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THE ONES WHO DARED
Why is there human suffering if there is a loving God? | Dr. Chris Palmer
Dr. Chris Palmer serves as the Dean of Ministry and Theology at Southeastern University. He earned his PhD from Bangor University in Wales, UK, and has authored eight books. His research focuses on the Book of Revelation, the concepts of suffering and theodicy. In this episode, Dr. Palmer sheds light on the enduring question of suffering: If God is good, why does He permit good people to endure suffering?
Dr. Palmer in this episode:
• Describes how witnessing the aftermath of Pol Pot's killing fields in Cambodia sparked his research journey
• Explains how historical events like the 1755 Lisbon earthquake shifted cultural perspectives on God and suffering
• Analyzes three major theodicies: free will theodicy, soul-making theodicy, and greater good theodicy
• Argues that Scripture doesn't attempt to reconcile God's goodness with evil's existence
• Proposes that living with hope and justice represents a form of protest against evil
Dr. Palmer is working on a book titled "A World Without God"
(Zondervan, 2026)
Link to Dr. Chris Palmer
https://www.instagram.com/chrispalmer/
-Links-
https://www.svetkapopov.com/
https://www.instagram.com/svetka_popov/
This is a really special episode with a unique guest, dr Chris Palmer, who's a pastor and a professor of theology at Southeastern University. Dr Palmer holds a PhD from Bangor University where, in his thesis, he examined the book of Revelation and the problem of evil, suffering and theodicy. So the big question we ask in this episode is why is there human suffering if there is a loving God? And maybe this is a question that you also wrestled with at some point. Maybe you're a person of faith and maybe you're not. But what I was curious about is what were the findings from Dr Palmer's research of over six years of digging into the subject and studying it? And also I was curious to see what made him into the subject and studying it. And also I was curious to see what made him want to study the subject of suffering, because it's not something that one sets out to study on a regular day, right? So let's see what Dr Palmer's thoughts are on this subject.
Speaker 1:Hey friends, welcome to the Ones who Dared podcast, where stories of courage are elevated. I'm your host, becca, and every other week you'll hear interviews from inspiring people. My hope is that you will leave encouraged. I'm so glad you're here, dr Chris Palmer, welcome to the Once a Year podcast. I'm so honored that you agreed to come on here.
Speaker 2:It's so good to be with you and thanks for having me on. I know that it's hard-pressed to find people that want to talk about suffering.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so we are the two crazies that actually want to talk about suffering. I'll tell you for me why that was of importance for me and why it intrigued me to bring you on in the first place. So for the last couple of years I've been doing some research in my family history, and specifically my grandmother, who was in the Nazi concentration camp as a teen. Then later she became a believer, suffered for her faith under the communist government in the former Soviet Union, and so just learning about her story, how much injustice she had to endure like completely outside of her control, Right, and so that made me go into this whole rabbit hole of suffering. And then I heard you speak on suffering and you did a whole thesis and I was like, okay, we just got to bring this guy on and let's just dig into it, let's talk about it, you know, and so.
Speaker 1:I'm curious to see what made you study suffering, because that is not a fun subject to study by any means.
Speaker 2:Oh, it's not. I think that all of us in fact, I know that all of us come to places in our life where we're confronted by various forms of suffering. There's all kinds of suffering. Some of those forms of suffering happen because of evil. Some of them are just not necessarily directly connected to any obvious or apparent sort of evil happened to us. But with suffering comes questions, and sometimes those questions become more than we can bear, and the way that we explore those is through research or rational thinking about that.
Speaker 2:When I was pastoring years ago that was about 2018, I went on a trip to Cambodia to teach to some of the Cambodian people that our church had been in partnership with and I was just finishing up my master's work at the time, where I just finished and I thought about the possibility of doing doctoral work, but I really didn't have anything that was sticking out to me as what I wanted to do. Parallel to that time, I was standing in the killing fields of Pol Pot. We'd had a day to just kind of explore Cambodia and hang out and see what the history was all about, and then I learned the fields that I was standing in. That particular field, 110,000 people were killed in the 70s and had lost their lives under Pol Pot's regime and, to my surprise, lives under Paul Paz regime. And you know, to my surprise, at the end of that I guess you could say tour that we were on there was a tower of skulls 200 feet tall. You could Google it, it would pop up. I stood before and saw skulls of people that once lived and I remember focusing on. It's easy just to see like a sea of skulls, but it became all the more powerful focusing in on individual skulls knowing that those teeth belong to somebody, that frame that they had was somebody, those eye sockets belong to somebody who saw the world and saw the future, and so it really kind of stopped me dead in my tracks.
