For Latter-day Saints the central purpose of this life and God’s own “work and glory” is to bring about our progress towards eternal life (Moses 1:39). If progress is the whole point of mortality and it requires suffering, then suffering is inevitably bound up with the purpose of life. Once we understand this basic fact about God and ourselves, we come to this profound truth: God will allow suffering if it furthers our growth.
But notice the hole atheists have dug for themselves. By saying that our brains are powerful deception machines, they have undercut the validity of science itself. If we can dismiss spiritual experiences (such as “feeling the Holy Ghost”) by appealing to brain chemistry, we can also dismiss sensory experiences in the same way and for the same reasons. If our brains are built to trick us, why should we trust anything they tell us, including the evidence for evolution, relativity, or any other scientific theory?
If we say that religion is useful (making people unselfish, honest, and communal), the atheist will answer that it is a “useful lie,” but couldn’t the same then be said of science and its technological achievements? The atheist has no answer, only a prejudice against spiritual knowledge. An atheist attempting to debunk religion ends up debunking science as well.
Finally, atheists claim that faith is the height of delusion, and yet everybody, including atheists, have faith in something. G.K. Chesterton is reported to have said, “If man doesn’t believe in God, he will believe in anything.” Once atheists leave traditional faiths, they gravitate to new, secular alternatives, such as Marxism, political progressivism, humanism, postmodernism, or scientism—every one of which is based on assumptions that require remarkable leaps of faith to accept.
For Latter-day Saints the central purpose of this life and God’s own “work and glory” is to bring about our progress towards eternal life (Moses 1:39). If progress is the whole point of mortality and it requires suffering, then suffering is inevitably bound up with the purpose of life. Once we understand this basic fact about God and ourselves, we come to this profound truth: God will allow suffering if it furthers our growth.