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Then what is the point of praying to Him? Do you think he loves you enough to make sure you get that promotion at work, or that your football team wins a game, but doesn’t love those mothers enough to prevent them from having catastrophically deformed children?
I’m all for a Deist conception of an inscrutable alien intelligence who created the basic rules of physics and then sat back to passively watch the simulation play out. What I cannot understand is a conception of a loving God who made humanity in his image, who intervenes positively in quotidian human affairs, and yet who allows, either through direct control or negligence, things like catastrophic natural disasters and anencephalic newborns.
Is it specifically the catastrophic natural disasters and anencephalic newborns that raise the objection, or is it in fact any form of suffering at all?
I observe that suffering is highly useful, even from a materialist perspective. We suffer hunger and thirst, and it motivates us to eat and drink. More abstract and generalized suffering provides the contrast necessary to recognize the difference between good and bad; if you agree that the "experience machine" is repugnant, that necessarily requires suffering and pleasure to be different from good and bad. From there, general acceptance of suffering, even of natural disasters and anencephalic newborns is not a large step: suffering is a reminder that there is a reality outside our selves that must be grappled with, and this is an insight we cannot dispense with.
The point of praying to Him is to build a relationship with Him. When we encounter suffering, we ask for his help, and when we encounter joy, we thank him for it. A similar process can be observed in the parent/child relationship; young children suffer greatly for reasons they do not understand and their parents cannot explain to them, but their parents mitigate some of this suffering and comfort them in the rest, and without gaining any insight into the causes or reasons for the suffering or indeed the reasoning of the parents, children hopefully learn that their parents are not its ultimate source, even when they are the proximate source. My eldest reliably starts screaming and crying when I turn off Cocomelon, but still lets me pick her up and soothe her until the discontent passes. So it is for me and the greater sufferings of pain and sickness and weakness and death.
There's a sense in which none of the above is rational, but then, rationality is a spook. Your rage and disgust at the evil of pain and suffering brings you no closer to solving them, and my acceptance of them produces no additional obstacle to fighting against them. Certainly sterilization or euthanasia are not general or even notably broad solutions to the problem. Humans will continue to live and die in pain no matter what you or I choose to believe or to do, short of complete extermination of the species. Nor does it appear that suffering is, in fact, in any fundamental way connected to material circumstances. Perfectly healthy, rich, comfortable people frequently demonstrate that suffering expands to fill the available space of one's psyche, regardless of material circumstances. The most concrete quantization of suffering available, the experience of physical pain, observably expands and contracts dramatically, and possibly without limit, based solely on how we engage with it, and particularly with choices we make when engaging with it.
It’s specifically the very bad forms of suffering.
The Boxing Day tsunami in 2004 killed about 230,000 people. Many were killed fairly quickly, although in one of most distressing ways I can imagine - for example, being swept away by a rushing deluge after slipping from the grasp of a family member clinging to a building, who then has to watch you slip away to your death - although a great many died later from starvation, disease, etc. All because they simply happened to live somewhere within the affected zone.
You want me to believe that this level of unspeakable death and suffering was the most effective way for God to send the message that suffering is real and that there are things more powerful that humanity? And you also want me to believe that such a God loves me? (Did he not love those 230,000 people?)
Imagine if every time your child cried, you grabbed a random stranger’s child and strangled it to death in front of your kid. This might indeed demonstrate to your child that there are worse things in the world than having Cocomelon turned off. It would also be an incredibly psychopathic and gratuitous way to teach that lesson - especially if the idea is that you love every child equally, and don’t just arbitrarily pick favorites.
