““God?” sniggered Damworth, “Where is your God when a little child of five has cancer? Where is your God when a boy is snatched from the streets and evil unleashed upon him? Where is your God when a woman gave herself to worshipping the imaginary and gets brutally murdered on her way back from Mass? Where then is your God?
This type of statement entertains the pull between resentment and truth. Many atheists I have interacted with cannot understand why a supposedly all loving God would allow such evil to occur. Many of the same atheists will rationally understand the concept of free will and how it must exist for love to be given freely, or rejected, freely. If God had created men with the command to love without any personal participation in that choice, then God would only have created machines. To truly love, indeed to hate, requires the ability to choose freely and it is on that basis, the soul who rejects the grace of God, rejects their own salvation; God acknowledges the choice of man even though He may not wish it.
Much harder for the atheist is the idea, considered evil by some, that the innocent or the good can experience grave suffering when a loving God could easily prevent it. The free will argument asides, this sentiment by the atheist, if he were being consistent, presents a dilemma of his own making; that goodness or innocence emerges from purely physical objects but the error is such that their very meaning belongs to a category that physical description can never reach. A physical object—whether an atom, a neuron, or a brain—can be described entirely in terms of mass, charge, motion, arrangement, and causal relations. These are descriptive features. But goodness and innocence are normative and evaluative concepts: they make claims about value, meaning, and moral status, not about spatial or chemical properties. No amount of detail about molecular behaviour, electrical firing patterns, or evolutionary pressures can logically yield a moral property, because moral properties are not the kinds of things that can be located in space, measured in units, or reduced to mechanical processes.
If one points to any physical object—say, a rock—one can describe its hardness, its weight, its structure. None of these properties contains the slightest hint of meaning, value, or moral significance. Adding more complexity does not change this. A more complex rock remains a rock. A more complex arrangement of neurons remains an arrangement of neurons. Complexity does not magically produce a new ontological category. One can scale up from particles to tissues to brains, but every level is still describing matter behaving according to physical laws. A description of behaviour cannot, on its own, become a moral category such as “good” or “innocent.”
To attempt to do so is an expression of the naturalistic fallacy. The naturalistic fallacy is the philosophical error of trying to derive an ought (a moral prescription) from an is (a description of facts about the world). It assumes that because something is a certain way in nature, it therefore ought to be that way morally. This fallacy was most famously articulated by G.E. Moore, who argued that moral goodness cannot be reduced to natural properties (like pleasure, survival, or evolutionary advantage) without committing a conceptual error. In short: facts about nature do not automatically yield moral obligations.
One, for example, can describe a child’s brain chemistry, hormone levels, or genetic markers, but none of that tells you whether the child is “good,” “innocent,” “precious,” or worthy of protection. Those judgments rely on a metaphysical framework that grants value, not a physical framework that describes behaviour. Likewise, you could describe in exquisite detail the synaptic patterns of a murderer, but the physical description never tells you that the act is “evil”; it only tells you how neurons fired.
Physical processes are indifferent to moral meaning. A supernova is neither cruel nor kind. A virus is neither wicked nor innocent. These judgments come from consciousness operating with categories that are irreducible to matter: intention, will, value, dignity, purpose. If human beings are only physical processes, then goodness and innocence collapse into illusions—useful perhaps for survival, but not objectively real. But the moment you treat goodness or innocence as real qualities, you have already affirmed something that transcends the physical, because matter alone has no evaluative dimension.
Thus, goodness and innocence cannot emerge from pure physical objects, because physical description is intrinsically silent on value. Moral qualities require a metaphysical foundation—either intrinsic dignity bestowed by God, or at least a reality deeper than matter. Without that, moral language becomes nothing more than poetic noise layered over chemistry and physics. In fact, the phrase “trust the science” commits a version of the naturalistic fallacy because it tries to move from descriptive facts (what science can measure or predict) to normative commands (what people ought to do) without justifying the moral or political step in between. In other words, it smuggles an “ought” inside an “is”—the very move the naturalistic fallacy warns against— something the media especially fell foul of.
