What’s the Problem of God? This Professor Has Studied Life’s Biggest Question for Nearly 20 Years

Throughout the course of human history, people have pondered whether God exists, who God is and what the existence of a supernatural power might mean for humanity.

For Erin Cline, Tagliabue Professor in the College of Arts & Sciences, these are questions she's wrestled with since she took her own comparative philosophy class as an undergraduate student. Cline initially saw the class as another requirement to finish college, but what she found was one of her most challenging courses that would lead to a lifelong fascination.

"I came to feel that understanding these traditions held the key to understanding cultural differences and more broadly political and societal differences," Cline said. "I immediately saw how applicable these different faiths were to our everyday lives, whether it's understanding your neighbors, other parents, kids, colleagues, or whether it's about trying to solve some of the challenging global problems we face today."

At Georgetown, these are questions every student grapples with in their first year in the university's signature course, The Problem of God. The class, which has been taught for over 50 years to some 100,000 Hoyas, encourages students to practice Georgetown's value of interreligious understanding, critically examine the religious dimension of human nature and reflect on their own experience with religion.

Cline, a comparative philosopher and theologian, has taught the class for many years since arriving at Georgetown in 2009. She also teaches the Ignatius Seminar, Human Flourishing East and West, which covers many of the same concepts and explores what human flourishing means around the world across history to the present.

Recently, Cline drew on nearly 20 years of thinking, teaching and studying these questions in her new book, The Problem of God: The Challenges of Faith, Religion, and Spirituality Today. The book examines religious belief and its challenges through the lens of Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Confucian and Daoist traditions, and introduces readers to many of the same concepts Cline's students learn in class.

"What we try to give our students in The Problem of God is an introduction to the spiritual dimension of human life so they can appreciate not just intellectual life, not just having a body that's healthy, but having a spirit that is healthy," Cline said.

We sat down with Cline to chat about her class, the most common arguments for the existence of God and how different faith traditions think about God.

How would you characterize some of the most common arguments for God's existence?

The book starts with these big questions of why we should believe in God. I work through the traditional arguments for God's existence, which are the ontological argument, the cosmological argument and the teleological argument.

The teleological argument encourages us to go up close and look at the fine-tuned details of nature. Based on what we find in nature, pattern, order and complexity, it argues for God's existence.

The cosmological argument contrasts with the teleological argument because, instead of asking us to look up close at the details of nature, it takes a step back and asks, Why is there anything? Why is there something rather than nothing?The argument for an ultimate being who is the origin of creation then becomes the basis for that argument.

The ontological argument is the argument that God must exist by definition. The ontological argument, in a lot of ways, encapsulates this view of God's largeness in the Abrahamic faith traditions, where God is the sum total of every positive predicate. In order to be the greatest possible conceivable being, God must exist because if God didn't exist, we could conceive of a greater being, one that exists. So existence is a part of God's nature according to the ontological argument.

I conclude that section with the argument for God's existence from the Nyaya tradition, which is part of the Hindu tradition. Students are struck after having worked through the ontological, cosmological and teleological arguments - these are all arguments for a big and powerful God, a God that's all-knowing, a creator God, an author of all things.

When they get to the Hindu argument for God's existence, they're struck by the fact that this is a different sort of God. This is a God that has certain limitations working in tandem with metaphysical law called the Law of Karma.

What are the primary similarities and differences between some of the major faith traditions you study in your book?

In the Bhagavad Gita, you have a vision of God's totality. When one sees God in the Bhagavad Gita, more broadly in the Hindu tradition, what you see is a vision of everything. This is part of what it means to say God is very large, but interestingly also God as creator, preserver and destroyer. God is at work in all things, even horrifying things.

In contrast, in the Christian tradition, it's the sum total of all positive predicates. When we read Augustine's Confessions, God is comforter, God is peace, God is love. He uses his mother as the most important symbol for God in the text. He understands God to be reaching out to him and loving him and caring for him, even when he's rebelling against God because his mother is the greatest source of love that he has ever experienced. So it's never destruction, it's unfailing love.

When we turn to traditions that don't take God to be central but offer alternative concepts, we see different things as well. In the Daoist tradition, we find an entity that is infinite, but it's not a personal being. It doesn't have the kinds of personal attributes that God has in the Hindu, Christian, Jewish or Islamic tradition. It is a positive force that wants to be in relation to us but not a force that has person-like characteristics.

Similarly, if you turn to the Confucian tradition and the concept of Tian, which is sometimes translated as heaven, you find an entity that has a plan for human beings. It's a little bit closer to being a personal being than the concept of the Dao, but it's still not completely a personal being.

You can have a spectrum of religious ultimates, some of which are more personal, where we would start to use the word God, and some of which are more impersonal, which are like a force or entity at work.

How does your class and book wrestle with the problem of evil?

I have students on the first day of class brainstorm what all the problems are associated with religious belief in God. The biggest one students come in with inevitably is what we call the problem of evil. This is a problem unique to the Abrahamic faith traditions.

The question is why we have pain and suffering if we have a God who has the power to stop it and who wants to stop it because God is omnibenevolent. The attempt to resolve that problem is called a theodicy. When people leave a monotheistic faith tradition, it is almost always some version of the problem of evil that leads them away.

The free will theodicy is designed to articulate why God would create human beings with freedom, the freedom to choose wrongly as well as rightly. Versions of the free will theodicy argue that from God's perspective, it is better to have human beings free to choose than it is to have humans simply as pre-programmed individuals who are designed to always choose correctly, which makes us essentially like robots.

Most versions of the free will theodicy contend that God creates us to be free because God wants us to choose to freely enter into a relationship with God. This is a fundamental part of all the Abrahamic faith traditions, the idea that God is a social being who wants to be in relationship with human beings but also wants us to have a choice.

Why is the problem of evil not a concern for other faith traditions like Hinduism and Daoism?

Evil is explained in other ways because none of those traditions subscribe to a belief that God is omnibenevolent, omnipotent and omniscient. In the Hindu and Buddhist traditions, the Law of Karma explains the existence of pain and suffering. We don't live one life. We live multiple lives, and a Law of Karma tracks the good and bad things we do over the course of our lives to ensure we pay a penalty for the things we do wrong and enjoy rewards for the good things we do.

What is the value of studying different faith traditions at a Catholic, Jesuit university like Georgetown?

When you study multiple traditions and conceptions of something like the infinite, the divine, what we call a religious ultimate, it deepens your understanding of what that entity is and what it's not in other traditions.

For students who are already grounded in a faith tradition, my hope is that it will deepen their faith and help them to become more reflective and better people of faith. I often tell students coming from the Christian tradition that I don't want their first time reflecting deeply on the problem of evil to be when one of their children is really sick or when they lose a child. It's better for us to reflect on the difficult problems that are part of our own faith before we're in a crisis.

I want all my students, no matter where they're coming from, to develop respect for other people and the way they approach those questions and the reasons why they find meaning in a different set of values and traditions.

Over the course of teaching The Problem of God, what have you learned about your own spiritual life or faith journey?

As I've been teaching The Problem of God, I've also been raising three children of my own. I've lost a parent. I've had different joys and sorrows in my own life. There have been times over these 17 years that I have responded to some of the fundamental questions that I teach in different ways personally.

I try to encourage my students to see me as someone who's learning alongside them. I encourage them not to expect that they will have all these things resolved once and for all because our spiritual and faith lives are a part of an ongoing, lifelong journey.