Among the confounding aspects of the theodicy controversy is the likelihood that the people who claim that tragedy disproves God, or at least His goodness, would scoff if offered a world of utter comfort at the price of free will. In contrast, believers understand, even if we differ in specifics and even if the practice can be difficult, that the solution is to develop our sense of comfort such that we accept and submit to God's will of our own accord. Even in this mangling world, that perspective takes the existential sting (as distinct from the personal ache) out of tragedies.
Part of the mistake, I think, is in the urge to insist that there is blame to be attributed. What is, what exists, is ultimately good by definition. Not many theists would welcome the emotional response that would surely follow any statement that appears to minimize the palpable suffering of parents who've lost their children. If the statements are made thoughtlessly and under inappropriate circumstances, those emotional responses would be entirely justified. But such emotion isn't a response to religious understanding when circumstances allow a more contemplative exchange.
Sufficiently removed, it is not obscene to balance emotion with emotion. Here's a question to ask yourself: If it would have prevented the tsunami, would you have sacrificed your own children? Rare (and likely dishonest) are those parents who would say "yes." Nobody would expect such a thing; in fact, in some contexts we admire unyielding love in a parent. Yet, every event of history leading up to your birth allowed you to be — caused you, as God's child, to exist. In a manner of speaking, one could suggest that God puts up with the catastrophe to make you possible. Not just "a person." Not just a person resembling you in some particulars. You. That is a God of love.
Here's a question on the other side of the scales: If you could remove every difficulty from your children's lives, would you? Personally, I'd suggest that doing so would steal something at the core of your children's humanity. And we — both children and the parents who help to form them — are created in God's image, after all.
Of course, we can return to the mantra: God, if He is a God of love, could have created us without the pain. But we don't have a larger context of what God was trying to accomplish with this world — what, specifically, He is trying to create in us — in order to assess whether He's managing it with love and toward ultimate good. We are incapable of comprehending something so vast. I mentioned previously the possibility that the Western aid following the tsunami softened the heart of a future bin Laden. Well, imagine these possibilities piling up to take account of every single person — living, dead, and yet to be born — affected by the calamity. At what point do we cease to see opposing measurements of good and evil and see, instead, a process that, in its end, we can accept as definitively good?
Ron Rosenbaum asks whether God could have created "a better, less murderous human nature—consistent with free will." One implication of this question is to pit the notion of God's goodness against the notion of his love. In order to be good, in other words, He would have had to preclude the existence of everybody who has ever existed (minus two).
I, for one, cannot imagine what it could possibly mean to say that God could have created autonomous people who are shaped in some measure by pain without the pain. What's really being said here is that the complainers would have created a different world than God has, inhabited by creatures innocent of pain. It's a value judgment, not a statement pertaining to mechanism. (And, as above suggested, it probably involves idealistic values that the speaker himself doesn't hold.) I suppose, similarly, a molecule might object to some of particulars of its existence, but who would be moved by its claim that the Creator could have made mountains without molecules?
Ultimately, there may be no breaching the gap between those with whom I share an approach to religion and those who insist, with Rosenbaum, that theodicy has yet to break beyond "vague evasions." The gap may even be insuperably broad between myself and my fellow Christian David Hart, who would apparently see my theology as "odious" and "blasphemous." In the case of the latter gap, surely this is an instance in which "the many paths to God" ecumenism applies such that those willing to leave explanation alone to stand on faith and those drawing on faith to think through explanations needn't resort to insults.
Such debates, even when too heated, are themselves evidence of a perspective for which we must strive, even as we admit that intellectual understanding is no match for ponderous grief. If the greatest good lies in a greater understanding of God and a more fully appreciative comprehension of His nature, then that good can exist not in spite of our grief, but within it.
Posted by Justin Katz at January 13, 2005 12:04 PM"A WORLD WITHOUT PAIN." What a concept. So utterly alien a concept, in fact, that it probably doesn't even bear contemplating. Would a world without pain be desireable? We learn from pain, we are instructed by suffering, it is part of what makes us human. What about "A World Without SIN" or "A World Without CONFLICT?" If such worlds were possible, what would they do to our humanity?
