On All Saints’ Day, 1755, the city of Lisbon shook, burned, and flooded. A powerful earthquake devastated the capital of Catholic Portugal while worshipers filled churches. Thousands died. Fires raged. The sea swallowed others whole. Across Europe, the tremors were not only geological — they were philosophical.
This tragedy became a turning point for the Enlightenment. Voltaire, the sharp-tongued French writer and critic of organized religion, saw in the Lisbon disaster a clear rebuke to the dominant theology of his day: Leibnizian optimism — the belief that this is “the best of all possible worlds” and that, in the grand design, all things work out for the best.
Voltaire didn’t buy it.
In his Poem on the Lisbon Disaster, he seethes at the suggestion that such horror could be justified in a cosmic ledger:
“Will ye reply: ‘You do but illustrate
The iron laws that chain the will of God’?
Say ye, ‘God is avenged: the wage of sin is death’?
What crime, what sin, had those young hearts conceived
That lie, bleeding and torn, on mother’s breast?”
Voltaire’s fury is aimed not at nature — but at theologies and philosophies that try to dress up disaster as part of a divine master plan. He asks what any honest observer must: If God is good and all-powerful, how could He allow this?
He concluded that God, if He exists, is not a moral being, and certainly not a present help in time of trouble. Rather than await divine rescue, Voltaire suggested that our only hope is human effort, modest improvement, and pragmatic reason. “We must cultivate our garden,” he wrote in Candide, rejecting both heavenly idealism and fatalism. Just do what good you can, and don’t expect answers from above.
These are not abstract objections. They echo from the pages of history into every scene of devastation and loss. And they demand a response. But not all responses are equal.
I. The Rationalist
The rationalist sees suffering and quickly concludes: “There is no God.” But this leap raises a deeper issue. If there is no God — if suffering is just a brute fact of a blind universe — then there is no moral problem to be solved. Things just are. But our instinctive reaction to tragedy says otherwise. We feel injustice. We cry out that something has gone wrong. But wrong by what standard?
Suffering doesn’t prove that God doesn’t exist. It proves that something is broken. The issue is not merely to fix the immediate cause of suffering, as Voltaire wanted, but to find meaning in this world that contains suffering and sin.
II. The Sentimentalist
Others respond with soft words and warm platitudes: “Everything happens for a reason,” or “God needed another angel in heaven.” These may soothe for a moment, but they don’t withstand the weight of deep grief. They trivialize pain and confuse the nature of both God and humanity. The Bible doesn’t offer that kind of sentimentality. It gives us Job. It gives us psalms of lament. It gives us the Man of Sorrows, acquainted with grief.
III. The Apologist-in-a-Hurry
Still others rush to defend God with well-meaning abstractions. They offer a tidy theology of sovereignty: “God has a plan.” True — but not always helpful if spoken too soon. There is a time for reverent silence, for tears, and for being with those who suffer. Appealing to a divine plan is only helpful if that plan can be understood. We may not know the “why” of each detail, but we must be able to know the big “why.” Yet this apologist says, “For all we know, there is a greater good being served,” without knowing what that greater good is.
What did Job say?
We must be able to define our greatest good. What exactly do we want in life? If it is a life of comfort without any suffering or loss, then we will find it to be elusive. The stoic solution is to harden yourself against loss and not feel anything. The pragmatist solution is to try and decrease loss through engineering. But neither of these tells us what our highest good is.
The Book of Job is about catastrophic suffering. And it is misread by the apologist-in-a-hurry. He tells us the point of the book is to show that God can do what He wants because He sees the big picture, whereas we only see a small pixel. But that isn’t what it is about.
Instead, Job is about this question: Is God worth loving? Satan says that Job only loves God for what God gives him. And when Job first faces his great suffering, he says not “I wish I were dead,” but “If life has no meaning, I wish I never existed.”
Job’s friends are apologists-in-a-hurry who want to convict him of sin to show he suffers as divine punishment. But they are looking in the wrong place. Even so, Job becomes increasingly frustrated so that he eventually justifies himself at the expense of God.
And then what happens? God tells Job to “answer like a man.” God then asks Job around 77 questions about creation. These questions range from the very foundation of the world to details about the wild donkey and the ostrich. How does this explain to Job the purpose of his suffering and loss?
It takes Job four chapters to get it. After two, he is ready to be quiet and stop questioning. But God doesn’t stop. After four chapters, Job gets it: “By hearsay I had heard of you, but now my eye has seen you.” Job hadn’t seen how the many works of God in creation reveal God to everyone. He hadn’t seen God there. And it took all of that significant suffering for Job to begin to seek Him.
“Well that’s not worth it,” says Voltaire. And Job might have agreed at the beginning or middle of the book. But once Job confesses his sin of not seeking and gains deeper knowledge of God, he would not exchange it for anything.
Unlike Job, Voltaire — when witnessing disaster — used suffering to excuse himself from knowing God. Many of us, however, fall into this same trap.
Voltaire offered us a world of Enlightenment pragmatism — we can prevent some suffering through human ingenuity. We still see this as the solution offered by “innovation” in our universities today, innovation to make the world a little more comfortable. But what we want is meaning. And a meaningful life requires that we can see God in all of His works. What will it take to get us to seek Him?
Owen Anderson is a professor of philosophy at Arizona State University and a pastor in Phoenix.