Speaker 2:It's hard to shake it and I had a lot of questions that conflicted with my frameworks for doing theology and I realized that in all of my schooling I had never really had a good answer for suffering and injustice that takes place at the hands of a, indirectly at the hands of a good, benevolent God, and it's something that anybody who thinks about God, who is a theist of some sort, even a deist, thinks about at some point. You have to, and it's very difficult to reconcile those two things evil, slash, suffering and the goodness of God. So for six years I went on a journey and an exploration and did my best not to really reconcile that question but to see where a rational exploration of that would lead, especially for myself who's a Pentecostal. We're so used to preaching healing and the goodness of God and deliverance, and so I really leaned into my Pentecostal tradition to develop the question and move it forward. And it was an interesting six years.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I mean, I think that's a question that most people ask, even people who aren't part of faith is like why is there suffering? Why is there injustice, why is there evil in the world? Like why is there suffering? Why is there injustice, why is there evil in the world? If there is a God and if God is love, as you know, we say he is, and just the patterns of humanity and human history, there's always been tyrannical rules. You have the Roman Empire, as far back as you can date in history. There's just been consistent suffering, and I think one of the most common things about humanity is none of us are without suffering. It may look different for people and um, but essentially, at the end of the day, none of us can make it out alive without um, having endured some form of suffering and um.
Speaker 1:And yeah, it is an interesting thing to reconcile because and like you said, you didn't really really you didn't go on this path to reconcile the question, but just to see what would come of it, what would you get out of it. So, from your six years of research, which is a lot to dig into that, what were some things that you came across that stood out to you or things that you felt like you got out of that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So where I basically started was trying to reconcile that question. I thought somehow some dusty book in a library that had yet to be discovered, or I was going to rediscover it and kind of pull something forward that shows that there's a way to reconcile the goodness of an all powerful, all loving God and the existence of suffering. And I wasn't able to do that and I knew that maybe like five months in, this wasn't going to happen, you know. So what do you do? But I think that the fruitful part of it was looking at how it's been looked at and kind of seeing that from various perspectives and how we look at things, and kind of seeing that from various perspectives and how we look at things. So one of the things that I did argue for in my thesis and made the argument was that I was particularly dealing with the book of Revelation, although I could say this pretty confidently about the entirety of the biblical text and the scriptures that we have is that it's not really, or not at all an attempt to reconcile those two points the goodness of God and the existence of evil that brings suffering. There's no rational explanation for why that happens, the way that we attempt to try to rationalize those things. It's not formulaic, there's no algorithm to it. Particularly in the New Testament we see portions of Revelation that deal with it. We don't see direct mentions of suffering as an explanation, but we see suffering happening but nobody really trying to preach and explain why these things happen. Um, or particularly, I mean there's. There's explanations for why certain sorts of suffering happens, but no real explanation for the goodness of God and suffering. And so this is more of a philosophical question. It gets out of theology and I would argue that theology is everything that takes place inside of the world of the text. So when we're talking theology, we're making sense of what actually is in scripture, what's there. But if it's not there, then we're moving away from it and we're coming into more abstractions and we're talking about philosophy at that moment. And so, kind of going back to when this really became the question of all questions I was able to. What I found is is you know, this question goes back all the way to. Epicurus was asking these sorts of questions. It kind of moved its way along throughout history. But it really settles upon culture, I suppose in society in the 17th century, when there is a great, or 18th century, when there's a great earthquake in lisbon and people lose their lives on um november 1st, okay, which is all saints day, people are going to church in lisbon and people lose their lives. On November 1st, which is All Saints Day, people are going to church in Lisbon. They're going to recognize the goodness of God and God's mercy, and this earthquake takes place and people lose their lives and they die. How do you reconcile that? I mean 30,000 people died in an earthquake. That's 10 times what we had in 9-11.
Speaker 2:And Voltaire begins this harsh critique on God. He begins to kind of move it away from the goodness of God into why would God let something like this happen? And that's the framework that we have to work with today. That's what we're dealing with, and so when you look at the question, you start with two suppositions. You have two of them that are diametrically opposed. God is good, god is all-powerful, you have the qualities of God and you have evil exists. And so when you're dealing with these sorts of premises, you have to reconcile them, but in reconciling them, you always prioritize one over the other.
