Resurrected! Man, has it really been a year? I was sure it was 4-5 months at most. Yikes.
Anyway, many thanks to Gol for reminding me of just where we were having this discussion about free will and how consistent natural disasters (and similar things) are with the idea of a benevolent God. I asked him about it because I've been thinking about this topic a lot more lately, and have been re-reading C.S. Lewis'
The Problem of Pain, which is about this very topic. Not quite finished with it yet, but it's all fairly fresh in my mind.
Gol and I left off mid-discussion, though at what was sort of an impasse. Correct me if I'm misstating anything, Gol, but I believe it was left with me saying that there could still be many unknown causes and effects (and even justifiable reasons) for the disasters that befall us, and that God by definition must do things that are often mystifying to us. You, I believe, acknowledged both points as technically consistent, but found each of them ultimately too convenient to accept. Would you say that's a fair summary?
Assuming so, here are a few scattered thoughts on the topic that might be helpful. I've structured them a bit to make them a bit more palpable.
1. Love is not merely Kindness
To most people today, kindness is the highest virtue. Helping people without ever judging them, giving them what they want, etc. It even gets mistaken for love. But love and kindness diverge at a key point: in the flaws they tolerate. Kindness will ignore flaws. Love will not. Love may
accept flaws, but it accepts in spite of them, and, to borrow Lewis' phrasing as well as his idea, "it can never cease to will their removal." If you love someone, you want what you really believe is best for them, and that's not always going to be a perfectly agreeable thing.
The upshot of all this is that people can't fathom the idea of a loving God who "allows" us to be hurt because they have a modern notion of love that equates it with kindness and comfort. It is the cookie before dinner, in other words, and not the stern reprisal, even if the latter is what we really need to hear.
This doesn't explain away all the tragedies of the world, but I do think it takes the edge off of them. If we equate kindness with love, the idea of a loving God seems impossible. If we recognize where they differ, it becomes plausible. It's a necessary distinction for any of the other arguments listed here to even gain an audience, which is why it's listed first.
2. Is pain bad?
On a base level this is counterintuitive, but I wonder how bad pain really is. At worst, I would characterize it as necessary. Some of the reasons are obvious: we learn from it, it often makes us better people, it helps us to know when something's wrong, be it physically or emotionally.
But, specifically, it humbles us. And this is where I must give proper credit to Lewis, because this is a far braver argument than I think I would have been willing (or able) to make on my own: perhaps we need pain to remind us of what we really are. Lewis has several excellent passages about this. Here's one (emphasis added):
If the first and lowest operation of pain shatters the illusion that all is well, the second shatters the illusion that what we have, whether good or bad in itself, is our own and enough for us. Everyone has noticed how hard it is to turn our thoughts to God when everything is going well with us.
...
Or as a friend of mine said, "We regard God as an airman regards his parachute; it's there for emergencies, but he hopes he'll never have to use it." Now God, who has made us, knows what we are and that our happiness lies in Him. Yet we will not seek it in Him as long as He leaves us any other resort where it can even plausibly be looked for. While what we call "our own life" remains agreeable we will not surrender it to Him. What then can God do in our interests but make "our own life" less agreeable to us, and take away the plausible sources of false happiness?
I know this is true in my case; when something upsetting happens to me, I am far more likely to turn to God and to humble myself in various ways than if I achieve some sort of success. I am thankfully in the habit of thanking God for successes, as well, but it comes much less naturally.
If God is as good as I believe Him to be, then we have no hope of stacking up. And that means that God's existence is, on some level, a source of shame for us. And this means that we are all going to have a very strong natural aversion to being reminded of this. In many ways it is an unpleasant reality even for the most pious of people.
If we are left with any happy option that does not involve confronting our own brokenness, we would take it. If we could find real happiness outside of God, we would take it. If we could find contentment without our own stunning inadequacy before God having to see the light of day, we would take it. I do not think we would search and think and philosophize if there were not pain. I think we'd just sit and wallow in our enjoyment. The behavior of most people who inherit vast quantities of wealth is a pretty good testament to this.
3. Truth and justice (American Way optional)
No, this isn't going to be "we're all sinners so we deserve whatever we get." This is about establishing truth. The following passage is on the same page as the passage above, and it's a slight twist on point #2 (emphasis added):
Until the evil man finds evil unmistakably present in his existence, in the form of pain, he is enclosed in illusion. Once pain has roused him, he knows that he is in some way or other "up against" the real universe: he either rebels (with the possibility of a clearer issue and deeper repentance at some later stage) or else makes some attempt at an adjustment, which, if pursued, will lead him to religion.
