god/

A friend sent me a link to an interview with Stephen Fry on Irish TV in which he is asked what he would say to God if he met him face to face.  His brutally honest answer begins with the words quoted above.  Essentially, his view is that if God exists, he must be a monster.

The number one most commonly asked question on The Alpha Course: "Why does God allow suffering?"  It's a humdinger and no one has come up with a satisfactory answer in 2000 years of Christian theology.  I was very amused by a passage in The Da Vinci Code where one of Dan Brown's characters explains the problem of suffering using the simple analogy of a child on a skateboard whose parent cannot allow him the freedom to play without letting him fall down and hurt himself from time to time.  Right.  That doesn't really answer Stephen Fry's question about bone cancer in children though, does it?

Clearly I'm not going to offer a final answer to this painful question either, as it would be arrogant beyond belief and insulting to those who are experiencing intense suffering.  But I have come across a school of thought which I have found immensely helpful and that I would like briefly to share.  Following the horrors of World War Two, some 20th century theologians started reflecting on the suffering of Christ on the cross and saw there a fresh aspect of God's radical identification with human beings.  It seemed to them that as the Son of God was born a human, suffered and died on the cross, God himself came to experience pain and even death.  In this way, they argued, God placed himself on the side of those who suffer.  God understands their situation from within.  God provides a story of suffering with which others can identify.  God states his protest against the forces of oppression and darkness in our world and invites us to work to bring them down.    

Of course, while this is comforting, it doesn't really explain why God lets such terrible things happen.  A sick child is hardly the result of someone exercising their free will, but the result of a profoundly damaged creation.  But in the face of appalling tragedy, I find it much easier to love and worship a God who has been there himself.

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