Of course, this begs the question too as to whether innocence or goodness is itself meaningful, and the physicalist atheist already has had his argument defeated by his own internal purposeless logic. If human beings are mere matter in motion, the product of random, unguided processes of a series of meaningless collusions culminating in a fortuitous assembly over time but with no inherent purpose other than the illusion of one, then innocence and goodness may as well, themselves, be types of rock. From a purely naturalistic perspective, an “ought” cannot emerge from an “is” simply because they belong to two different categories; normative and descriptive respectively. In contradistinction Christian theology avoids the trap of reducing goodness, innocence, or moral value to mere physical properties because it affirms that the human person is not only a physical organism but a being whose nature includes a spiritual dimension that grounds moral meaning. Divine law and the Christian understanding of the human person provide the metaphysical framework that naturalism cannot supply.
As Catholics we are called to do the good, because love is not inward focused but towards something greater; the greatest—God. Even we are called to love ourselves, we do so, with the grace of God as creations of Him. We love, as in will the best for, precisely because the recipient is made in the image of God. That explains why no true Catholic can reduce another human being to an arbitrary category of positivism like, personhood, a devise that grants him or her value according to some subjective criteria. God given value is non-divisible, non-negotiable, inalienable and imprescriptible precisely because we are all made in God’s image. This helps to explain why providing any arbitrary distinction, like wantedness—that differentiates between a human life that has value, or none—is contrary to any true understanding of ethics. This is why abortion; the intentional killing of an innocent human life, is a grave sin as it offends the value granted to all human life by virtue of its ultimate provenance; God.
I’ve slightly meandered, so I will return.
Ultimately, when the atheist condemns the notion of an all loving God, he does on the basis of a particular world view that he has yet to substantiate. For convenience sakes, I will call it “the vantage point”, because it only views the entirety of reality from the vantage point of finite physical existence. The modern secular imagination tends to bracket eternity as an abstraction, then wonders why the problem of suffering looks insoluble. If the afterlife is real and eternal, the entire meaning-structure of earthly suffering changes categorically, not quantitatively.
The atheist physicalist judges suffering as if only the temporal slice existed and this creates a false problem.
The key problem with many in modernity is that they no longer think in metaphysical or eschatological terms. They think like this: “My suffering lasts 10 years”, “My joy lasts 30 years”, “My heaven lasts… well… who knows.” They treat the afterlife as a murky imponderable, so it never enters the calculation, thus evaluating God inside the finite frame, not across the whole. They are—without realising—doing all their moral mathematics on numbers and refusing to let ∞ enter the equation. Once you ignore ∞, the arithmetic collapses into absurdity.
The truth is, is that infinity is not just a longer timeline — it’s a category breaker. It is as St Gregory the Great, explicitly invoked, referring to a metaphysical category difference between finite vs. infinite.
“Whatever affliction we endure in this life passes swiftly, while the reward that follows is endless. What is finite cannot stand in comparison to what is infinite.”
— Moralia in Job, Book 9
The classical tradition insists, such as espoused by St Gregory, that eternity is non-temporal so it is not “lasting forever” because “it” is being outside duration entirely. If that’s true, then any amount of suffering, however intense, remains contained within finitude, and any participation in divine life is infinite in value and mode. This is the asymmetry many, who ignore metaphysics, perpetuate because they shrink the ontology to “the now.” Without infinity, God looks monstrous; with infinity, the whole picture changes.
