Theodicy and Temporal Suffering

Back in 1997, a gentleman whom I'll just call Robert (he has requested that I not use his full name in this age of personal google searches) posted on alt.christnet a post rejecting Christianity in part because of the existence of evil and suffering. This is the fifth in a series of posts that constitute my response to some of his objections. You can use this table-of-contents post to read Robert’s original post and then each of my response posts, in the appropriate order.

Robert,

Let us turn our attention, then, to the problem of temporal suffering, i.e., war, poverty and disease.

First of all, Painful World assumes that suffering can never be a good thing. Christianity says the opposite; it says that God allows no suffering that he can't, judo-style, turn into good if the sufferer is willing to cooperate with Him. ...continue reading...(St. Augustine, for example: "For God Almighty..., being supremely good, would on no account permit the existence of any admixture of evil in his works unless he were to such a degree almighty and good as to bring good even out of evil" [Enchiridion xi].) On this view any suffering that you see is suffering that will one day not be regretted by the sufferer, if he lets God deal with it. So Painful World really says, "If God were all-powerful, He could keep undeserved suffering from happening or make something good out of it; if He were good, He would keep undeserved suffering from happening or make something good out of it, and He would have done it already. But people suffer undeservedly, and I haven't seen God turn it into good yet. Therefore He isn't going to. Therefore, etc. Q.E.D." Obviously this is not logically compelling at all.

I don't expect you to buy right off the idea that anyone could ever be glad that something painful had happened to them. So let me give you a simple example, in a very unimportant arena. Remember Emmitt Smith in the 1994 playoffs? He had a separated shoulder, which involves a tremendous amount of pain, and nobody in the world would have blamed him if he hadn't played. Yet he insisted on playing, gained more than 150 yards, and all but single-handedly dragged the Cowboys to victory in what is now recognized as one of the most lion-hearted athletic performances of all time. That game has made Emmitt Smith forever one of the great heroes of the NFL. Now, imagine that God now, here in 1996, gives Emmitt a choice. He says, "Emmitt, you had to go through a lot of pain back then, and I feel real bad about it. Would you like Me to go back in time and fix it so that you didn't get injured? You'll get the same amount of yardage and you'll still win the Super Bowl. You just won't have to suffer all that pain." Would Emmitt say yes, do you think? I myself don't think so. Before the game he would have taken the offer, I'm sure. But now that the pain is over, the fact that he experienced it has made his performance not just another excellent game, but a landmark in sports. If you asked him now whether he is glad the injury happened, I think his honest answer would be, "Yeah, it wasn't any fun at the time, but looking back it made my performance so much more satisfying...no, I wouldn't change a thing." In other words, Emmitt would say, echoing the words of Paul: "I consider the suffering I underwent not worth comparing to the glory I got out of it."

Or what about Kerri Strug? If she's healthy, then it's a good vault, and it secures the medal for the Americans. And that's all. But since she was injured, 1996 becomes, now and forever, the Kerri Strug Olympics. You think she considers the suffering worth comparing to the glory?

Now there are thousands of people besides Smith and Strug who look back at some painful experience in their lives and say, "Sure it was painful, but looking back I'm glad it happened." In other words, the suffering has turned out to be a good in their lives. What's more, there is no logical grounds for denying that an infinite God, given an infinite afterlife, isn't planning to do the same sort of thing even for those people who do not yet see any reason to be thankful for their suffering. So the identification of suffering with evil is too simplistic, and Painful World as it stands is a bad argument.

You can try to rescue it, of course. You can do so in one of two ways. The first is to complain that if God is all-powerful He should have been able to give us the benefits of suffering without the actual suffering. However, this is pretty plainly another example of CKIAS: you assume that you are aware of actual options a being such as God might theoretically have had, and that you are capable of weighing all the pros and cons and passing judgment on God's decisions. For if anyone says, "Look, maybe God had His reasons," you reply, "Well, I can't imagine what they could have been, and therefore I know they weren't good enough."

You may be tempted to complain, "Oh, but God's omnipotent; He could do anything He wanted to, so I can't think up an option that He didn't really have and reject." So I should point out that omnipotence strictly speaking is not the power to do whatever wild thing we think up. There are certain things that God cannot do, even under the Christian assumption of His "omnipotence." He cannot violate His own nature. And since He is reasonable — rather, since he is Reason — it would be a violation of His reasonable nature to do nonsense. Thus He can't create square circles, or put in a single universe both an irresistible force and an immovable object, or do any other such self-contradictory (that is, unreasonable) thing.

