John Lennox on Suffering, the Problem of Evil, and Why God Allows It

John Lennox and Alex O’Connor return to the question that ended their first conversation — why a loving God permits suffering — and Lennox, rather than claiming a solution, reframes it as a mathematician would: not why is there evil, but is there evidence that God can be trusted with it.

Key ideas

1. The problem changed, not solved. Lennox concedes the intellectual problem of suffering has no clean answer — centuries of philosophers from Lucretius to Hume ‘never get anywhere’. Borrowing a mathematician’s habit, when a question resists for centuries you change it: from ‘why does God allow this?’ to ‘is there any evidence I can trust God with it?’ Christianity, he argues, gives a way in to cope with suffering, not a proof that dissolves it.

2. Observing suffering is not experiencing it. Two perspectives run through the episode. The observer needs intellectual answers; the sufferer needs pastoral ones. Lennox refuses the ‘generic answer’ — there is no generic sufferer, only individuals — and roots his case in the testimony of people who met God inside extremity (gulag prisoners, the Christchurch widow), where, as one prisoner told him, God ‘acts in the situation, not before it’.

3. Atheism must account for evil too. O’Connor grants the point: to call suffering evil presupposes a standard the atheist must ground. He therefore reframes his own challenge as the problem of suffering — not that suffering exists, but its apparent arbitrariness and intensity. Lennox agrees this arbitrariness is ‘the hard bit’.

4. Divine hiddenness is the residual mystery. O’Connor presses two cases he cannot disbelieve: a person who sincerely wants to know God yet cannot, and a person who suffers gratuitous, avoidable harm. Lennox does not wave these away — he shares them, calls the objection ‘real, not pretend’, and offers empathy and personal evidence rather than a system.

5. Faith is evidence-grounded trust in a person. Trusting God for an unfamiliar situation resembles trusting a spouse: no specific evidence for this instance, but a cumulative lifetime behind it. ‘God is not a proposition. God is personal.’ The cross, and Christ’s own suffering, are where Lennox locates the ground for that trust.

Summary

Reframing the problem of evil

Both men agree the classical problem of evil is a stalemate — Lennox invokes Lucretius and Hume to say the undergraduate form of the argument ‘never gets anywhere, ever’. His move is methodological: a mathematician stuck for centuries changes the question. So instead of demanding why a good God permits arbitrary suffering, he asks whether there is ‘oblique or indirect evidence of any kind’ that God can be trusted with it. The answer, for him, lies not in theory but in the life of Jesus — how Christ met not only others’ suffering but his own. This does not, he stresses, solve suffering ‘like a question to be solved’; it opens a way to cope with it.

O’Connor sharpens his own side by distinguishing the problem of evil from what he prefers to call the problem of suffering. He would not predict a world with no suffering whatsoever; what resists explanation is the arbitrariness and intensity of it — suffering that ‘could have easily been avoided had it been in accordance with the will of the sustainer of the universe’. Lennox accepts arbitrariness as the genuinely hard case and declines to trivialise the Holocaust survivor or the bereaved who say they would love to believe but cannot.

The two perspectives: intellectual and pastoral

Lennox draws a line between observing suffering and experiencing it. Seated in comfort, we observe; the sufferer inhabits it — and most people are a mixture of both. The observer’s questions are intellectual; the sufferer’s are pastoral, and answering the second with the first is a category mistake. He is scathing about the ‘generic answer’: asked what he would say to a suffering person, he replies that unless he knows the person he would not know what to say, because psychology and emotional experience run too deep for a template. The discipline he sets himself is to take each person seriously and to sit with questions he cannot answer rather than paper over them.

Evidence from those who suffered

Lennox’s positive case is testimonial. In post-earthquake Christchurch a widow passed him a note — he had shown ‘the first ray of light’ she had had — without receiving any solution. In Siberia he met a man imprisoned seven years in the gulag for his faith, who fainted at the sight of his own blood yet discovered that ‘God comes in and he acts in the situation, not before it’ — echoing Christ’s promise that the persecuted would be given words ‘in that hour’. Lennox offers this as part of the evidence: the array of people who, in the deepest suffering, found their faith refined rather than broken is what he would expect if Christianity is true.

O’Connor supplies the sharp rejoinder honestly: if religion is merely a psychological cope, this is exactly what you would expect — a comfort that shows up in need, offering no rational solution because it has none, serving an evolutionary function of staving off despair. Lennox agrees the subjective consolation alone proves nothing, which is why he insists on pairing it with the objective, rational side — the half of the case the new atheists, to their credit, did the most to sharpen.

Divine hiddenness and the honesty of the sceptic

The conversation folds divine hiddenness into the same problem: why does God allow some who cry out to receive burning bushes while others get silence? Lennox refuses the cheap cultural dismissal (‘you only believe because of where you were born’) by noting worldviews do change, and he is candid that a residual problem remains. He distinguishes those who, like Thomas Nagel, frankly do not want there to be a God, from those who seem genuinely to seek and not find — and grants O’Connor’s claim that at least one such sincere seeker surely exists. His answer is not a theodicy but a posture: openness, vulnerability, and the willingness to let counter-arguments into his own space, as he once did buying Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian off a Cambridge shelf.

Faith, trust, and the person of Christ

Against the new-atheist redefinition of faith as ‘believing where there’s no evidence’, Lennox restores its ordinary sense: trust. Trusting God in an unprecedented situation is like trusting a spouse — no specific evidence for this case, but a cumulative history that makes it reasonable. He warns hard against the abuse of this — the ‘if you had enough faith you’d be cured’ teaching that devastates people when the cure does not come, which he calls dangerous and absent from the New Testament. His own near-fatal illness, set beside his niece’s death from a brain tumour the same year, disciplines him against a ‘God is good to me’ narcissism. Faith, for him, terminates not in a proposition but in a person: ‘God is not a proposition. God is personal.’ The cross — truth speaking to power, a kingdom ‘not of this world’ that cannot be imposed by force — is where he locates both God’s answer to suffering and the reason Christ cannot be blamed for the violence done in his name.

Speakers

• John Lennox — guest; mathematician and philosopher of science, University of Oxford; Christian apologist
• Alex O'Connor — host; Within Reason / CosmicSkeptic; presses the atheist case on suffering and divine hiddenness

See also

• Theodicy — the problem this episode reframes: suffering as a way-in to cope with, not a question to solve
• John Lennox on Science, God, and the Rationality of Belief — the earlier lecture where Lennox reframes theodicy and defends evidence-based faith
• John Lennox on AI as God, Science versus Atheism, and the Return to Theism — the first O’Connor–Lennox conversation, whose closing minutes on the problem of evil this episode picks up
• Free Will — the moral-evil half of the problem: violence as disobedience to Christ, not his kingdom
• Scientism — the self-refuting ‘science is the only way to truth’, dismantled in passing here
• Alex O'Connor — host page