Eternity cannot mean time, because time—no matter how long—is always sequential, measurable, and divisible, whereas eternity, in the classical sense, has none of these properties. Time is marked by “before” and “after,” by change, by duration, and by the possibility of counting moments, and anything that can be counted or ordered is finite in structure even if it extends without end. If eternity were simply endless time, it would still contain successive moments, meaning it could be measured, added to, subtracted from, and altered by sequence, which collapses it back into the finite order of temporal becoming. But classical Christian thought defines eternity as totum simul—“the whole at once”—a mode of existence without succession, without change, without potentiality, and without a next moment waiting to arrive. To introduce sequence is to reintroduce temporality, which is incompatible with the unchanging divine life and incompatible with the idea of beatitude as a participation in God’s own mode of being. Thus, eternity cannot be time or “time extended infinitely”; it is not a quantity of moments but a qualitatively different reality, outside measurement, succession, or duration altogether.
If one assumes (consciously or unconsciously) that this life is everything or almost everything then of course the afterlife will appear vague, unreal, even irrelevant. In truth, eternity is poetic language to capture the absence of time. If this is so, then naturally, suffering seems irredeemable, and God appears indifferent or cruel. However, if “eternity” exists then the question changes radically: Not “Why does God let this finite moment hurt?” but rather “How does this finite moment fit into an infinite destiny?” The emotional objection loses its leverage once the infinite term is actually acknowledged.
It is here that the neglect of infinity distorts justice so people judge suffering under the assumption that injustice must be resolved within time and that the ledger must close inside history. But, if the ledger closes in eternity, then wrongs can be righted infinitely, losses can be restored infinitely, and joy can swallow sorrow not by compensation but by transfiguration. Yet, modern people insist on evaluating God as if He were bound to the mortal clock. This isn’t rational—it’s metaphysical myopia.
Please indulge me in this slight detour. Scientists actually struggle to define time, why? because every physical tool we use—clocks, oscillations, decay rates, orbital cycles—measures only change, not time itself. A clock is simply an instrument that tracks periodic motion, whether it is the vibration of a cesium atom or the rotation of the Earth, but none of these motions are time. They are merely proxies for something more fundamental that resists direct observation. When physicists say “time slows down” under relativity, what they truly mean is that the rates of physical processes change under varying conditions of gravity or velocity; the clock’s behaviour is altered, but this does not identify what time is, only how matter behaves under temporal conditions we cannot isolate. Even in quantum mechanics and cosmology, time appears as a parameter inserted into equations, not a phenomenon we can independently detect. The difficulty arises because every scientific definition of time ends up referring to something that changes—motion, entropy, decay—yet time itself is not reducible to these changing processes. It is the condition under which change occurs, not the change itself. Thus, scientists can measure intervals, but not time’s essence; they can describe how systems evolve, but not what the “flow” of time actually consists of. Clocks are simply rhythmic devices that mirror the world’s alterations, and mistaking them for time itself is like mistaking a ruler for space or a thermometer for heat.
Yet, many atheist materialists will argue from a position of time to measure the gravity of suffering (despite their own world view acknowledging, if consistent, that none of these questions matter anyway, because they are mere matter in motion with illusions to aid purposeless survival). Many people tend to speak about suffering with a worldview that excludes the very metaphysical premise that Christianity is built upon. Thus, their critique is aimed at a God whose existence they’ve reduced to temporal proportions. If you grant the premise of God and eternal life, you must grant the infinite horizon but if you reject the infinite horizon, you’ve already rejected the premise of God. Most moderns do the former while pretending not to do the latter. Infinity as we attempt to understand it changes everything, not because it minimizes suffering, but because it reframes the ontology of the human journey.
In classical terms an finite life plus infinite union with God equals infinite destiny. A finite life plus finite suffering does not equal infinite loss. It is simply irrational to ignore the infinite term and pretend the finite is absolute. It isn’t even that most people don’t miscalculate infinity — they leave it out of the equation entirely, and once you do that, the worldview collapses. The atheist critique assumes a caricature of God—one who is “all-loving” in a sentimental, pampering, therapeutic sense, not in the classical metaphysical sense, and from the vantage point of limitation. Then they use that caricature to attack Christianity, not the actual doctrine.
