A World Without Pain, Part 1

So... theodicy. What follows is neither in response to nor targeted toward those whom any recent calamity has directly affected; I can only pray that God will forgive me for my gnashing of teeth at events far less trying than the devastation that the tsunami and other events have wrought of late. Patrick Sweeney is right to say that understanding "why God allows the good to suffer and the wicked to thrive is not a comfort to the afflicted."

Rather, Patrick is half-right. Understanding will comfort; how could it not? What would be "stupid" is to attempt explanations in the midst of suffering. Nonetheless, the sowing of doubt continues apace, making it reckless not to pick up the other side. Therefore, it is to those sufficiently removed from personal loss for emotion not to be an insurmountable barrier that I suggest: If your vision of God is such that your faith can be shaken by the reality of catastrophe, then you'd best reformulate that vision, because your faith rests on an obvious fantasy.

Holding this view is part of why I've found my reading of essays, such as one by Ron Rosenbaum, to be reduced to pure exercise:

... it is an underappreciated scandal that, philosophically, the "age old question" of theodicy has not been satisfactorily answered without resort to vague evasions ("It's all a mystery," "We just can't understand God's plan," "It will allow good to manifest itself in the hearts of the survivors," "We live in a fallen world," "The dead are better off in heaven"). A failure that asks us to just have faith that it's all for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

Just 278 words into a 3,114-word piece, and Rosenbaum has already used the word "satisfactorily" twice in this way. When you disagree with a premise that's so firmly declared, the next few thousand words tend to resonate like an intellectual game. Rosenbaum repeats the favorite response that an all-powerful God could have made a world without evil, but in which human beings still had free will. The fact that, instead, God created the world that we inhabit supposedly presents believers with a conundrum that Arts & Letters Daily editor Dennis Dutton puts thus:

If God is God, he's not good. If God is good, he's not God. You can't have it both ways, especially not after the Indian Ocean catastrophe.

What Rosenbaum and Dutton are essentially asking for is Heaven on Earth as proof of God and His goodness. The impression that such declarations give — notwithstanding the confidence with which they are stated — is that the issue lies more with the speaker's feelings about pain and definition of good than with God's role. There's something commiserable about the urge to offer God a standard of goodness up to which He must live.

Often, particularly when the person providing an "objective" measure of good for God to follow is an atheist, the point is as Michael Novak describes it: "to get me to deny the reality of God." Again the sense of a game pushes up between the lines; I don't know what creeds Rosenbaum and Dutton follow, but the former insists that the question has never been "satisfactorily answered," and the latter asserts that it cannot be.

These exchanges can go around and around, and surely many a "taunter" (Novak's word) has batted away with glee every attempt of a believer to put his view into mutually agreeable language. Even Eastern Orthodox theologian David Hart provides a platform from which to swing, saying that "no Christian is licensed to utter odious banalities about God's inscrutable counsels or blasphemous suggestions that all this mysteriously serves God's good ends."

And so it goes. John O'Sullivan, perhaps wistfully, mentions in passing the possibility that American GIs' "visibility also reduces the hatred of the Christian West on which Osama bin Laden feasts" in Muslim parts of South Asia. The notion made me wonder how the anti-theodicists might dismiss a suggestion that the tsunami, by its generation of goodwill, may have turned around the view of, say, an Indonesian man who was on track to make bin Laden look like a cheap prankster. Probably they'd say that a God of goodness wouldn't have needed to slaughter the innocents in order to change one man's mind.

I could continue that particular thread by suggesting that what is possible, when it comes to human society, is muddled up with our thresholds for apathy and for holding grudges. But since these are meant to be examples in circular futility, I'll just throw out a couple more. What if I suggest that without pain there is no pleasure? Well, God could have created a world in which that wasn't true. That without fault and error, the universe would merely be a vast playground, not a place in which we could derive purpose? Well, God could have created a world in which that wasn't true.

It begins to seem that no answer is satisfactory mostly because what people really want is to live in a world in which the tsunami didn't happen, in which it could not have happened. That, my friends, would not be the world in which we live. And that, in turn, is why the argument is probably futile; either you accept that the world explains God, or you believe that God owes us an explanation — now — for the world in order for us to believe in Him.

(N.B. — due to length and hour, I'll continue this essay in a part 2 post tomorrow, as measured by breakes in consciousness.)