To us, understanding neither what God is trying to accomplish by allowing suffering nor what banishing suffering would entail, there appears no reason why God couldn't make this world just as good as it is now but without suffering. In the same way, a person who didn't understand geometry would not understand why God couldn't make a square circle. Yet when we understand geometry we see that to ask for a square circle is to talk nonsense, and humility forces us to admit that if we were capable of cosmic understanding we might see how our request for a world that got the good of suffering without actually experiencing suffering is cosmic nonsense. That's why the statement, "Well, I can't imagine any good reasons for allowing suffering, and therefore I know there are none," is cosmic know-it-all syndrome.

By the way, the limitations on God's "omnipotence" are not something I've made up just now to wriggle out of your argument. These limitations have been part of standard doctrine at least since St. Thomas Aquinas, in the 13th century, explained how God's "omnipotence" was properly to be understood. (See the Summa Theologica, Part I, Question 25, especially Article 3.)

The second way to save Painful World is to point to some suffering that cannot possibly be redeemed. If you can say, "Here's some undeserved suffering that's never going to be turned into good in all eternity, so either God's evil, impotent, or nonexistent," then you'd have the beginnings of a cogent argument. It seems to me that that is exactly what you are trying to accomplish when you accuse God of predestining people to Hell, and thus not merely allowing evil but actually practicing it. For if God creates people who can't help choosing to go to Hell, then it's hard to see how they can deserve their suffering, and hence hard to see how God's behavior could be excused (assuming our intuition about what is "good" is valid). But that takes us back to predestination, which we don't need to go over again.

Besides, we still have the question, "Irredeemable by what standard?" For this argument implicitly appeals to a moral standard (a) which we happen to know infallibly, and (b) to which God is subject. But where do you get that standard? What can you be doing if not either denying that God is the ultimate standard of morality (and hence begging the question of whether the Christian God exists) or else throwing a hissy fit because God didn't make the universe in accordance with your personal taste?

Enough. For centuries now people who are mad at God for not doing things their way have been arguing that God doesn't exist, because if He did He would have done things the way they would have done them if they'd been God. That argument is logically hopeless, not to mention hysterically egocentric. It is a complete dead end.

Yet logical arguments are not the only thing to consider. There are a few emotional barriers that are no less powerful for being irrational. They spring partly from the American prejudice that unfairness is inexcusable, and partly from the very human feeling that some sufferings are so unspeakably hideous, and those who suffer so heartbreakingly innocent, as to render those sufferings intolerable. So let's look briefly at the emotional (as opposed to logical) argument from "irredeemable" temporal suffering.

It may seem unfair that in this world the amount different people suffer seems to have very little to do with how much those people deserve to suffer. You complain, for example, that God is "capricious;" that "we eat while Calcutta starves;" that he "allow[ed] me to live in relative luxury...while children and grandmothers were being murdered in Bosnia, Somalia, and Rwanda." May I point out that Americans have a very odd fixation on "fairness," meaning that everybody should be treated the same way? I see no reason to think that the world "ought" to be fair.

Consider the implications, as demonstrated in your own examples, of the idea that God should be "fair:" if God doesn't feed Calcuttans, that's a bad thing; but His offense is made worse if he...does feed Americans. You manage to complain both because God allows political murder in some places and because He doesn't allow it in others. If you intend to insist on "fairness" as a moral imperative, why then you must think that two murders are better than one — because if Jack gets murdered, then Jill's murder at least restores "fairness." Is this morality? Or is it merely an inversion of the self-righteous envy that says, "Well, if I and the folks I happen to like can't be happy then by God the people I don't like had better be unhappy too"? Now don't accuse me of caricaturing your arguments. It was you who used the fact that you live in comfort as proof that God is evil. Unless you believe that two wrongs are worse than none but better than one, then you should have simply asked, "Why does Calcutta starve?" For "Why do I eat while..." is simply irrelevant unless two wrongs make at least a half-right. (I'm not criticizing your morals, you understand, just your very odd logic.)