Atheists will often assume that an “all-loving God prevents all suffering.” That assumption is nowhere in classical theism. Rather, it’s a projection of modern therapeutic culture onto God. In classical Christianity Love is not sentiment. This is why I utterly reject the pastoralism of today that has collapsed into an entire series of “Dawson’s Creek” type theological meal, with plenty of “Little House on the prairie” as a side dish. Love is willing the good of another, and the highest good is union with God, which is infinite. Finite suffering does not negate this; it can even be part of its formation. But atheists unconsciously smuggle in: “A good God must behave like a 21st-century parent who bubble-wraps the child.” That’s a category error.
Christians reply with free will — but the deeper point is, that suffering is, really, meaningful. Yes, free will matters but real meaning requires real stakes and real stakes require the real possibility of hardship, loss, sacrifice, courage, endurance, fidelity, and self-giving love. A world without suffering is a world without: virtue, compassion, courage, integrity, forgiveness, self-sacrifice, perseverance and redemption. In other words: a world without moral texture. It would be a zoo of harmless, padded experiences — safe, trivial, meaningless.
Even in the worst suffering, when placed against infinite beatitude, the scale is not 50/50.
It’s finite vs infinite and the infinite dominates absolutely. This is classical metaphysics:
anything finite, no matter how big, is nothing when placed beside the infinite. This isn’t minimizing suffering; it’s accurately situating it.
Without the infinite horizon, suffering appears cosmically absurd and this is why the modern West, which rejects eternity, experiences suffering as: an outrage, a scandal, a contradiction and even evidence against God’s goodness. Once the infinite context is deleted, the finite becomes absolute and that is mere philosophical amputation.
But in Christianity suffering is not final, it is not ultimate, it neither absolute, nor the last word. It is one chapter in an eternal narrative.
Suffering is not a contradiction to God’s love. In fact, Scripture says explicitly that participation in Christ’s suffering increases glory, not decreases it. This is the whole Catholic theology of redemptive suffering, rooted in Romans 8, Philippians 2–3, and Colossians 1.
You see, the atheist’s objection only works if suffering is absolute and eternity is irrelevant, but this is not the Christian worldview, rather, It’s a projection of secular assumptions onto God. Once eternity enters the equation, the critique collapses. It becomes like saying: “A teacher who allows a student to struggle through a difficult year is evil, even if afterward that student enjoys 80 years of flourishing because of that struggle.” Yet, this analogy still understates the difference, because 80 years is finite; heaven is infinite.
The great Ox, St Thomas Aquinas, puts it succinctly,
“The least reward of the life to come exceeds every suffering and toil of this life; for the eternal outweighs the temporal beyond all proportion.”
This type of statement entertains the pull between resentment and truth. Many atheists I have interacted with cannot understand why a supposedly all loving God would allow such evil to occur. Many of the same atheists will rationally understand the concept of free will and how it must exist for love to be given freely, or rejected, freely. If God had created men with the command to love without any personal participation in that choice, then God would only have created machines. To truly love, indeed to hate, requires the ability to choose freely and it is on that basis, the soul who rejects the grace of God, rejects their own salvation; God acknowledges the choice of man even though He may not wish it.
Much harder for the atheist is the idea, considered evil by some, that the innocent or the good can experience grave suffering when a loving God could easily prevent it. The free will argument asides, this sentiment by the atheist, if he were being consistent, presents a dilemma of his own making; that goodness or innocence emerges from purely physical objects but the error is such that their very meaning belongs to a category that physical description can never reach. A physical object—whether an atom, a neuron, or a brain—can be described entirely in terms of mass, charge, motion, arrangement, and causal relations. These are descriptive features. But goodness and innocence are normative and evaluative concepts: they make claims about value, meaning, and moral status, not about spatial or chemical properties. No amount of detail about molecular behaviour, electrical firing patterns, or evolutionary pressures can logically yield a moral property, because moral properties are not the kinds of things that can be located in space, measured in units, or reduced to mechanical processes.
