I've been reading this Harold Kushner book and this famous set of lines was an interesting explanation.
To try to understand the book and its answer, let us take note of three statements which everyone in the book, and most of the readers, would like to be able to believe:
A. God is all-powerful and causes everything that happens in the world. Nothing happens without His willing it.
B. God is just and fair, and stands for people getting what they deserve, so that the good prosper and the wicked are punished.
C. Job is a good person
As long as Job is healthy and wealthy, we can believe all three of those statements at the same time with no difficulty. When Job suffers, when he loses his possessions, his family and his health, we have a problem. We can no longer make sense of all three propositions together. We can now affirm any two only by denying the third.
And people ask me why I say that I don't know what I believe any more. I am agnostic because I do think there is something greater than anything here on Earth, but that's as far as it goes.
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