Speaker 2:Prior to this earthquake, people prioritized the fact that God was good. That was unquestionable, and you'd look at the world in the lens of the goodness of God. You would just see the world that way, and though suffering was taking place, that was an uncompromisable premise. I mean, others would do it. You can find writings of people doing it, but that wasn't apropos or the default setting of the day.
Speaker 2:Fast forward to this, earthquake takes place, then the premises and how people begin to prioritize those, it gets changed, and so now you have suffering happens.
Speaker 2:What are you going to do about the goodness of God? And so that kind of sets us in a trajectory where we find ourselves today because of what our advances in science and what modernity has given to us, an age where we have developed in technology, developed in information. It's really borne down on our scientific worldview that we've taken from the Enlightenment, and so God is really in his characteristics and his qualities is ours. The burden of proof is on theists to really prove that out, and it's very difficult to do empirically or rationally, and that's why in apologetic circles, once that question comes up, it is an unanswerable question. No-transcript a. I've seen good answers, but I haven't seen that smoking gun that everybody wants, and I don't think we're going to see that, because I think that that kind of moves us along to the nature of faith and belief. So that's where we find ourselves and yes, it's, it seems grim, but it really isn't, because there's other ways forward, I think.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So when you say good answers, what are some of the good theories that people come up with for suffering?
Speaker 2:Like you have free will.
Speaker 1:So there's evil in the world because we're free to do what we want.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So there's several of them, there's three I think, that are namely pretty popular. They're called theodicies. I'm sure of course you're aware of that.
Speaker 2:Theodicy is a big word. It's not to be something that intimidates. It's theos, which is the word God, and DK, which means justice or defense, or it gives the idea of a court case. So theodicy is a defense of God. You're essentially, when you're doing theodicy it can be used as a verb You're attempting to defend God from the accusations that are made where he's kind of on the hot seat and even though he's not directly responsible. I mean we could kind of do away with some of the language in the Old Testament as being hyperbolic or suggest that it wasn't as literal. You can do all that, but you can't get away from the fact that if this happened, that it's plausible that God is indirectly responsible for these things. So he would be on the hot seat If he had the power to stop it. He didn't. He's indirectly the cause of evil. So theodicy comes along and attempts to defend God from being on that hot seat, as you're mentioning.
Speaker 2:The first one that is very popular and is the most popular is the Augustinian free will theodicy that people use. It's essentially that humankind had free will and because of their free will they brought evil into the earth. And now there's this uh plan that we're on where god is redeeming us through christ jesus, because of the evil that we caused, because of free will, and that has traditionally made its way around the church the most, and probably is something that pastors and teachers will use to lean into. I don't think two things. I think what Augustine was doing was he was attempting to use theology as a way to answer that question. I don't think the Bible is really trying to by showing that man has used free will to choose sinfulness. I don't think that is the text explaining to us. This is why this is how you reconcile those two propositions. I don't think that's what that's doing, not an attempt to reconcile that. It's just telling the story and then, kind of, we read our, we use our paradigms to tell that story. But the problem with the free will theodicy is that it is limited. It doesn't really get to questions that are deeper than that. Okay, so let's just take him at his premise that free will is what brought evil into the world.
Speaker 2:Well then the next question becomes if God truly created a perfect world and all things perfect, why did the ability to choose evil actually exist? And where did the evil come from if all things were perfect for it to exist? And then, quite naturally, the next response is well, it came from satan. Well then, that whole scheme of thinking goes back to satan and angels, and so eventually you kind of have to appeal, appeal to mystery, and then it doesn't really get at where the impulse, um, to choose evil came. I mean, if before the choosing of evil, there has to be the thought to choose evil or the impulse to choose evil that's part of the equation where did that come and why even is there a choice? It would seem that something that's perfect is always going to choose perfectly. Um, that's, that's one of the arguments. And so, and if all things perfect, why is there an imperfect choice to make? So we could explore that more if we'd like to, but it goes down that road and it never comes back from that road. So you move away from that.
