1. The problem can be summarized: 1. “God” is all-powerful (omnipotent), all-knowing (omniscient), and all good or all-caring (morally perfect). 2. Such a God could, and would, prevent unnecessary suffering. 3. There is unnecessary suffering in the world. So, 4. Either God doesn’t exist, or doesn’t possess the classic attributes of perfection, or is malevolent.
2.
3. From a ship in Lisbon harbor, Candide watches helplessly as the good drown and the wicked survive. His friend Martin concludes that if the world has any purpose at all, it is to drive us mad. Lisbon Earthquake , 1755. Some 90,000 people died in Lisbon- more than one third of its population. Another 10,000 lives were lost in southwest Spain and Morocco.
4. We stand, as it were, on the shore, and see multitudes of our fellow beings struggling in the water, stretching forth their arms, sinking, drowning, and we are powerless to assist them. Felix Adler
5. Philosopher Susan Neiman reminds us that eighteenth century thinkers like Voltaire saw the Lisbon quake as a metaphysical event. For some, Lisbon lessened either God's beneficence or his power. For others, the quake lessened their estimation of human reason and a reasonable world. Nature, according to enlightened minds, was a benign and intelligible force. Its well-oiled operation reflected the intelligence and skill of a designer God. Could we, though, retain our confidence in reason, and thus in God's ways, in the rubble of Lisbon?
6. Today, there no longer seem to be any Voltaires questioning reason and nature, or, put baldly, addressing the problem of evil. Why ?
7. http://bartdehrman.com/ The leading reason given by atheists and agnostics for their disbelief is the problem of suffering or evil. Bart Ehrman, a respected Bible scholar at the University of North Carolina who until quite recently considered himself a devout Christian, was finally led by his reflections on the problem to lose his religion. He says “the Bible fails to answer our most important question - why we suffer.” “ Suffering is not only senseless, it is also random, capricious, and unevenly distributed.”
8. Ehrman's inability to reconcile the claims of faith with the facts of real life led the former pastor of the Princeton Baptist Church ultimately to reject Christianity. In God's Problem , Ehrman discusses his personal anguish upon discovering the Bible's contradictory explanations for suffering and invites all people of faith - or no faith - to confront their deepest questions... Why are the sick wracked with unspeakable pain? Why are babies born with birth defects? Why are young children kidnapped, raped, and mur- dered? 5 Why does a child die of hunger every five seconds ? 6
9. Ehrman's inability to reconcile the claims of faith with the facts of real life led the former pastor of the Princeton Baptist Church ultimately to reject Christianity. In God's Problem , Ehrman discusses his personal anguish upon discovering the Bible's contradictory explanations for suffering and invites all people of faith - or no faith - to confront their deepest questions... Why are the sick wracked with unspeakable pain? Why are babies born with birth defects? Why are young children kidnapped, raped, and mur- dered? 5 Why does a child die of hunger every five seconds ? 6
10. Child suffering is surely the greatest challenge to belief in a perfect, loving, all-powerful, and all-knowing God. Ehrman recounts testimony from the Nuremberg trials: “ The children were thrown in [the ovens] alive. The cries could be heard all over camp.” The cries of children, screaming from the midst of the blazing ovens. 25
11. One of the most common explanations—it fills many pages of the Hebrew Bible—seems simplistic, repugnant, back- ward, or just dead wrong to many modern people. It is that people suffer because God wants them to suffer... they have disobeyed him and he is punishing them... Nothing happens in this world unless God has done it. Suffering comes as punishment for sin. 27
12. Ehrman says that contrary to common opinion, free will plays only a very minor role in the biblical tradition. And even if we attribute the Holocaust, (e.g.) and its horrific toll on innocent victims (including millions of children) to humans' abuse of their god-given freedom, he asks, how can you explain drought or the hurricane that destroys New Orleans or a tsunami that kills hundreds of thousands overnight? Or earthquakes, mudslides, malaria, dysentery...? If in the end we say the answer is a mystery, that's not an answer. It is an admission that there is no answer.
13. In the last analysis, Ehrman concludes, the book of Ecclesiastes gets it right: “suffering does not come for known causes or reasons. Suffering just comes, and we need to deal with it as best we can.” 189 ...it is fitting to eat and drink and find enjoyment in all the toil with which one toils under the sun the few days of the life God gives us; for this is our lot. (Eccl. 5:18-19) 194 “ To be sure, we should work to overcome suffering—in ourselves and others... But life is more than simply avoiding suffering. It is also enjoying what can come to us in our short stay on earth.” So, says Ehrman...
14. “ I have to admit that at the end of the day, I do have a biblical view of suffering - the view put forth in Ecclesiastes... The solution to life is to enjoy it while we can, because it is fleeting. The idea that this life is all there is should not be an occasion for despair and despondency. It should be a source of joy and dreams—joy of living for the moment, and dreams of trying to make the world a better place... This means working to alleviate suffering.” 276
15. When you see images of child suffering and abuse, learn of the devastating consequences for innocents of violent crime, witness the ferocious, heartless impact on vulnerable human beings of “natural” calamities like earthquakes and tornadoes, etc. etc. ad infinitum , can you in good conscience really assert that ours is the kind of world we should expect a perfect and unlimited being to create?
