The Problem of Pain

"I've been reading through your comments again as I work on my assignment. This time I am wondering if I can explore these comments with you as part of my ownexplorations.

"Having read your own email in response to mine, I will understand if you do not wish to comment or explore them. It would be exploring them as issues rather than specific to your mother's death though I guess any comment may reflect on that.

"While I have noted these comments from what you have written, they are not comments that are unique to what you have written. They are comments I have heard from others as well.

"I must have done something terribly wrong to be suffering this pain".

"I believe that was a comment of your mothers and I have a recollection that I heard her say that too. I am sorry now that I did not explore that with her.

"The other question is one that is implied and you yourself commented that the question is as old as Job: Why should the good (the nice) suffer?

A similar question is found in "Why should bad things happen to good people?"

You ask some big questions. While Nancy makes dinner, I'll try to pound out my thoughts for what they are worth.

(Some of the contents of this essay comes from interactions I have had with several people going back many years.)

As regards to mom, I heard her make that comment, but it of course needs to be contextualized in the pain and depression that she endured, so I don't give it any weight at all.

"Tell me about your God of love," an atheist wrote to me a few years ago, "forall that I see is 1 Samuel 15:3, 2 Samuel 24:15, 2 Samuel 6:6, and 1 Chronicles 21:14." Never let it be said that atheists haven't read the scriptures. Sometimes they have read it only too well. And I must admit thatI too I have trouble squaring God's command to "slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass" with the One who said "Permit little children, and forbid them not, for of such is the kingdom of heaven." That God would inflict pain or even allow pain has challenged man since the days of Job.

Grandma June provided one answer to Natalie Angier. "When I was eight yearsold, my family was in a terrible car accident, and my older brother almost died," she writes. "The next night, as I lay scared and sleepless on my paternal grandmother's living-room couch, she softly explained to me who was to blame. Not my father's Aunt Estelle, a dour, aging wild woman and devout Baptist, who, as usual, was driving recklessly fast. No, the reason Estelle's station wagon flipped over and Joe was thrown out the back window was this: my father had stopped going to church the previous year, and God was very, very angry."

A 16 year old had a question for an advice columnist: "When I was a little girl it was not so bad because I got used to the kids of the block makingfun of me, but now I would like to have boy friends like the other girls andgo out on Saturday nights, but no boy will take me because I was bornwithout a nose-although I'm a good dancer and have a nice shape and my father buys me pretty clothes. I sit and look at myself all day and cry. Ihave a big hole in the middle of my face that scares people-even myself-so I can't blame the boys for not wanting to take me out. My mother loves me,but she cries terribly when she looks at me. What did I do to deserve such a terribly bad fate? Even if I did some bad things, I didn't do any beforeI was a year old and I was born that way. I asked papa and he says he doesn't know, but that maybe I did something in the other world before I was born, or that maybe I was being punished for his sins. I don't believe that because he is a very nice man. Ought I commit suicide?"

The basic formulation for the problem is as follows: If God is good, He isnot God. If God is God, He is not good. If God is good, He would wish tomake his creatures happy. If God was all-powerful, He would be able to dowhat He wished. But His creatures are suffering. Thus, God lacks power or goodness or both. Either God doesn't exist or He is impotent or He is evil.

In The Brothers Karamazov, the greatest novel of the 19th century, Fyodor Dostoevsky puts into the mouth of the atheist Ivan the one irrefutable objection to a personal God, that the only possible religious answer is that human suffering will be justified by the divine harmony and the end of history. It's a hollow argument made by some theologians to explain the holocaust-that Hitler was God's punishment of European Jews for their secularization and Biblical prophecy was fulfilled when the state of Israel was born.