Speaker 2:And then the next ways to explain evil one would be the soul-making theodicy. This is pretty popular in a lot of our Christian writings that we find when we're talking about nominal forms of suffering. The reason why I dented my car, because I was in a rush and I backed into a pole and God was trying to teach me patience. Or you know the reason why I lost my keys today and I was late for work and I ended up losing my job. You know, something like that is God's just trying to teach me to slow down, and so all the forms of suffering that we experienced become ways that we build up our God is building us and making us and he's shaping us. And where that maybe can be argued in scripture are passages where that's exactly what persecution does. I mean there is direct connections to persecution being something that produces faithfulness in the believer, something that produces righteousness in the believer, that helps us to understand the sufferings of Christ. But those are connections to persecution that actually have to do with following Jesus.
Speaker 2:The problem with this sort of soul-making suffering is that it works for some things. I would never deny somebody who says you know, I lost my keys and God taught me patience. That's very possible, that's a given. But what do we do with something like you're talking about? When it comes to the holocaust? How do you explain a genocide? Right, the genocide happened so that the world could learn about, about what so it costs? You know, six million plus people, their lives a whole, this is what it takes. Or you know somebody who's coming out of 9-11 and saying the reason this happened is so that this could happen. Well, what about the sufferers, the 3,000 people, and then their families? And then you know it's easy to really make the soul-making theodicy work when you're experiencing minimal forms of suffering. Or you're not the sufferer forms of suffering, or you're not the sufferer.
Speaker 2:Now some people will use that theory to kind of explain their conditions and and I'm not saying that that hasn't been done, it can't be done, but it only gets really so far, uh, and. And then you have to ask other questions like, well, why does it take this, why does it take me suffering, why can't god do it some other way? And that that's a valid question for that. And so at you know, at worst it becomes a little bit insensitive, not a little bit, a whole lot of it, insensitive at points. And you know it should never be a default reaction. When someone comes into your office and is looking for pastoral care and they're explaining why, you know they're, they're going through something traumatic in their lives and you know, you kind of point to it and they say, well, I've had an abused past. Well, the reason you've had an abused past is because look at you now, you know you're doing so great in ministry and it's like really.
Speaker 2:This is all to do good in ministry. That's what it came down. I had to go through this. What about all the other people that have to go through that? And then, of course, maybe an even more popular one is greater good theodicy. So you're not talking about necessarily. This was used to build up my soul, but God lets evil happen so that he can perform a greater good. So God allowed sin into the world and God allowed evil into the world because we're going to have the new Jerusalem now. That's going to be even better. So God got this huge victory in spite of sin, or you know, tragedies have produced a greater good for society. You know, a child loses his life in a car accident, but it brings the community together.
Speaker 2:But again, those kind of go back to the same questions why did it have to be through this? Couldn't have been through that? What kind of abhorhorrent, monstrous god would choose the death of a child to bring a community together? Now it can bring a community together, but the question that's actually being answered asked is why did it take this to to do that? I mean, good can come out of evil, but does good require evil and suffering to actually take place? That's what that theodicy is advancing and and it's if you're hard-pressed to say that's the case, and so a lot of these theodicies kind of lock you into something that's dangerous, and that is god absolutely needs um suffering to bring about these goods and god doesn't need. God does not need suffering and god does not need evil, he is not codependent on evil to bring about these goods and God doesn't need, god does not need suffering and God does not need evil, he is not codependent on evil to bring about his good. And so it leaves our minds kind of boggled.
Speaker 2:But then, you know, you move sort of forward in all this and you have a group called the anti-theodicy or anti-theodicists, and they're just completely against thinking about and exploring suffering and in any rational way. At first, you know, I was like, okay, I like this because they feel that when you talk about evil and suffering it, we do have minds and we just can't turn them off when it comes to evil and that there is a place for rationally talking about these types of things. But I think, you know, the healthy thing is to suppose that these do work in some cases, but they don't work in all cases and, um, you know, they do find their limits, and so it kind of leads us back to square one. So so how do you reconcile the two, the two premises, and rationally they're irreconcilable in my opinion.
Speaker 1:Okay, Well, that was, that was like well, that's great.
Speaker 2:But how do you go from here?
Speaker 1:You know, um, but like in your study, what, what would you say were some of the things that you walked away with? Like okay I've done six years and I've been told like maybe next subject you study will be joy, so you don't have to in order to like experience it. And maybe in in those six years you've had your own share of suffering. I don't know. But what were some of your conclusions or your takeaway from that?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So that's a great question. I think you know I always get this response especially. You know, thanksgivings were a lot of fun when I was studying all this because I would be having a good time. And here comes Chris the Sufferer. That was my nickname, by the way. All throughout my thesis was Chris the Sufferer, because I was thinking about it so in depth and I'm in Florida now.