How about a world without SATAN? Actually, the Lebanese poet Kahlil Gibran explored this concept in a short story entitled "Satan." You ought to read it, it's quite thought-provoking:
http://4umi.com/gibran/satan/
I heard various people talk about what a wonderful place Heaven must be. Yet the more I think about what they envision, the less it appeals to me. Some kind of spiritual state of existence, a higher plane of being so to speak, I can grasp that. But what might it mean to our sense of individual identity? Everything that we are as individuals is informed, in part, by suffering, so when Heaven is described as a place where there is no sadness, no sin, no suffering, no conflict, just the everlasting singing of angels and the glorification of God ... well, it seems to utterly inhuman that I find it a bit scary.
Posted by: Chuck Anziulewicz at January 13, 2005 2:49 PMIndeed, I cannot imagine a Heaven without pain and suffering.
Being created in God's image, we experience pain and suffering because God experiences pain and suffering. I think it would be a mistake to assume that God does not suffer the ravages of death and destruction from the forces of nature that humankind does, as intimately connected as God is to us. The tendency to relegate God to a painless corner of Heaven and deny that he shares everything with us is all too common. It is not an easy thing to keep in mind.
Posted by: smmtheory at January 13, 2005 11:36 PMHart is Orthodox, isn't he?
Posted by: ELC at January 14, 2005 9:47 AMELC,
Yes. Isn't it appropriate to call an Orthodox Catholic a "fellow Catholic"? (That's an honest question; no argument implied.)
Posted by: Justin Katz at January 14, 2005 10:01 AMPerhaps we are talking past each other? I meant that AFAIK Hart belongs to one of the ancient Eastern Churches not in communion with the Holy See, which are usually called Orthodox though at least some of them call themselves "Orthodox Catholic" or "Orthodox and Catholic" or "Catholic and Orthodox". Since being in communion with the Holy See is what makes one Catholic, then Hart is not Catholic.
Posted by: ELC at January 15, 2005 2:00 PMWell, ELC, you've convinced me that I'm not ready, yet, to form an adequate understanding of communion! I've backed off a bit to call Hart a "fellow Christian" (and put sorting through the broader matter on my to-learn list).
Posted by: Justin Katz at January 15, 2005 2:13 PMCool beans. :-) God bless.
Posted by: ELC at January 15, 2005 8:52 PMI was blogging on this topic and have been looking around for what others have said.
Found the post interesting. BTW, as I understand it, the Orthodox are in communion as much as the Anglicans are.
Posted by: Stephen M (Ethesis) at January 16, 2005 7:12 PMHart had an exchange with a couple of people that was put up on the Mere Comments blog of Touchstone magazine. I'm not sure I followed all the arguments, but I distinctly got the impression that Hart was talking about rather high-level metaphysical and theological concepts, and that some of the reaction to what he wrote had to do with the gap between high-level metaphysics, amateur metaphysics, and pastoral concerns (e.g. his statement that evil/suffering is ultimately meaningless).
His argument seems to be that one cannot claim that a higher good is achieved through evil than could be achieved without it, because this implicates God in evil (i.e. Ivan Karamozov's challenge in The Brothers Karamozov). He takes a hard line on this, but, at least in what I've seen so far, he doesn't explain how the distinction between requiring evil and allowing evil plays out. That is, he is insistent that evil cannot be required to achieve God's purposes, but doesn't address the fact that, at a minimum, God allows evil to occur, which is still difficult for people to reconcile with His perfect goodness.
Justin, what about the distinction between suffering caused by human choices and that caused by natural disasters like the tsunami. Your arguments seem to focus on the former, but this particular context is focused on the latter. Is the 'free will' argument transferable to nature itself?
I'm sure there are centuries of thought on this in the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches that I'm not aware of, so I apologize if I'm restating simple arguments here - I'm just "thinking out loud", as it were.