"Listen! If all must suffer to pay for the eternal harmony, what have childrento do with it, tell me, please? It's beyond all comprehension why they should suffer, and why they should pay for the harmony. Why should they, too, furnish material to enrich the soil for the harmony of the future? I understand solidarity in sin among men. I understand solidarity in retribution, too; but there can be no such solidarity with children. And if it is really true that they must share responsibility for all their fathers' crimes, such a truth is not of this world and is beyond my comprehension. Some jester will say,perhaps, that the child would have grown up and have sinned, but you see he didn't grow up, he was torn to pieces by the dogs, at eight years old. Oh,Alyosha, I am not blaspheming! I understand, of course, what an upheaval of the universe it will be when everything in heaven and earth blends in one hymn of praise and everything that lives and has lived cries aloud: 'Thou art just,O Lord, for Thy ways are revealed.' When the mother embraces the fiend who threw her child to the dogs, and all three cry aloud with tears, 'Thou art just, O Lord!' then, of course, the crown of knowledge will be reached and all will be made clear. But what pulls me up here is that I can't accept tha tharmony. And while I am on earth, I make haste to take my own measures. You see, Alyosha, perhaps it really may happen that if I live to that moment, or rise again to see it, I, too, perhaps, may cry aloud with the rest, looking atthe mother embracing the child's torturer, 'Thou art just, O Lord!' but I don't want to cry aloud then. While there is still time, I hasten to protectmyself, and so I renounce the higher harmony altogether. It's not worth the tears of that one tortured child who beat itself on the breast with its little fist and prayed in its stinking outhouse, with its unexpected tears to 'dear,kind God'!"

The classic counter is that God made man not as robots but with free moral agency. God freely limited his own freedom and put no limit on ours. God thusly could not have created a moral universe without at the same time freeing man's spirit. If God had programmed all humans to be good, therewould be no evil but there would be no virtue as well. Evil exists because free will exists. Blind force, instinct, or the orchestrations of God do not compel us. This reply to suffering makes sense only if weassume that God is not in control of all that happens. If God controls plane crashes, terminal cancers, and atom bombs, then God must be responsible, just as I must be responsible if I allow my child dies after I let him to play in the traffic. If those actions are bad, then God must be fundamentally evil and also the author of evil. I cannot believe that. Rather, I believe that God created a contingent universe and delegated tohumanity the freedom to work through the vicissitudes of life-dealing withwar, disease, and poverty. By doing so, humanity develops morally, intellectually, and technologically. So this is another reason why I believe God's self-limiting sovereignty and that we determine our own destiny in the face of life, death, and God.

It is commonly said that God is omnipotent, having the power that admits of no bounds or limitations. The word itself doesn't exist in the Bible, which firstly makes the claim suspect. There are certainly many references to God the creator, that the winds and the sea obey Him, that Satan is bound by His will, and that "in Him we live and move and have our being." All of this is true. But it doesn't follow that God is all powerful in the sense that God intervenes in natural law. We see this is Jesus rebuke of Satan when when Satan tried to tempt him in the desert (Matthew 4). I also believe that God constrains Himself when it comes to consience and will. We say this with Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, where Our Lord said "Not my will, but thine be done." I read that to mean there was nothing preordained about the choice that Jesus made.

My boys brought home their report cards yesterday with almost all As and a few Bs. They are the best answer I can think of to the problem of pain. Their intellect is to a great extent than perhaps I would want to admit mere chance--that mystery of DNA alchemy as well as the accident of birth that put them in community with great schools and teachers that mades them who they are are with their unique minds, temperaments, and appearances. The smallest chemical inbalance could have made both children profoundly retarded and barely sentient. Let us say that my children were disabled. Can we really say that the enabled children are blessed by God and the disabled are cursed by God? But what isn't luck are the chain of choices Ben and Zach will take in the future with the power and the potential to be a a physician or a porn site web master. And this, I believe, is where God comes in-- not in orchestrating the rain that falls or whether we like or don't like vanilla ice cream, but in inspiring and sustaining us to to live up to our full intellectual and emotional potential. I see the converse of this in what I call atheist infomercials, those annoying but strangely fascinating televangelist shows that purport to make you rich and healthy if only you will send in your contributions to a sliver-tongued man of the cloth. What is perhaps even more heritical are those who ascribe to God such soveriengnty that they decline to take commonsense medical precautions on behalf of their children, such as blood transfusions. Whatever these people may profess, they are by their actions the walking embodiment of evil. For by their actions, they are practical atheists in the worst sense, as they reject the existence of a God that can gave us doctors and medicine and our minds to make such decisions.

