Suffering is just a fact, a consequence of being organisms with nerves and brains. It doesn't do us any good

The question: Does suffering improve us?

Whether or not suffering improves us depends first of all on how we define "suffering". Real suffering – pain, disease, thirst, starvation – don't improve us; they don't leave us room to improve. "Improvement" is an activity for healthy people in tolerable circumstances; when things are desperate improvement becomes a luxury.

On the other hand if we're thinking of suffering as a continuum with agonising pain at one end and categories such as discipline, exercise and effort at the other, then clearly some kinds of "suffering" do improve us. "Il faut souffrir pour l'art," the saying goes. Some athletic and artistic practices do require real physical pain: ballet is a kind of refined torture, and gymnastics and hockey, to name only two, are bruising sports in the most literal sense. The pain of dancing en pointe seems unlikely to improve the character in any very profound sense, but it probably does teach a kind of stoicism.

But the truth is, most of this sort of thing isn't real suffering anyway. We enjoy a certain amount of effort and discipline, and when we have to push ourselves past that point, we at least enjoy the feeling of heroism. It's frivolous to think of voluntary forms of discipline and deprivation as real suffering.

The idea that hardship improves us looks like a rationalisation of an old superstitious fear that too much prosperity will trigger the opposite. The gods are jealous, and if we don't have any suffering, they'll see that we get some – and they always overdo it, the bastards, so it's much better if we do it to ourselves first so that they don't come along and wallop us. It's a good bargain if it works: I give up chocolate for a month and the gods don't drop an asteroid on my head.

There's also the class warfare version, but that's obviously a hopeless dead end. Wouldn't we all love to see various bankers and hedge fund managers and CEOs lose all their savings and be evicted from their large houses and lose the Porsche, the boat, and the condo in Aspen and have to go to work in a coal mine. Now that would be some improving suffering, but it's not going to happen.

The reality is that suffering is just a fact, a consequence of being organisms with nerves and brains; we rehearse trivial forms of suffering in the vain hope that this will make the real thing more endurable. It won't.

There are some sick views on all this in Christianity, doubtless thanks to its preoccupation with torture as atonement. (Before you swell with outrage, remember that it's Christianity that has an implement for execution by torture as its central symbol, worn as a necklace and decorating the covers of hymnals.) There is "Mother Teresa" for example. Dr Robin Fox, editor of The Lancet, visited her hospice in Calcutta in 1994 and reported, "I could not judge the power of their spiritual approach, but I was disturbed to learn that the formulary includes no strong analgesics." This was not for want of money, it was policy. It is notorious that she once said in a filmed interview that she told a patient suffering the agonies of the final stages of cancer, "You are suffering like Christ on the cross."

There is Richard Swinburne, who has argued for the benefits of suffering in many places, among them an interview in What Philosophers Think:

"If the world was without any natural evil and suffering we wouldn't have the opportunity, or nearly as much opportunity, to show courage, patience and sympathy. Of course I'm not suggesting that God ought to multiply suffering ad infinitum in order to give us endless opportunity, but I do think the world would be a poorer place if we didn't have some opportunity to show ourselves at our best in this kind of way."

There is the Archbishop of Canterbury, who told the House of Lords in 2006 that "All religious believers hold that there is no stage of human life, and no level of human experience, that is intrinsically incapable of being lived through in some kind of trust and hope." His point was not simply to make an observation about religious believers, it was to oppose legislation that would allow terminally ill people to escape the last pain-ridden stage of life if they so chose. In this case suffering is taken to be such a good thing that it must be allowed to run its course, regardless of the wishes of the people doing the suffering.

Ultimately this has to do with the obvious fact that the world is full of suffering, so people who want to believe in a benevolent God have to reconcile the two in some way. Claiming that suffering improves us is one such attempt.