If one points to any physical object—say, a rock—one can describe its hardness, its weight, its structure. None of these properties contains the slightest hint of meaning, value, or moral significance. Adding more complexity does not change this. A more complex rock remains a rock. A more complex arrangement of neurons remains an arrangement of neurons. Complexity does not magically produce a new ontological category. One can scale up from particles to tissues to brains, but every level is still describing matter behaving according to physical laws. A description of behaviour cannot, on its own, become a moral category such as “good” or “innocent.”
To attempt to do so is an expression of the naturalistic fallacy. The naturalistic fallacy is the philosophical error of trying to derive an ought (a moral prescription) from an is (a description of facts about the world). It assumes that because something is a certain way in nature, it therefore ought to be that way morally. This fallacy was most famously articulated by G.E. Moore, who argued that moral goodness cannot be reduced to natural properties (like pleasure, survival, or evolutionary advantage) without committing a conceptual error. In short: facts about nature do not automatically yield moral obligations.
One, for example, can describe a child’s brain chemistry, hormone levels, or genetic markers, but none of that tells you whether the child is “good,” “innocent,” “precious,” or worthy of protection. Those judgments rely on a metaphysical framework that grants value, not a physical framework that describes behaviour. Likewise, you could describe in exquisite detail the synaptic patterns of a murderer, but the physical description never tells you that the act is “evil”; it only tells you how neurons fired.
Physical processes are indifferent to moral meaning. A supernova is neither cruel nor kind. A virus is neither wicked nor innocent. These judgments come from consciousness operating with categories that are irreducible to matter: intention, will, value, dignity, purpose. If human beings are only physical processes, then goodness and innocence collapse into illusions—useful perhaps for survival, but not objectively real. But the moment you treat goodness or innocence as real qualities, you have already affirmed something that transcends the physical, because matter alone has no evaluative dimension.
Thus, goodness and innocence cannot emerge from pure physical objects, because physical description is intrinsically silent on value. Moral qualities require a metaphysical foundation—either intrinsic dignity bestowed by God, or at least a reality deeper than matter. Without that, moral language becomes nothing more than poetic noise layered over chemistry and physics. In fact, the phrase “trust the science” commits a version of the naturalistic fallacy because it tries to move from descriptive facts (what science can measure or predict) to normative commands (what people ought to do) without justifying the moral or political step in between. In other words, it smuggles an “ought” inside an “is”—the very move the naturalistic fallacy warns against— something the media especially fell foul of.
Of course, this begs the question too as to whether innocence or goodness is itself meaningful, and the physicalist atheist already has had his argument defeated by his own internal purposeless logic. If human beings are mere matter in motion, the product of random, unguided processes of a series of meaningless collusions culminating in a fortuitous assembly over time but with no inherent purpose other than the illusion of one, then innocence and goodness may as well, themselves, be types of rock. From a purely naturalistic perspective, an “ought” cannot emerge from an “is” simply because they belong to two different categories; normative and descriptive respectively. In contradistinction Christian theology avoids the trap of reducing goodness, innocence, or moral value to mere physical properties because it affirms that the human person is not only a physical organism but a being whose nature includes a spiritual dimension that grounds moral meaning. Divine law and the Christian understanding of the human person provide the metaphysical framework that naturalism cannot supply.
As Catholics we are called to do the good, because love is not inward focused but towards something greater; the greatest—God. Even we are called to love ourselves, we do so, with the grace of God as creations of Him. We love, as in will the best for, precisely because the recipient is made in the image of God. That explains why no true Catholic can reduce another human being to an arbitrary category of positivism like, personhood, a devise that grants him or her value according to some subjective criteria. God given value is non-divisible, non-negotiable, inalienable and imprescriptible precisely because we are all made in God’s image. This helps to explain why providing any arbitrary distinction, like wantedness—that differentiates between a human life that has value, or none—is contrary to any true understanding of ethics. This is why abortion; the intentional killing of an innocent human life, is a grave sin as it offends the value granted to all human life by virtue of its ultimate provenance; God.