Speaker 2:I think I knew I needed the sun, you know, to get me out of this dark gloom of suffering. But there are a lot of people that have to really think about suffering. I mean, I would remind people I was blessed that up to this point in my life I haven't had to think about suffering other than rationally, through self-study and analysis, instead of experientially, because there are people every day that are going to the hospital and visiting their sick loved ones and have to think about it all day, every day. I think there's a few things that were takeaways, big takeaways for me, and I think that I hope to contribute to Pentecostal ethos and the Pentecostal theology of suffering. Number one suffering is caused by evil. It's not a rational enterprise in its fullness. We can't. This is not going to be solvable and it's going to take more than thinking to really get us out of this and that may just be something that we have to understand when we're doing apologetics is that this dead ends at some point. But thankfully, our apologetic and our defense of Christ doesn't end with where we answer the suffering question. I think our greatest apologetic is the Spirit and how the Spirit moves us and how the Holy Spirit moves us in suffering, that there's something is convicting about the fact that, yeah, we don't really know why this happens totally and why evil is doing what it's doing, but we do know that. We do know the story that God sent Christ into the world and that he sent the Spirit from the Son, and the Spirit is what empowers us to act responsibly and to act in forms of restoration while people are suffering, and those aren't always grandiose ways.
Speaker 2:I was reading a story in the early Pentecostal literature when I did my studies, and the story is called Pentecost at a Funeral and there was a woman who was deeply grieved at the loss of her child I think the child was it couldn't have been more than three months old. The child was sick and the child died. And there was a pastor his name was Pastor Clark Eckert and his wife and they went to minister to the Beree family. And the was a pastor his name was Pastor Clark Eckert and his wife, and they went to minister to the Bereave family. And the pastor's telling this first-person narrative and he's not trying to posit any sort of theodicy. There's no explanation, but there is a genuine, we would say, a move of the Spirit. There's a genuine demonstration or presence of the Spirit that was with that woman. That was able to not mitigate her suffering or to try to explain away what had taken place, but it was enough to bring that woman a hope that she would see her daughter again or her child again not sure it was a girl or boy, but that she would see her child again, see her daughter again or her child again I'm not sure it was a girl or boy but that she would see her child again and that her child would was in the arms of Christ and in the arms of Jesus. And there's no real explanation for that, as to why that happened, but it is. It's a.
Speaker 2:And then in that there's all these other things that take place. I mean there's reading of Scripture that takes place concerning comfort. They're able to go to the book of Ephesians and they see the text in a way that they haven't seen before. They see the goodness of God in ways that they haven't seen before. And so I think that in suffering, there's ways about suffering, there's things that happen within those that help us to draw on the goodness of God, to realize the goodness of God that's taking place, and instead of just seeing monster God and hateful God, somehow we still see the goodness of God, and that is, I think, one of the things that we have to draw on is the Spirit's response. There's also examples of people who are the sufferers themselves in the text and they're going through the suffering. But the same thing, there's really a move of the Spirit in the presence of God, where they're able to see suffering, and they're suffering and not relent and not lose hope.
Speaker 2:So, as a Pentecostal, I think it's important that in times of suffering, that we're able to draw on the Spirit and hear the Spirit in those forms you know, in the book of Revelation. When you have these churches, like the church at Smyrna or the church at Philadelphia, and they're going through suffering, what Christ says to them is hear what the Spirit is saying. I think that there's in those moments an opportunity to hear the Spirit, hear what the Spirit is saying and that ministers to us in our suffering, but it doesn't answer it, it doesn't give us the question, it tells how to reconcile the premises, but there's opportunity in suffering, whether we're the sufferer or someone else is the sufferer, to understand the goodness of God. It kind of brings me back to a couple of well, I'd say, a year and a half ago, when, at the end of my thesis, when my mom, you know, goes to the hospital and she's, I get a call one day and I was living in Tennessee that my mom is, you know, has sepsis.
