Suffering and Assumptions about God

by John Hansen

1825. William Blake. Job Plate 11.

One of the perennial questions in philosophy is that, if God is both all-powerful and all-loving—assuming, that is, that he* exists—how is it that he permits suffering and evil in this world? We may imagine, for example, the gruesome suffering of a child, or a natural catastrophe.

One of the most influential thinkers in this area was John Hick (1922-2012), an American philosopher of religion and a theologian. Hick was an unconventional thinker, to the extent that he was twice the subject of heresy hearings. Yet his arguments on human suffering set the agenda. Hick held, to put it simply, that there is no evil in our suffering, but suffering improves our souls. That is, suffering is ultimately good, and merely appears to be evil.

There are multiple biblical references that suggest Hick's thesis: not only does God permit human suffering, but he actually endorses it. The story of Job is the prototype where God actually allows Satan to harm the righteous person (Job) in order to make him more ‘god-like’.

Since Hick, there have been new arguments, which Hick himself could hardly have imagined. Lately, there has been great interest in B.C. Johnson, who is not a theologian—yet through the strength of his arguments, has gained a large following. Johnson holds, to put it too simply, that everywhere, awful ‘accidents’ happen without the interventions of an all-powerful God. Therefore God is evil, or part good and part evil.

However, we find many unexamined assumptions, in both Hick and Johnson. We here examine some of them.

1. Both Hick and Johnson assume that God is personal—essentially, human in nature. Yet nowhere do they discuss this assumption. Is God human? If so, how? Thus they assign to God human codes of conduct. As a result, their discussion about God is essentially one about human morality. The question arises: do we justifiably refer to human morality, expecting God to conform with what is ‘human’?

2. Johnson assumes that God 'has refused to help' us in our sufferings -- and thus he must be evil. The assumption is that God would help us, unasked. One could conceive of an all-powerful, all-loving God who would not intervene in human affairs unless he was petitioned to do so—through a person with the requisite ‘faith’ to make the request. It would not be illogical to assume that God should be asked, by someone who believed that it was worth asking.

3. Almost every example that Johnson uses to question the goodness of God is found in his use of ‘accidents’. The assumption here, however, is that God has power over that realm. Even an all-powerful God could, presumably, leave some things alone. One could posit that a good God would not want to disturb the accidents of nature, because such intervention could disturb the flow of our environmental process. Perhaps he chooses rather to be all-powerful in the spiritual realm.

4. Hick, on the other hand, asks whether accidents can ever be called evil. In that case, can one assume a motive? A classic example is a hornet’s sting. Was there evil intent? Hick equates moral evil with human wickedness, and non-moral evil as equivalent to human pain and suffering from other sources. The distinction is important because Hick suggests that, in the case of human wickedness, we as free agents are in control. God himself may have no evil intent.

5. Johnson questions the theist’s ‘retreat to faith’ to explain God’s goodness. Such faith, he holds, cannot be justified in a wider context. When one casts an eye over history, God’s record is not good. Yet may it not be a category mistake? Faith is a matter of spiritual ascertainment and may make little sense when applied to human rules or philosophical analysis. Faith may not need to be ‘justifiable’ in terms of our own notions of right and wrong.

6. Skeptics may assume that God should have created the world as a hedonistic paradise devoid of human suffering. Suffering and evil may themselves be interpreted as good. God may have created the world to include pain and suffering. The necessity of such suffering, in turn, would bring about God-like characteristics that are necessary. According to Hick, if God were to eradicate all human suffering, we would drift through life aimlessly as if in a dream.

7. A final assumption of the skeptic is that God knows nothing of suffering. Yet an omnipotent, good God himself may have suffered throughout history, just as much as humanity has done, if not more. Such an all-powerful God may believe that it is necessary for human beings to suffer in a similar way as he has done, in order to become more like him, in a different state of existence.

Whether or not one agrees with Hick’s conclusions, it is submitted that his arguments are more plausible than Johnson’s, in that they do not attempt to analyse an unanalysable faith. We may have no better language to talk about it than this.