Again, totally risible. It is precisely the recognition that a state of affairs is monstrous and unjust which provides the impetus to begin working to change it. For the vast majority of human history, childbirth was ridiculously dangerous to women, and children so often died young. Entire religious traditions sprang up to teach us that these things are just an inevitable part of life, that we are powerless to stop them because God wills them, and that they’re actually our fault for being so wicked and fallen. But hey, what do you know: they actually weren’t an inevitable part of human life, and the second we figured out how to exercise agency over them, we eagerly did so; in the 21st century, they are now incredibly rare in every society that has access to the technologies to prevent them. The same is true of disease; plagues used to be the inescapable will of a vengeful God, but now we can usually stave them off with some basic vaccination. I’m really fucking glad some enterprising souls decided that God’s inscrutable will might be worth defying. I desperately hope that one day humans get good enough at geo-engineering that we never again need to be smugly told that earthquakes and tsunamis are just part of God’s plan.
You’re once again doing the thing where you pretend not to understand that there are degrees. It is possible for some suffering to be inevitable, but at the same time for us to have the power to massively reduce it. I don’t want to live in the “experience box”; I also don’t want to have my fingernails ripped out, or to burn alive, or to see my infant be born without a brain. You’re welcome to throw your hands up and thank God for suffering; I’m going to go a different path.
Agreed, I much prefer a disinterested clockmaker that implicitly says "as for your comfort, that will depend upon your efforts" than an all-loving deity who lets a devoutly Catholic Lisbon be razed by an earthquake on All Saints Day.
There is no good reason the arc of history (and physics itself) needs to involve such enormous amounts of suffering. An omnipotent being could structure the universe like a slice-of-life anime where the worst that could happen is that you look foolish in front of your friends.
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Further, when you look at the teachings of Christian spiritual teachers, the point is very often that you shoudn’t be praying for random things you want, you should be praying for God to do what he wants. The Lord’s Prayer has no place for the Chiefs winning the Super Bowl; instead it says, “thy will be done.” I would argue that any prayer that goes “God give me this thing I want,” is a bad and spiritually dangerous prayer.
Instead you should be praying for strength, or peace, or any of the mental and spiritual gifts that can help you deal with whatever’s going to happen. The point of Christianity is not material success but spiritual growth. That’s why prosperity theology is such a dangerous heresy.
Also, I believe in a vision of Christianity where suffering is itself almost a positive good, because it creates closeness to Christ the suffering servant, and I believe the world was created in order that we could suffer with him. Or, at least, so that our slate of experiences and God’s slate of experiences could be the same — God’s passability and ours is the point of the world. So I find the classical answers to the problem of evil unsatisfying, though I understand their point.
I know that sounds nuts to non-Christians, but I don’t have a high view of folk Christianity and I think it very often misses the mark.
Just so. For myself personally, though, I think I've leaned too hard in that direction in the past, verging on a sort of fatalism, to the point that I no longer prayed for people to be healed, but only for what God wanted to happen, to happen. It seems to me that this verged on a sort of cowardice, where it became more about not asking for things because I didn't believe they'd happen anyway. On the other hand, I've found the faith to pray to God for things that seemed highly improbable, have in fact received some of those highly improbable things, and am very grateful for them. To a great extent, my life is now defined by those positive answers to specific requests, which inspires great thankfulness to God for granting them.
The rational perspective would point out that this is all just confirmation bias. I've chosen to believe in God axiomatically, and I interpret all evidence I receive according to that axiom. But of course, there is no other way to reason from incomplete data; Axioms are necessary precisely because they cannot be proven, and they are necessary because it is impossible to reason without them.
Agreed that Prosperity theology is radioactive trash.
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I don’t claim to fully understand the problem of evil in the same way a two year old doesn’t fully understand why he can’t have candy for dinner. But the issue of original sin ensures there will be bad things until the end of the earth as the fault of man; that much I can say.
A truly wretched ideology, I’m sorry to say. I have a ton of cultural affinity with Christians, and devout Christians have been some of the kindest people I’ve ever known. But that is just colossally repellent metaphysics.
Scott’s short treatment of the subject in his review of Malleus Maleficarum gives the most defensible explanation:
This is the best they can come up with. I’m serious. I don’t believe in God, but conditional on there being a magic sky fairy, this is the most likely explanation.
Paul himself gestures in this direction. Read Romans 9 sometime, especially the metaphor about the potter and the clay.
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