Posted by: Mike S. at January 17, 2005 1:38 PMMike,
The basic gist of the explanation for "natural evil" is that original sin dislodged mankind from nature somehow. We live in a fallen world because we are fallen. For my part — and to be honest, I'm not sure how well this aligns with the teachings of my Church — I've begun to think that the world is fallen mainly because of our perspective.
In other words, I'm not sure that it makes any sense to say that natural disasters are "evil." They just are. I don't directly correlate "bad" or "heartbreaking" with "evil." Evil, to me, connotes spiritual corruption, and if we believe that this life is not all there is, then great disaster needn't corrupt the dead or the living.
With human evil, I don't think things can rightly as easily defined away; human evil, being willful, inherently involves evil. From a human perspective, there is clearly a moral difference between doing evil so that good will result and accepting that good actions toward good results may allow evil to happen. Simply put, God offered us free will (good) toward His ends (good), but free will requires that we be able to choose evil.
I played with some of these ideas in the context of the Many Worlds Interpretation in my "theory of everything" series of essays, which if taken as assertions rather than intellectual puzzle-playing probably bring me at least up to the border of kookdom. Basically, the idea is that every action that we could possibly take really happens in some sense from God's point of view; the question is whether our continuous perception [our souls] take that route, making it more than a shadow. Evil and good, then, are merely parts of reality's construction that we invest with meaning by choosing them.
Posted by: Justin Katz at January 17, 2005 3:54 PMFor far too long the secular world has looked to philosophers that had difficulty in distinguishing the heartbreak and pain of natural disasters from evil, and specifically from actions of humankind. Some have ascribed natural disasters to the fallen condition of humankind. This also makes it difficult for those philosophers to distinguish the two apart. It unfortunately continues even today as can be evinced from the Muslim religious leaders blaming tourists with different morals for the cause. I have even heard an American college professor seem unable to distinguish the natural disasters from behavioral evil when describing the historical views of theodicy displayed in 17th and 18th century writing.
If it is any reassurance, I don't think your exploration of metaphysical theory places you all that near the border of kookdom Justin. I can see no reason it would ever keep you from entering the field of philosophy the way my theoretical views of physics would keep me from becoming a physicist.
In other words, I'm not sure that it makes any sense to say that natural disasters are "evil." They just are. I don't directly correlate "bad" or "heartbreaking" with "evil." Evil, to me, connotes spiritual corruption, and if we believe that this life is not all there is, then great disaster needn't corrupt the dead or the living.
I agree they are not the same thing - the tectonic plates did not 'choose' to shift, causing all the suffering. But nonetheless, innocent people suffered greatly. The problem of evil is closely related to the problem of suffering (we wouldn't care so much about evil if it didn't cause so much suffering).
I guess the reality is that we will always have the conflicting facts in front of us: God is good, and He allows great suffering. I think you are on to something regarding our perspective relating to suffering. What is the distinction between your view and Hart's, then? You think suffering is not evil from God's perspective, but only appears so from our limited perspective? That it is an intrinsic part of reality that could not be otherwise? Whereas Hart says that it is something separate and apart from God, that He will eventually overcome?
Posted by: Mike S. at January 18, 2005 2:23 PMMike S.,
I think we limit ourselves if we always assume that suffering is not good. That perspective makes it difficult to separate the not good from the evil of human agency. I'm not saying that suffering should be considered good either. I think it offers us an opportunity to experience the presence of God and knowing that He is with us through thick, and thin. Must it always be assumed that suffering is of a contradictory nature to or conflicting evidence of the goodness of God? On the one hand, the perspective is that allowing suffering to occur conflicts with people's image of a God who is all good. On the other hand, we can change perspective and see suffering from the evil of human agency not as evidence that God allows suffering but that God allows free will and views our free will as the ultimate good. We can see that suffering from natural disasters not as evidence that God allows natural disasters but that natural disasters are a consequence of the life sustaining nature of our planet. What else would drive the weather engine necessary to sustain us.
Or maybe I'm just rambling.
Posted by: smmtheory at January 19, 2005 12:36 AM
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