... No doubt Pain as God's megaphone is a terrible instrument; it may lead to final and unrepented rebellion. But it gives the only opportunity the bad man can have for amendment. It removes the veil; it plants the flag of truth within the fortress of a rebel soul.
To drive this point home, Lewis uses a hypothetical man who double-crosses people in both his personal and professional lives and achieves great success this way. He revels in shallow, material things, and thinks himself cleverer and better than everyone he has tricked. He has what he wants and is thoroughly convinced that he is living the "correct" way, by looking out for himself first.
The question is simple: do you want this man to be punished?
I think almost everyone would. And if you're anything like me, it's the idea that
he thinks it's okay that bothers you the most. You would instantly feel more sympathy with him if you knew he regretted what he'd done at all or had some doubt about the manner he's lived his life, even if he never quite changed his behavior as a result.
There's a part of all justice-loving people that just wants him to
know it's wrong. That can't stand him skipping along, thinking what he's doing is okay without reprisal. The pain he deserves is not revenge, but truth. It is a wake-up call. It creates that doubt and the opportunity for reflection, because
nobody can ignore pain.
4. Lucifer
I realize that for many people the invocation of Satan is right about the time religion starts seeming goofy to them, though logically there's no reason this should be the case and it's probably due more to silly depictions of the same than any problem with the idea itself. Regardless, it's a pretty elegant solution: bad things may happen simply because God isn't the only force capable of altering our circumstances, and suffering causes many people to question God's goodness or existence. The fact that we're having this conversation shows as much.
5. Entitlement
While I'm borrowing heavily from a much keener mind than my own with some of this, I did have a thought of my own while reading
The Problem of Pain the other day.
I try to be in the habit of thinking about the argument I find hardest to answer against any idea I hold, and in the case of pain and God's alleged goodness one of the hardest contentions to answer is that of someone who has lost a loved one. Someone whose spouse or family member, for example, has passed away because of some disease or natural disaster, or something else that appears largely random. Their pain will likely last them the rest of their lives, and even perfectly valid arguments as to why this might have happened sound glib. If they insist that the hurt is too much for any loving God to allow (let alone inflict), nobody can really tell them otherwise.
With that in mind, I am about to advance an idea that may sound a little callous to anyone who has lost a loved one. I apologize if this upsets anybody; I'm just trying to explore an idea here. It isn't meant to belittle anyone's suffering, which I cannot measure, and will not try to.
While thinking about this type of loss, I realized that anyone mad at God for such a thing is making a pretty sizable assumption: they're assuming that the person they loved belongs to them, in a way. That, having found someone to love, they are therefore entitled to that person's presence. But we all know this isn't so, and most people who love another tend to regard (rightly, I think) their presence as a gift.
A fairer comparison then, if one were calling God to task, would not be "this person should still be with me," but "this person should not have existed at all." But who really thinks this about someone they've lost? Almost to a person, they remain glad they knew them. The loss, then, is not about receiving a bad event, but about not getting as many good ones as they hoped. It's about a gift that only lasts for so long, and not a belonging which was unjustly wrestled away from them. If we really believe the presence of our loved ones is a gift to us, then their absence, painful though it may be, can't be an injustice even though it feels like one.
I don't expect this answer to satisfy anyone who's had to endure this type of loss. I'm not sure I expect it to satisfy
me if and when I must confront it. It's entirely possible my grief will lead me to dismiss my own argument in time.
It's not clear, however, which version of me will be right; will my grief enlighten me as to how inexplicable this kind of suffering is, or will it only cloud my judgment? There's no way to know. But sitting here now, of sound mind and body and with a sincere respect for how immense this pain must be, it seems to me that the presence of the people we love is a generosity, and not a possession, and that this truth in turn means that we have nothing to call God to task for, and that our grief quite probably could not be satiated by any answer God could give us, anyway.
Anyway, those are my thoughts for now. I'm still making my way through
The Problem of Pain, and some of these thoughts can't be condensed very well. I'd be glad to reproduce more of the book for context, which makes all the difference in the world, given how subtle and delicate some of these points are.