My view accords with the view of Harold Kushner, whose young son had progeria, the rapid aging disease. By the time his son had died at 14,the boy looked like an old man. "An aching sense of unfairness" ledKushner to write the best-selling book When Bad Things Happen to GoodPeople. Kushner argues that bad things didn't happen because God wants topunish us for our sins, test our strength, or teach us lessons. (In mymother's case, what possible lesson or opportunities for personal growthwould be imparted as she lay on her broken back starving to death?) Instead, Kushner sees randomness to the universe. Lottery winners are merely lucky-not blessed. And when bad things happen, we shouldn'tquestion ourselves or God and be angry because the world is imperfect andunfair. Insurance companies call earthquakes and hurricanes that kills hundreds of people "acts of God", but they use God's name in vain. These are acts of nature, not acts of God. Nature is morally blind. The act of God is the courage of us to continue in the face of disaster.

But I think this somewhat of a sterile argument that doesn't address the core issue of the suffering of the innocent. I think for example of thetwo million Jewish babies and children that were swallowed by the maw ofthe Nazi death camps, including kids of relatives of my wife. It makes me think that if there is a God, it's a God who is blind. That children must die so that we will be good strikes me as incomprehensible. Following the death of his young boy, Huxley replied to a letter from the Reverend Charles Kingley: "As I stood behind the coffin of my little son the otherday, with my mind bent on anything but disputation, the officiating minister read as part of his duty, the words "If the dead rise not, let useat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die." I cannot tell you how inexpressibly they shocked me. Paul had neither wife nor child, or he must have known that his alternative involved a blasphemy against all the best and noblest in human nature. I could have laughed with scorn. What! Because I am face to face with irreparable loss, because I have given back to source from whence it came, the cause of great happiness, stillretaining through all my life the blessings which have sprung and willspring from that cause, am I to renounce my manhood, and, howling, grovelin bestiality? Why the very apes know better, and if you shoot theiryoung, the poor brutes grieve their grief out and do not immediately seek distraction in the forge."

I have great sympathy for this reaction, and should I lose my wife or child,my grief would be as great, but I could not be persuaded that their lives hadbeen at no purpose leading us to chuck our ethics. I think of the Oxford don C.S. Lewis who aggressively promoted the classic Christian answer to evil and suffering in The Problem of Pain that I mentioned earlier. You may remember the movie "Shadowlands", played by Anthony Hopkins as Lewis, in which he had acrisis of faith when he watched his young bride die of cancer. At the end ofthe day, there are no satisfactory answers-only the consolation of faith in the One who also suffered-- and our friends. In one of the last scenes in"Shadowlands," we see the professor hugging his young step-son after his wife had just died-- both in tears.

Perhaps that is the only real answer in the face of the silence and distance of God. Faith is not all green pastures and still waters. The comforters in the Book of Job put forth their rational arguments, and at the end Job-without an explanation but with the existential experience of God-turns for questioning to wondering silence: "I will lay mine hand upon my mouth." In this fragment of time on this island in space,we are in this together and we must help each other out. Evil and sufferingis inextricably part of the human condition individually and institutionally, and if there is one thing we must believe in, it is that we can make a difference. To live is to suffer. To suffer is to find meaning. And, if there is purpose in life, there must be purpose in suffering and death. The Psalmist said that "My help cometh from the Lord, which made heaven and earth." It did not say, "My tragedy comes from the Lord."

The bad that happens in our life has no meaning. But we can redeem it by giving it meaning.

"There seems to be a very thin line between a "tough love" God and a "not there / uninterested" God. How do you distinguish which God version correctly explains the human situation? Faith alone?"

I cannot say that I've nailed the question of theodicy. But it is my attempt to reconcile what may very well be irreconcilable-- the existence of an imminent God to the more deonstrable existence of nature bloody of tooth and claw.

You're certainly right about that thin line. Perhaps one way to analogize it is look at our relationship to Our Father in Heaven to our father on earth-- parents and their relationship to their children-- not when thir kids are able to harm themselves by playing in the street-- but as adults themselves-- making what we hope are sensible choices at the university but with us there only in spirit to guide them. Could it be that God expects that level of maturity from us, not to expect magic tricks, a hand on the back of the bicycle, or checks in the mail but to look within ourselves and to others to make the right decisions and take the right actions?