Stephen Fry’s latest attempt [1] to remind the world just how relevant and intelligent he is has brought Irish media legend Gay Byrne into the debate. In his show “The Meaning of Life,” Gay asked Fry what he would say, should he encounter God at the Gates of Heaven (assuming Saint Peter has given him a pass)? His response: “I’ll say, ‘Bone cancer in children? What’s that about? How dare you? How dare you create a world in which there is such misery that’s not our fault. It’s not right. It’s utterly, utterly evil. Why should I respect a capricious, mean-minded, stupid God who creates a world which is so full of injustice and pain?”
Based on the assumption in the argument that there is a God and there are the Gates of Heaven (not a view held readily by Fry, I suspect), let’s consider what this means.
Let’s leave aside that these comments are at best angry and juvenile: his description of God as being “evil, capricious, monstrous maniac” is merely parroting Dawkins’ Atheism 101 script. Let’s leave aside that it is the very Judeo-Christianity-infused society, upon which Fry is piggy-backing,encourages such challenging of God (remember: Israel, or Isra-el, means “struggle with God”).
What Judeo-Christian thought gave Man was agency in a knowable universe (I recommend Larry Siedentrop’s Inventing the Individual [2]). Man – led by religiousthinkers – started to explore the world. Rather than the capricious, feet-of-clay gods believed by the Greeks, God created a rational, calculable, knowable universe. Conversely, there had been little point in the Greeks investigating, say, meteorology, given that its machinations were predicated on gods with human temperament and emotions.
I raise the subject of science for a reason. Fry is (rightly) upset by insects that burrow into a child’s eye. He’s rightly upset by child bone cancer. Who wouldn’t be? What he doesn’t explore is the very question asked in the show: the Meaning of Life. I for one see our challenge as to better our situation, using the tools provided on Earth before we ever even got here. And one of those challenges? To defeat illness. To kill the insects that could bore into a child’s eye; to prevent and cure the cancer that eats at a child’s bone.
And who has being working away at this? Well, in Africa a huge proportion of medical and other services is provided by the Church. It is the same in many parts of the world. Christians are to the forefront in seeking to relief suffering in all its forms and rise to great heights of heroic virtue and even saintliness in doing so.
It’s true that suffering is hard to reconcile with belief in a good God. But it is also true that many Christians go to great lengths to relief suffering as well. Let’s remember that.