Speaker 2:It just kind of happened. She had a stomach ache, she goes to the hospital, she goes septic, and I get a random call that my mom, who is pretty healthy, who I just had talked to a couple of days ago, you know, come home. You're going to be saying goodbye to your mom. So that's a lot to just get in one afternoon. So I, that's a lot to just get in one afternoon. So I'm a wreck and drive up to tennessee as fast as I can. Get to the hospital. My mom is all hooked up, you know, breathing tubes, and it's like this wasn't the mom I talked to three days ago.
Speaker 2:And so, um, I remember taking the night shifts. My brother and my dad would go home. I would stay at night and watch my mom's oxygen levels drop. It was a blue number that I had to keep my eye on. When that got low, that was bad news and being really wrecked.
Speaker 2:But then I remember pulling out Scripture, pulling out the Bible, reading the book of John to her as she was laying there, and there was a very strange comfort, strange presence that really guarded my heart. And I remember singing to my mom one of her favorite worship songs, as unconscious as she was, and my mom, in that induced coma, lifted up her hands. It's like she knew I was singing and she began to worship God with me and there was a presence that was there. But that doesn't answer the question. But I do see in that that the goodness of God is not to be negated and that the goodness of God is something that persists in time to suffering and gives us hope to look forward to what we believe Scripture has promised us. But it's not a rational explanation and it's incompatible with the scientific worldview. But I would say that scientific naturalism doesn't necessarily get to call the terms all the time, especially when it comes to suffering and God. So there's ways to work that out, I suppose.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's interesting that you said that, because as I was studying, you know my grandma's story specifically, I came upon this interview just like I think it was last year, which was interesting because I had all this resources. But that last thing came at the very end and she kind of lists things. In the end she says you know, when I was in Germany as a teenager as an Eastern European slave in the concentration camp, I didn't think that I would come home because there was no hope. When I was in prison and I was tortured for her faith, she said there was no hope. And when I got married and the persecution was so intense we didn't think that we'd make it through that year alive.
Speaker 1:Yeah because it was so intense. And you know, she lists all these things and then she says at the end she goes but my way are not God's ways and my thoughts aren't his thoughts. And she said God is always faithful and he's always on time. And I'm like how do you say that after you just list like you had such a crazy life with consistent suffering that are outside your control? It's not like she induced these things to herself and so, in essence, her hope has always laid in the faith and the good God in the middle of all that. And I think one of the things that Timothy Keller also says is Job never saw why he suffered, but he saw God and that was enough.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that that. That goes back to another. What you're talking about with the grandma and what, what Timothy Keller is saying goes back to sort of a new form of theodicy that's emerging. It's not a rational explanation for it, but it's practical theodicy. And how do we, how do we practically live in defiance of suffering and evil when it's taking place? Um, that in a way that produces hope. And I think that really works well for charismatics and pentecostals, because we're not just philosophers, we're not philosophers by any sense. Our tradition is not one of, you know, being a think, prioritizing the rational, but prioritizing doing. They were pentecostals were doers. Spirit field people are doers. We, when something takes place that's tragic, we don't ask why it happened, we just go there to be the arms and the hands and the feet of Jesus.
Speaker 2:And there are stories that I was reading of the Holocaust where there would be Holocaust prisoners who were being starved to death and they would get a loaf of bread between them all, one loaf of bread for all of them, and they would really really take measure to divide that bread evenly. Because in dividing that bread evenly, it was a form of justice that everybody was getting their fair share of that piece of bread. And Victor Frankl, I believe, tells a story in his book the Search for Meaning. What he's trying to say is that you know, there was. It was this form of justice that was able to produce hope, but it was also defiance against the evil that put them in the situation it was. It was a protest of some sort. So I think that goodness and the way that we live our lives is a protest against the evil that bears down on them. And when we are able to live our lives faithfully, in faithful witness of the hope that we have, it does bear witness that we're okay with not knowing, and but we do have hope. Because what else do you do? I mean you just give into it, we all suffer, and that that leads you down a real quick path to nihilism, to life is meaningless, and even our suffering is meaningless and nobody really wants to think. I mean, that's not what you do.
Speaker 2:If an atheist is really honest with themselves and with the people that are around them and wants to be faithful to their commitments, then they have to get up at a funeral and say that the suffering of the victim really meant nothing in the long run. In the long run it could have meant something to them. But even that meaning is meaninglessness, and I don't know any that's bold enough to do that. But that's what they really think. But a Christian can honor their commitments by getting up there and saying, hey, I may not have empirical evidence to do this, but we do have hope.
