Why does the problem of evil lead to loss of Christian faith - but only in the "modern" era?

It has become a commonplace observation that Modern people tend to lose faith when they experience pain, suffering - in a word evil. 

It is therefore assumed - and this appears to be true quite often - that such experiences as bereavement, illness, famine, war... will tend to induce Christians to lose their faith on the basis that these are incompatible with a God supposed to have created everything, and be both Good and Omnipotent. 

The reasoning goes that if mortal life is suffering from evil, then that idea of God cannot be true - therefore Christianity must be false. 

My point here is that this reason for loss of Christian faith is a Modern and "Western" phenomenon -- something that seems to have been a feature only of the "modern" era, which might be asserted to have begun (in Western Europe) around 1500, become common (in some groups) in the middle 1700s - and socially-dominant from the later 1800s; until nowadays it is all-but universal. 

Nowadays in the West it is quite normal for previously devout churchgoing Christians to experience that their faith is At Least strongly challenged by extreme adversity; by personal experience of the evils of this mortal life.    

Yet, there really is very little evidence of this happening in the first 3/4 of Christianity - it is recorded, but exceptional - despite at-least equally great (perhaps greater) human suffering. 

Indeed the opposite was more usual: the assumption that the more humans suffered, the more devoutly Christian they became. 

For instance; in a medieval work like Piers Plowman (c 1380-1400) the starving and diseased poor were generally regarded as better Christians (on average) than the idle and luxurious rich. 

It was indeed a commonplace that peace, prosperity, and comfort were the main enemies of Christianity.  

In other words; with the advent and spread of Modernity, there has been a reversal of the effect of evil experiences on people. 

I believe that the reason has been that modern consciousness has changed from the pre-modern - "consciousness" meaning (roughly) our degree of self-awareness, and the way our minds spontaneously interpret the world.  

Modern consciousness apparently began in the upper and educated classes, giving the earliest inklings and examples among the likes of poets and writers; and spread progressively downwards through almost-whole Western populations - albeit probably less-so in other places and cultures. 

But it is modern consciousness that has led to our explicit and personal awareness of the "problem of evil". 

This seems to me one of the major ways in which our basic situation in the world has changed. The experience of evil has always been part of life; but the response of people has almost inverted; exactly because modern Man experiences himself qualitatively differently from pre-modern times. 

Adult modern man is spontaneously (almost universally) cut-off and "alienated" from God, spirits, indeed the world of the spirit which used to be either spontaneously apparent in ancient times - or (later) was easily evoked by religious symbolism, language, ritual and (in general) Christian societal organization. 

What is obvious - indeed apparently unavoidable - to modern consciousness; was invisible or insignificant to most people in the past. 

Insofar as modern man is passive he does not experience God, and is atheist - hence unChristian. 

The particular power of the experience of the problem of evil in losing Christian faith is that modern Man surveys the claims of Christianity from outside. 

Pre-modern Man was spontaneously "inside" Christianity; hence he mostly did not even notice the contradiction between the existence of evil and assertion of a God who is both Omnipotent and Good.

Nowadays - surveying Christian claims "objectively", modern man can hardly fail to notice the contradictions. It seems merely rational to abandon belief in a contradiction. 

Of course, there are innumerable long and complex rationalizations as to how it is possible for God to have created everything, and also be omnipotent - and yet there be evil in the world. 

Yet these arguments have, for many and various reasons (including that they are, in my opinion, all of them fundamentally incoherent!), failed to convince. 

In practice; the stark and observable experiences of evil powerfully refute the idea of a personal, all-creating, omnipotent and wholly-good God in the context of modern consciousness. 

In this context; so long as Christians Insist that God Must Be creator-of-all, and omnipotent, and wholly-Good - for so long will the experience of evil lead quite naturally to the abandonment of Christianity. 

 

Note: The answer, as I see it, is to abandon the idea of an Omni-God. In other words, now that we recognize the incoherence of a wholly-Good God as all-creating and omnipotent - it is the attributes of all-creating and omnipotence that should be discarded. The alternative path of insisting-upon God's omnipotence and all-creating nature is - in practice - to move Christianity towards the mind-set of Judaism or Islam - where God is not argued to be "good" by Man's evaluations - but rather the argument goes in the opposite direction: that whatever God does, is what counts as good. It is the difference between "God is Good", and "Good is God" - as Charles Williams put it. In other words, when Christians find themselves asserting - whether explicitly or implicitly - that Good is God, then they have moved out of Christianity and into the theology of strict monotheism.