At any rate, most people at most times and places in history outside of modern-day America have felt that there were more important things than making sure everybody gets treated exactly the same way, and the God of Christianity in this case votes with the majority. The Christian God is not at all interested in fairness, nor is any other God outside of the vague deity produced by hypostasizing the currently fashionable p.c. code into a Politically Correct Holiness for whose existence there is neither empirical nor philosophical evidence. Consider the Christian doctrine of the Atonement: we screw up, God doesn't; God volunteers to suffer so that we don't have to. (Highly simplified, of course.) The question of whether Atonement makes sense is not at issue here; what matters is simply that it is plainly very unfair to God for Him to suffer instead of us. The Christian God feels no obligation to be a good American (and only a very silly provincialism could expect Him to). He does not care about Fairness. He cares about Love.

Besides, imagine what a boring place the world would be if everybody were treated the same way. If everybody could play basketball like Michael Jordan, what would be the fun of watching Michael Jordan? If all my neighbors could act as well as Meryl Streep, and all the men were as handsome as Robert Redford and all the women as beautiful as Demi Moore, what would be the fun of going to movies? If the lottery prize money were divided fairly (i.e., equally) among all players, who would play? God decided to make a world of individuals with widely differing talents and interests and backgrounds, and in a world full of individuals where everything else varies dramatically from person to person, why should it be odd to find that suffering varies as well — especially if those who suffer will one day find their suffering transformed into glory? God's "capriciousness" is just His creativity as it happens to be manifested in suffering. It does not, as the term "capricious" would imply, mean that God loves some people more intensely than others, or has no good reasons for treating different people differently. (And before you start quoting Scriptures about "Jacob have I loved and Esau have I hated" and the like, remember that the Bible's statements about God's feelings are figures of speech, not rigorous philosophical formulations. To take that verse literally is to be as naive as one who would say that since the Bible speaks of "the hand of God" He must have a human body.)

Perhaps it's not minor variations in the suffering-to-desert ratio that bother you; perhaps it's only extreme examples that move you to wrath. For example, you might think that a two-year-old girl suffering sexual abuse and then dying a lingering, agonizing death at the hands of her abuser, represents suffering that cannot possibly be redeemed. Certainly it should shock, grieve and infuriate anyone who hears of it. But to say that it can't be redeemed is to assume that you know in advance either that there is no afterlife, or else that in that pitiable child's afterlife God will not be able to redeem her suffering — and unless you are a cosmic know-it-all, you can't possibly know that. The same objection holds for any form of suffering you put forward except for eternal damnation, which brings us once again back to predestination. Therefore no form of temporal suffering is logically sufficient to rule out the existence of a good and omnipotent God.

We are talking about emotions, however, not logic, and while I can only guess at your emotional response, most non-Christians see the preceding paragraph as a huge cop-out. "Oh, yeah," the feeling is, "how convenient — God will fix it all after we die. That's so obviously just making up a belief to comfort yourself." Of course it is a comforting belief; of course many Christians have been comforted by it; of course it is possible that the belief has its ultimate origin in wish-fulfillment rather than in reason. On the other hand, some beliefs are both comforting and true. It has, for example, been quite useful to you emotionally to believe that Christianity has evolved from earlier religions and has no validity beyond the mythical. Would you say that since this belief has been useful for you it is therefore false? Of course not. Similarly the mere fact that Christian belief in an afterlife is convenient is in itself no sign that the belief is false. Most significant for our purposes, however, is the fact that at the very least the Christian doctrine could be true. And that possibility is enough to render Painful World invalid for any form of temporal suffering.

And yet...and yet it all still sounds pretty sophistic, right? Callous, too: it sounds as though I am making light of other people's suffering. If I had suffered myself, I wouldn't be so glib...right? When it comes right down to it, you just can't buy a God who would sit back and let that child suffer, no matter how much He might promise to make it up to her in heaven — isn't that how you feel about it? It's how most people who use Painful World feel, at any rate. So here is a column I once wrote for a local church newsletter that addresses such feelings:

At this time of year (Christmas and Epiphany), it’s often said that Jesus "wasn’t born the way we would expect God to be born," meaning that we would expect God to be born in a palace, as befits his rank. It seems to me, however, that in at least one sense Jesus’ miserable birth, in a stable at midwinter to impoverished, politically oppressed, socially despised parents was exactly what we should have expected.