16. Of course we should always bear in mind the cautionary observation of pre-Socratic philosopher Xenophanes (570-480 B.C.E.), when tempted to articulate the attributes of God(s) - “ If oxen and horses and lions had hands and could draw, horses would draw the gods shaped as horses and oxen as oxen...” 9 We're bound to anthropomorphize... probably an error. But, if God is a human exemplar we must suppose some significant common ground...
17. The Brothers Karamazov Book V, Ch. 4 - "Rebellion" - Ivan to Alyosha, on children's suffering: Are you fond of children, Alyosha? I know you are, and you will understand why I prefer to speak of them. If they, too, suffer horribly on earth, they must suffer for their fathers' sins, they must be punished for their fathers, who have eaten the apple; but that reasoning is of the other world and is incomprehensible for the heart of man here on earth... Fyodor Dostoevsky 1821-1881 http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks07/0700061h.html#eiv http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks07/0700061h.html
18. 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 unexpiated tears to 'dear, kind God'! It's not worth it, because those tears are unatoned for. They must be atoned for, or there can be no harmony. (cited in Ehrman, "God's Problem") http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks07/0700061h.html#ev Grand Inquisitor
19. Abraham & Isaac The point of the Genesis story of Abraham's “offering” of his son, at God's insistence, is that being faithful to God is the most important thing in life: more important than thinking for yourself, more important than your conscience, more important than your love for your own children. [Ehrman 169] What would Socrates say? http://www.answers.com/topic/abraham http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r/macleish/macleish.htm The Danish philosopher Kierkegaard goes into Abraham's plight in considerable detail in his work Fear and Trembling ...
20. Sartre understands the story not in terms of Christian obedience or a "teleological suspension of the ethical", but in terms of mankind's utter behavioral and moral freedom. God asks Abraham to sacrifice his only son. Sartre doubts that Abraham can know that the voice he hears is really the voice of his God and not of someone else, or the product of a mental condition. Thus, Sartre concludes, even if there are signs in the world, humans are totally free to decide how to interpret them. [Also see Ehrman on Job] But is there any other conscionable answer, from a parent's perspective,than an emphatic, incredulous, apalled “ NO! I will not sacrifice my child!?!”
21. Colin McGinn on suffering as a test from God... and on faith: ...beliefs about what reality contains should always be formed on the basis of evidence or rational argument—so that “faith” is inherently an unethical way to form your beliefs. To believe “on faith” is to believe that the world is a certain way (contains a god etc) without the support of either empirical or logical justification. This violates the ethics of belief—how you ought to arrive at your convictions....
22. Wittgenstein said “a nothing is as good as a something about which nothing can be said .” An incomprehensible God is really not the kind of deity anyone can worship. It can’t be both ways: God can’t be unfathomable and be known as a father figure who cares intimately and personally about each of us.
23. It has been suggested that God grants his creatures free will, and they (we) mess up and bring suffering into the world by abusing that gift. But God is supposed to have created each of us as part of the natural order, and (as Simon Blackburn says): “ if God had not wanted Stalin to slaughter millions he would not have created the nature that eventually gave rise to the decision-making modules of such a person.”
24. Finally: even if we make the dubious concession that some suffering might be necessary to provide the concept and underscore the importance of free will, much suffering in the world (including all suffering due to earthquakes, storms, and the like) is not responsive to human choice. There’s clearly a great deal more suffering in the world than is necessary to illustrate the concept.
25. "I cannot bring myself, as so many seem able to do, to blink the evil out of sight, and gloss it over," William James wrote to his brother as a young man in 1870. "It's as real as the good, and if it is denied, good must be denied too. It must be hated and resisted while there's breath in our bodies." And sixteen years later: "There is no full consolation. Evil is evil and pain is pain."
26. “ Suppose you found yourself at school or university in a dormitory. Things are not too good. The roof leaks, there are rats about, the food is almost inedible, some students in fact starve to death. There is a closed door, behind which is the management, but the management never comes out. You get to speculate what the management must be like. Can you infer from the dormitory as you find it that the management, first, knows ...
27. ...exactly what conditions are like, second, cares intensely for your welfare, and third, possesses unlimited resources for fixing things? The inference is crazy . You would be almost certain to infer that either the management doesn't know, doesn't care, or cannot do anything about it. Nor does it make things any better if occasionally you come across a student who declaims that he has become privy to the mind of the management, and is assured that the management indeed knows, cares, and has resources and ability to do what it wants. The overwhelming inference is not that the management is like that, but that this student is deluded. Perhaps his very deprivations have deluded him.” Simon Blackburn, Think (Oxford, 1999)
28. “ Nobody ever inferred from the multiple infirmities of Windows that Bill Gates was infinitely benevolent, omniscient, and able to fix everything... The imperfections of Windows have no doubt led to virtues of patience or fortitude, but even Microsoft has never used that to defend the perfection of the product, and indeed that is why they continue to try to improve it.” -- Simon Blackburn, Think