* I follow Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan: ‘We refer to G-d using masculine terms simply for convenience's sake ...’

Poem: Speculating on Providence

Posted by Chengde Chen

Woodcut by Hans Schäufelein, Augsburg 1513.
Christ and Mary as intercessors /
God the Father shooting plague arrows.

 

Besides the known causes of the Covid pandemic

I suspect that God had a few more intentions

A coincidence cannot be counted as providence

But causality deserves logical proof nevertheless

 

He must have wanted to help us fight climate change

Otherwise why did Covid bring a hidden green hope?

We had almost lost our confidence in reducing CO2

The pandemic dropped it decisively to an ideal level

 

Galileo’s telescope showed Jupiter’s satellite system

Letting people 'see' how the solar system works

Isn’t Covid like a low-carbon possibility experiment

Demonstrating the non-inevitability of global warming?

 

He must have wanted us to cope with the lockdown

Otherwise why did Covid arrive behind the Internet?

People of the Net can be isolated without isolation

Meeting across the Earth redefines time and space

 

The lights of myriad families light up screens wherever

The digitalised joys or sorrows are shared whenever

Without the personal contacts in this semi-real space

The half-dead world may have been dead completely!

 

He must have also wanted Covid to warn science

Otherwise why was it as massacring as bio-weapons?

If a virus can turn the world upside down like this

Won’t genetic engineering threaten our existence?

 

Inside those labs capable of manipulating molecules

They are full of the scientific urge to take such risks

Human self-destruction has been a matter of time

Can the Creator not worry if His work is to be wasted?

 

It's hard to say if these were really His thinking

But, believing or not, you'd better so assume

So as to understand the philosophy of providence –

Turning empirical logic into the rationality of faith!

 

(Chengde Chen is the author of Five Themes of Today: philosophical poems, and of the novel: The Thought-read Revolution. chengde.chen@hotmail.com )

The Silence of God

Posted by Eugene Alper

Perhaps God is so silent with us for a reason.  If He were to answer, if He were to respond to even one question or one plea, this would spell the end of our free will.

For once we knew His preferences for us, once we could sense His approval or disapproval, we would no longer exercise our own preferences, we would not choose our actions.  We would be like children again, led by His hand.  Perhaps He did not want this.  Perhaps He did not create us to be perpetual children.  Perhaps He designed the world so we could think about it and choose our actions freely.

But mentioning free will and God's design in the same sentence presents a predicament—these two ideas need to be somehow reconciled.  For if we believe that God designed the world in a certain way, and the world includes us and our free will, its design has to be flexible enough for us to exercise our free will within it.  We should be able to choose to participate in the design or not, and if so, to which degree.  Should we choose to do something with our life—however small our contribution may be—maybe to improve the design itself, or at least to try to tinker with it, we should be able to do so.  Should we choose to stay away from participating and become hermits, for example, we should be able to do so too.  Or should we choose to participate only partially, every third Tuesday of the month, we should be free to do so as well.

This thinking smacks of being childish.  We want God's design to be there and not to be there at the same time.  We want God to be a loving father who is not overly strict.  This is how we created His image in the Old Testament: God is occasionally stern—to the point of destroying almost the entire humankind—but loving and caring the rest of the time.  This is how we created His image in the New Testament, too: God so loved the world that He sent His own Son to redeem it.  Maybe all we really want is a father again; whatever beings we imagine as our gods, we want the familiar features of our parents.  Maybe we are perpetual children after all.  We want to play in our sandbox—freely and without supervision—and build whatever we want out of sand, yet we want our father nearby for comfort and protection.

There is no need to reconcile anything.  This is how it works.  Our free will fits within God's design so well because it is free only to a degree.  Time and space are our bounds.  We have only so much time until we are gone, and we have only so much energy until it runs out.  Gravity will assure that we can jump, but not too high, that we can fly, but not too far.  We cannot cause too much damage.  Sitting in the sand, we can fight with other players, we can even kick them out, we can build our own castles or destroy theirs, but we cannot destroy the sandbox itself.  Maybe this is the secret of the design.