Different men reject Christ for different reasons. In this column we’re interested in those people who refuse to be a Christian because they don’t like the way God has chosen to do things; they have a grievance against God. Of these, the most noble are those who complain, not of how God has treated them personally, but of how God has treated others — those, in other words, who hold that since evil and suffering exist, God does not.

Now this argument against God actually has two parts. One part is rational; it consists of the arguments that claim to prove that God and evil are incompossible. (To steal Ambrose Bierce’s definition of incom¬possible: "Two things are incompossible when the world of being has scope enough for one of them, but not enough for both — as Walt Whitman’s poetry and God’s mercy to man." I consider this the most amusing of all attempts to disprove God’s existence by appeal to human suffering.) If God is to win the soul of the atheist, He must refute these arguments, and that is why He created people like St. Thomas and C. S. Lewis and Josh McDowell.

But the rational arguments are not what really matters. The complaint against God does not begin with logic. The caring atheist does not look at a suffering child and calmly deduce that he should be outraged. No, he looks at the suffering child, feels outraged, and shapes his outrage into the form of logical arguments. The idea, "No caring God would allow this," is not something we figure out by thinking rationally. It is an instinct, or, to use technical language, a direct judgment. And no matter how clearly you show the holes in his arguments, the compassionate atheist will continue to believe that no caring God would allow such suffering. For he believes it, not because his logic demonstrates it, but because his indignation demands it. The logic trots along behind the indignation, not the other way around.

Now the indignation comes, not from a belief that God is powerless (if He were, who could blame Him for allowing suffering?), but because He "doesn’t care." And I think that the image behind that is something like this: "God’s in His heaven, even though all’s wrong with the world." We want to know what kind of smug Being would sit comfortably on a celestial throne and gaze unconcernedly on the misery of an innocent child. [Or, in your words, Robert, "What kind of God would sit back and let it happen?"] If He cared, wouldn’t He be driven to act? Wouldn’t He be driven to end the suffering?

Now the cure for this feeling of outrage only begins when we recognize a curious fact. A person can help end the suffering of another without caring about him at all; if, for example, God wanted to show off His nobility, He could end suffering and congratulate Himself on His "compassion," even if He didn’t care tuppence about us. It’s perfectly true that God will wipe away every tear from our eyes; we must not forget the new heaven and new earth that await us. But first God did something even more compassionate than ending our suffering. Before He ended it, He stooped down and shared it.

The atheist’s true answer is the life of Christ. Is it outrageous to see an infant born into extreme poverty? You bet. And what is God’s answer? "She wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger." Is it obscene that a child should suffer degradation because his parents are thought to have sinned? Absolutely; think, for example, of what it meant for a Jewish boy to be referred to as "Jesus, son of Mary (since we don’t know who his father is, heh, heh)." Are we sickened by political oppression — such as the Roman oppression of the Jews? Or by brutal physical and mental torture, such as ripping the flesh off a man’s back and spitting in his face and hurling insults in his broken teeth? Or, most of all, by the murder of an innocent man? From Calvary come the words of the dying thief: "This man has done nothing wrong."

The atheist will never be convinced until his moral outrage has been appeased. And I know of no way to appease it except by the observation of Dorothy Sayers, that though the reasons that God’s rules allow sufferings are beyond our understanding, still "God plays by His own rules." For the eyes of every suffering child are the eyes of Christ, who two thousand years ago was born in a stable, "because there was no room in the inn."

Robert, if you could look at the suffering that people in this world undergo and not be moved to pity and outrage, I would think there was something wrong with you. But if you allow your philosophy to be dominated by your emotions to the point at which you accept fallacious arguments, then you have overreacted.

I remember driving along I-40 just west of Memphis after an ice storm and seeing forty accidents in a twelve-mile stretch. The one that sticks in my mind the most, however, is a lady who had slid into the median. Four strapping college lads were straining to get enough traction to push her back on the road while she gunned the motor helplessly. Then suddenly the tires bit, and she shot out of median onto the road...and slid helplessly right on across both lanes into the ditch on the other side. We crept on by, and she was still there when we eased out of sight over the next hill.

I tell this story just to say: don't let your entirely admirable compassion and pity slingshot you from the median of callousness into the ditch of CKIAS.