Speaker 2:And hope comes from the Spirit, and the Spirit is not something that can be measured empirically. But we have encountered this hope and we have had this experience and we can't ground it in anything necessarily empirical, but it lives in our hearts. And if you're asking me which way I want to choose, I want to choose the latter. I don't think it's philosophical suicide to do that, but I think that for the person that has encountered Christ and has encountered his spirit, that's really what makes sense. Not to say that my hope has had no, my suffering has had no purpose. I think that's unbearable and it leaves us with absolutely nothing. So again, I think, when it comes to suffering, when we try to answer it and get to the end of it rationally, we can't do it theologically, not to the end. But I don't think we should allow the rules of scientific rationalism to dictate how we approach the biggest topic in the world, which is suffering.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, I want to honor your time and wrap up this interview. I know you have to get to class. You're working on a new book. Can you just briefly touch on that and what it's about and what got you to do it?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's called A World Without God and it will be published by Zondervan Reflective. It'll come out in 2026, and it will kind of get at some of these things. What is a world without God? What does that actually look like, and how does digital technology and our advances in information really make that world even more so? A world without God? It's just an exploration of that creatively, artistically, as well as philosophically and scripturally. So it's an interesting engagement, about halfway done writing it and it's been really a joy to write. It's funny, it's snarky, it's hard hitting, but it's hopeful.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Can't wait to get my hands on that. What would you say are two books that impacted your life At the Once we Dare podcast. Giving back is part of our mission, which is why we proudly sponsor Midwest Food Bank. Here's why Midwest Food Bank Pennsylvania distributes over $25 million worth of food annually, completely free of charge, to over 200 nonprofit partners across PA, new York and New Jersey, reaching more than 330,000 people in need. Through their volunteer-driven model and innovative food rescue programs, they turn every single dollar donated into $30 worth of food. Now that's amazing. Join us in supporting this cause. To learn more or to give, go to MidwestFoodBankorg. Slash Pennsylvania.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I would probably say. Well, I was an apocalypse scholar, so I read this book called Reading Revelation Responsibly by Michael Gorman. I think people always ask me what I think about that book of Revelation. That was very impactful for my studies and was a great trajectory forward in that the Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl is a book everybody should read. Very impactful for me.
Speaker 1:That definitely is my top three books, for sure. For sure, and what would you say is the best advice that someone gave you? Just in general, it doesn't have to be on this topic.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I've gotten a lot of good advice. I think somebody had meant I remember I was in college and um, on my first day of college we were on an oak tree and um, my core leader, who's played for the harlem globetrotters, who had lived a lot of life he just said you know, you guys are gonna, you're waiting for your lives to get to a certain point he goes, but your life's never going to get to that point. You're going to realize that you're just going through. You're never going to see that point, that hilltop you think. You see it's not there. As you live life, you're just going to realize you're going through it and I never forgot that. And it gives me pause when I want to look towards the next thing, to remember that all I have is the present. I was driving into school today and considering my ambitions and I realized that my now, my present, the sunny day that we have, what I get to do today, the classic antithesis podcast this is my joy, not the future.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's beautiful. That's beautiful. Last question is what's the bravest thing Dr Palmer has ever done?
Speaker 2:The bravest thing ever. Dr Palmer is extremely risk averse. Okay, the bravest thing I I ever done is I um, I did my phd. That was brave. It was. You want to talk about suffering. It was very difficult to do that. Um, I never thought I would see the day. I remember the first day I did, getting started on it, and I'm like what am I doing? It was just me. And the thesis in the British system it's just. You have a supervisor, you talk to you once every six months so you're on your own. And I remember standing in the library, didn't even know if I was supposed to be in the library, like how do I get started on this? I never thought I'd finish. It took courage to do that and it wasn't just a moment of courage, it was, uh, six years, almost a decade of courage, and so I'm proud of myself for it. I can say Awesome.
Speaker 1:Well, Dr Chris Palmer, thank you so much for your time. It's been just an honor hearing from you and thank you for coming on.
Speaker 2:Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1:Thank you for listening to the Once we Dare podcast. It is an honor to share these encouraging stories with you. If you enjoy the show, I would love for you to tell your friends. Leave us a reviewer rating and subscribe to wherever you listen to podcasts, because this helps others discover the show. You can find me on my website, speckhopoffcom.