I’ve slightly meandered, so I will return.
Ultimately, when the atheist condemns the notion of an all loving God, he does on the basis of a particular world view that he has yet to substantiate. For convenience sakes, I will call it “the vantage point”, because it only views the entirety of reality from the vantage point of finite physical existence. The modern secular imagination tends to bracket eternity as an abstraction, then wonders why the problem of suffering looks insoluble. If the afterlife is real and eternal, the entire meaning-structure of earthly suffering changes categorically, not quantitatively.
The atheist physicalist judges suffering as if only the temporal slice existed and this creates a false problem.
The key problem with many in modernity is that they no longer think in metaphysical or eschatological terms. They think like this: “My suffering lasts 10 years”, “My joy lasts 30 years”, “My heaven lasts… well… who knows.” They treat the afterlife as a murky imponderable, so it never enters the calculation, thus evaluating God inside the finite frame, not across the whole. They are—without realising—doing all their moral mathematics on numbers and refusing to let ∞ enter the equation. Once you ignore ∞, the arithmetic collapses into absurdity.
The truth is, is that infinity is not just a longer timeline — it’s a category breaker. It is as St Gregory the Great, explicitly invoked, referring to a metaphysical category difference between finite vs. infinite.
“Whatever affliction we endure in this life passes swiftly, while the reward that follows is endless. What is finite cannot stand in comparison to what is infinite.”
— Moralia in Job, Book 9
The classical tradition insists, such as espoused by St Gregory, that eternity is non-temporal so it is not “lasting forever” because “it” is being outside duration entirely. If that’s true, then any amount of suffering, however intense, remains contained within finitude, and any participation in divine life is infinite in value and mode. This is the asymmetry many, who ignore metaphysics, perpetuate because they shrink the ontology to “the now.” Without infinity, God looks monstrous; with infinity, the whole picture changes.
Eternity cannot mean time, because time—no matter how long—is always sequential, measurable, and divisible, whereas eternity, in the classical sense, has none of these properties. Time is marked by “before” and “after,” by change, by duration, and by the possibility of counting moments, and anything that can be counted or ordered is finite in structure even if it extends without end. If eternity were simply endless time, it would still contain successive moments, meaning it could be measured, added to, subtracted from, and altered by sequence, which collapses it back into the finite order of temporal becoming. But classical Christian thought defines eternity as totum simul—“the whole at once”—a mode of existence without succession, without change, without potentiality, and without a next moment waiting to arrive. To introduce sequence is to reintroduce temporality, which is incompatible with the unchanging divine life and incompatible with the idea of beatitude as a participation in God’s own mode of being. Thus, eternity cannot be time or “time extended infinitely”; it is not a quantity of moments but a qualitatively different reality, outside measurement, succession, or duration altogether.
If one assumes (consciously or unconsciously) that this life is everything or almost everything then of course the afterlife will appear vague, unreal, even irrelevant. In truth, eternity is poetic language to capture the absence of time. If this is so, then naturally, suffering seems irredeemable, and God appears indifferent or cruel. However, if “eternity” exists then the question changes radically: Not “Why does God let this finite moment hurt?” but rather “How does this finite moment fit into an infinite destiny?” The emotional objection loses its leverage once the infinite term is actually acknowledged.
It is here that the neglect of infinity distorts justice so people judge suffering under the assumption that injustice must be resolved within time and that the ledger must close inside history. But, if the ledger closes in eternity, then wrongs can be righted infinitely, losses can be restored infinitely, and joy can swallow sorrow not by compensation but by transfiguration. Yet, modern people insist on evaluating God as if He were bound to the mortal clock. This isn’t rational—it’s metaphysical myopia.
