Religion
In reply to the discussion: Religious Question #1 [View all]Fortinbras Armstrong
(4,473 posts)Alfonso X of Castile, surnamed El Sabio -- "The Wise" -- wrote, "Had I been present at the Creation, I could have made a few suggestions for the better ordering of the universe."
God is omnipotent, all good, and all loving. Why, then, is there suffering and evil in the world?
The problem of evil only arises in a certain set of circumstances. If you believe in two gods, one good and one bad, there is no problem. Evil, in such a system, is as much a part of the show as good. The same thing is true if you believe that God made the world, not out of nothing, but out of some primeval matter God was stuck with. Then you can blame evil on the sleaziness of the raw materials and get God off the hook. (Jesus hanging on the cross means that God is firmly on the hook. However, the problem still remains.)
However, Christians believe that Yahweh is the only God, that all things are created out of nothing, and that God delights in creation and finds it good. So, why is there evil? Moreover, there is not only evil, there is also "the problem of pain." Evil is those things which people do which are wrong: Pride, anger, envy, greed, lust, sloth, gluttony, etc. Pain is "the thousand natural shocks our flesh is heir to": Disease, tornadoes, man-eating-sharks. The standard explanation of evil is that God allows us free will, so that we shall choose the good of our own accord, thus furthering Gods glory. However, we have no real answer to the problem of pain. (One of my favorite science fiction stories is Poul Andersons "The Problem of Pain". In it, Anderson posits a monotheistic alien race with a concept of God that answers the problem of pain, but cannot explain why there is evil.) Some have said that God allows suffering to teach us lessons and make us better. Thus, we have disappointment to teach us perseverance, pain so we learn to keep our hands out of the fire, unkindness from others to help us grow in charity, and so on. The problem is the "and so on": Famine, to teach us what? Earthquakes, for what reason? Cancer, to improve us how? The whole bleeding, dying, screaming, lying, cheating, rotting carcass of the world to uplift us to what end?
This simply does not work. For a few great souls, poverty may be a blessing; for everyone else, it is a curse. Now and then, a terminal disease ennobles, most of the time, it is just rotten. God as a teacher who uses such methods makes him the warden of the worst run penitentiary of all. T S Eliot described this view in his "East Coker":
The whole earth is our hospital
Endowed by the ruined millionaire,
Wherein, if we do well, we shall
Die of the absolute paternal care
Which does pursue us everywhere.
Others say that suffering is the result of sin. Speaking of a man born blind, the disciples ask, ""'Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?' Jesus answered, 'Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that Gods works might be revealed in him.'" (John 9:2-3)
Although scripture affirms sin as causing suffering, it is not the sole cause. Suffering is a conflict between what is and what should be, sickness and health, failure and achievement, rivalry and love. At one level suffering simply describes the tensions that torture us in our attempts to be whole. The suffering caused by sin is aggravated by the conflict arising from self-centeredness, estrangement, and compromise of ideals. In any case, suffering has no value in itself. It is one thing to say that suffering shows the work of God; it is quite another to say that it has redemptive power itself.