The Problem of Pain

Tags:  religion,

I first read The Problem of Pain back in 2024. Here is my review from the initial reading:

I like C.S. Lewis, but I didn’t much like this book. Not because it was poorly written or poorly thought out, but because I don’t think the basic facts of existence require intricate, arcane theological explanations that rely on thousands of years of convoluted religious and philosophical texts.

Why does pain exist? It just does. How’s that for an answer?

Buddhism takes this as the starting point of its belief system. The first tenet of Buddhism is that life is suffering. We don’t need a church hierarchy and thousands of years of biblical commentary to tell us that. We don’t even need to be literate. We know it because we live it.

In Christianity, the existence of pain and suffering are a problem because, as Lewis puts it,

If God were good, He would wish to make His creatures perfectly happy, and if God were almighty He would be able to do what he wished. But the creatures are not happy. Therefore God lacks either goodness, or power, or both.

So why does pain exist? To teach us to be better people. Every parent knows that some of the lessons kids need to learn are going to hurt. That doesn’t end when we grow up.

Lewis makes a good, clear argument for this, and then has to add in a number of contortions to explain why animals also feel pain, even though they can’t really grow morally and spiritually the way people can.

My problem with this book is that, at bottom, all religious texts are metaphorical, and all seek to convey meaning that we can grasp intuitively. Religion addresses deeply meaningful subjects that are not rational. Interpret these things literally and then try to reason about them and you wind up with libraries of abstruse theology, rigid dogma, and holy wars, none of which improve the world.

Throw out the tortured arguments and go back to the fundamental principles of love, compassion, goodness, and generosity. Those are things everyone can grasp, and they go a lot further toward alleviating pain than all the theological arguments the world has to offer.

[Update: May 6, 2026]

OK, well I just re-read the book, and I have about the same opinion as before, though I do like some of Lewis’ reflections in the latter third of the book. Among them is this uncannily accurate description of our current president, a man who is perhaps the most unchristian person alive and yet was elected, in large part, by people who claim to be Christians.

This is from the chapter called “Hell,” in which Lewis addresses readers’ objections to the idea of hell as a place of eternal punishment.

Picture to yourself a man who has risen to wealth or power by a continued course of treachery and cruelty, by exploiting for purely selfish ends the noble motions of his victims, laughing the while at their simplicity; who, having thus obtained success, uses it for the gratification of lust and hatred and finally parts with the last rag of honor among thieves by betraying his own accomplices and jeering at their last moments of bewildered disillusionment. Suppose, further, that he does all this, not (as we like to imagine) tormented by remorse or even misgiving, but eating like a schoolboy and sleeping like a healthy infant–a jolly, ruddy-cheeked man, without a care in the world, unshakably confident to the very end that he alone has found the answer to the riddle of life, that God and man are fools whom he has got the better of, that his way of life is utterly successful, satisfactory, unassailable…

The idea that God should forgive such a man while he remains what he is, is based on a confusion between condoning and forgiving. To condone an evil is simply to ignore it, to treat it as if it were good. But forgiveness needs to be accepted as well as offered if it is to be complete: and a man who admits no guilt can accept no forgiveness…

[Some] men prefer darkness to light… We are therefore at liberty… to think of this bad man’s perdition not as a sentence imposed on him but as the mere fact of being what he is. The characteristic of lost souls is ’their rejection of everything that is not simply themselves.’ Our imaginary egoist has tried to turn everything he meets into a province or appendage of the self. The taste for the other, that is, the very capacity for enjoying good, is quenched in him except in so far as his body still draws him into some rudimentary contact with an outer world. Death removes this last contact. He has his wish–to lie wholly in the self and to make the best of what he finds there. And what he finds there is Hell.