Please indulge me in this slight detour. Scientists actually struggle to define time, why? because every physical tool we use—clocks, oscillations, decay rates, orbital cycles—measures only change, not time itself. A clock is simply an instrument that tracks periodic motion, whether it is the vibration of a cesium atom or the rotation of the Earth, but none of these motions are time. They are merely proxies for something more fundamental that resists direct observation. When physicists say “time slows down” under relativity, what they truly mean is that the rates of physical processes change under varying conditions of gravity or velocity; the clock’s behaviour is altered, but this does not identify what time is, only how matter behaves under temporal conditions we cannot isolate. Even in quantum mechanics and cosmology, time appears as a parameter inserted into equations, not a phenomenon we can independently detect. The difficulty arises because every scientific definition of time ends up referring to something that changes—motion, entropy, decay—yet time itself is not reducible to these changing processes. It is the condition under which change occurs, not the change itself. Thus, scientists can measure intervals, but not time’s essence; they can describe how systems evolve, but not what the “flow” of time actually consists of. Clocks are simply rhythmic devices that mirror the world’s alterations, and mistaking them for time itself is like mistaking a ruler for space or a thermometer for heat.
Yet, many atheist materialists will argue from a position of time to measure the gravity of suffering (despite their own world view acknowledging, if consistent, that none of these questions matter anyway, because they are mere matter in motion with illusions to aid purposeless survival). Many people tend to speak about suffering with a worldview that excludes the very metaphysical premise that Christianity is built upon. Thus, their critique is aimed at a God whose existence they’ve reduced to temporal proportions. If you grant the premise of God and eternal life, you must grant the infinite horizon but if you reject the infinite horizon, you’ve already rejected the premise of God. Most moderns do the former while pretending not to do the latter. Infinity as we attempt to understand it changes everything, not because it minimizes suffering, but because it reframes the ontology of the human journey.
In classical terms an finite life plus infinite union with God equals infinite destiny. A finite life plus finite suffering does not equal infinite loss. It is simply irrational to ignore the infinite term and pretend the finite is absolute. It isn’t even that most people don’t miscalculate infinity — they leave it out of the equation entirely, and once you do that, the worldview collapses. The atheist critique assumes a caricature of God—one who is “all-loving” in a sentimental, pampering, therapeutic sense, not in the classical metaphysical sense, and from the vantage point of limitation. Then they use that caricature to attack Christianity, not the actual doctrine.
Atheists will often assume that an “all-loving God prevents all suffering.” That assumption is nowhere in classical theism. Rather, it’s a projection of modern therapeutic culture onto God. In classical Christianity Love is not sentiment. This is why I utterly reject the pastoralism of today that has collapsed into an entire series of “Dawson’s Creek” type theological meal, with plenty of “Little House on the prairie” as a side dish. Love is willing the good of another, and the highest good is union with God, which is infinite. Finite suffering does not negate this; it can even be part of its formation. But atheists unconsciously smuggle in: “A good God must behave like a 21st-century parent who bubble-wraps the child.” That’s a category error.
Christians reply with free will — but the deeper point is, that suffering is, really, meaningful. Yes, free will matters but real meaning requires real stakes and real stakes require the real possibility of hardship, loss, sacrifice, courage, endurance, fidelity, and self-giving love. A world without suffering is a world without: virtue, compassion, courage, integrity, forgiveness, self-sacrifice, perseverance and redemption. In other words: a world without moral texture. It would be a zoo of harmless, padded experiences — safe, trivial, meaningless.
Even in the worst suffering, when placed against infinite beatitude, the scale is not 50/50.
It’s finite vs infinite and the infinite dominates absolutely. This is classical metaphysics:
anything finite, no matter how big, is nothing when placed beside the infinite. This isn’t minimizing suffering; it’s accurately situating it.
