With regard to those who use the problem of pain as a reason to disbelieve in God, Philip Yancey writes this:

“It’s as if we in modern times think we have a corner on the suffering market. Do we forget that Luther and Calvin liven in a world without either and penicillin, when life expectancy averaged thirty years, and that Bunyan and Donne wrote their greatest works, respectively, in a jail and a plague quarantine room? Ironically, the modern authors – who live in princely comfort, toil in climate-controlled offices, and hoard elixirs in their medicine cabinets – are the ones smoldering with rage.”

– From the introduction to Where is God When it Hurts?