Without the infinite horizon, suffering appears cosmically absurd and this is why the modern West, which rejects eternity, experiences suffering as: an outrage, a scandal, a contradiction and even evidence against God’s goodness. Once the infinite context is deleted, the finite becomes absolute and that is mere philosophical amputation.
But in Christianity suffering is not final, it is not ultimate, it neither absolute, nor the last word. It is one chapter in an eternal narrative.
Suffering is not a contradiction to God’s love. In fact, Scripture says explicitly that participation in Christ’s suffering increases glory, not decreases it. This is the whole Catholic theology of redemptive suffering, rooted in Romans 8, Philippians 2–3, and Colossians 1.
You see, the atheist’s objection only works if suffering is absolute and eternity is irrelevant, but this is not the Christian worldview, rather, It’s a projection of secular assumptions onto God. Once eternity enters the equation, the critique collapses. It becomes like saying: “A teacher who allows a student to struggle through a difficult year is evil, even if afterward that student enjoys 80 years of flourishing because of that struggle.” Yet, this analogy still understates the difference, because 80 years is finite; heaven is infinite.
The great Ox, St Thomas Aquinas, puts it succinctly,
“The least reward of the life to come exceeds every suffering and toil of this life; for the eternal outweighs the temporal beyond all proportion.”
— Summa Theologiae, I–II, q. 114, a. 10, ad 3
Finite suffering does not negate God’s love, finite suffering is not even comparable to infinite beatitude, and suffering, precisely because it is real and weighty, gives life meaning, moral texture, and the capacity for love to be chosen freely. Atheists are attacking a god-of-comfort, not the God of classical Christianity — and the god they attack doesn’t exist.
St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross — expressed how earthly suffering pales in comparison with the eternity of beatitude, and thus shows how Christian theology re-frames suffering in light of the infinite— stating,
“To suffer and to be happy although suffering, to have one’s feet on the earth, to walk on the dirty and rough paths of this earth and yet to be enthroned with Christ at the Father’s right hand, to laugh and cry with the children of this world and ceaselessly sing the praises of God with the choirs of angels — this is the life of the Christian until the morning of eternity breaks forth.”
Suffering, I must stress, is never taken for granted in Christian theology, for God Himself does not regard it lightly. But suffering cannot be understood within the narrow horizon of secular physicalism, which judges all things according to temporal duration and material effect. Physicalism views suffering only as a biological event within a finite life-span, and thus finds it intolerable, absurd, or morally inexplicable. But Christian revelation insists that suffering must be considered within the perspective of God, whose vision encompasses eternity and whose providence orders all things toward a final and supernatural end. From God’s vantage point, the value of suffering does not lie in its physical pain nor in its temporal length, but in its relation to eternal beatitude and the divine plan of salvation. What appears from the earthly side as meaningless hardship is, in the divine economy, capable of becoming a participation in Christ’s redeeming work and a passage toward the glory that infinitely exceeds the present moment. Therefore, suffering remains a mystery, but not an absurdity: its significance cannot be measured by the categories of matter, time, or utility, but only by the infinite wisdom and love of God, who alone sees the whole of reality in a single act. To judge suffering without reference to this divine horizon is to misjudge it entirely, for the meaning of the finite cannot be discerned apart from the infinite in which it is fulfilled.
In the end, every grave goes unvisited but it must also be stated, with quite some frankness, that no matter how sound the rational argument presented above may be, the cries of a mother or father at the death of a child cannot be soothed by logical explanation, even when the logic is flawless. Suffering is real, visceral, and immediate; it pierces the heart before it ever reaches the mind. No appeal to metaphysics, no analysis of infinity, no theological exposition can soften that first blow. The journey through such grief is a human and spiritual ordeal, not an intellectual puzzle, and Christian theology does not pretend otherwise. Reason can illuminate suffering, but it cannot anesthetise it. Only grace can.”