My Grand Apologetics Program Part 6c

See these previous posts:


http://ljtsg.blogspot.com/2012/12/my-grand-apologetics-project-part-1.html?m=1

http://ljtsg.blogspot.com/2012/12/my-grand-apologetics-project-part-2.html?m=1

http://ljtsg.blogspot.com/2012/12/my-grand-apologetics-project-part-2-cont.html?m=1

http://ljtsg.blogspot.com/2012/12/my-grand-apologetics-project-part-3-a.html

http://ljtsg.blogspot.com/2013/01/my-grand-apologetics-project-part-3b.html?m=1

http://ljtsg.blogspot.com/2013/01/my-grand-apologetics-project-3c-f.html

http://ljtsg.blogspot.com/2013/01/my-grand-apologetics-project-part-4.html

http://ljtsg.blogspot.com/2013/01/my-grand-apologetics-project-part-5.html

http://ljtsg.blogspot.com/2013/02/my-grand-apologetics-project-part-6.html

c. The Problem of Evil

The most pressing problem that one faces when one makes a religious commitment is the problem of evil and innocent suffering. When we look at the world with our senses, we see a world that seems so evil, so terrible, that it stands as direct counter-evidence to the phenomenological evidence put forth by our deepest affective experiences.

Life is an endless parade of suffering and death. This has been particularly sharpened by the rise of our knowledge of natural selection. Natural selection is how any and all living things are shaped and come into being. And natural selection tells a terrible story, one of just mountains of suffering and death. It's terrible. Every day children are murdered and raped, torture is used as a form of punishment or to extract information. Even good people are faced with terrible choices, and forced to adjudicate between the lesser of two evils.

What's more, once one chooses to trust one's deepest affective experiences, there is a whole world of negative, indeed evil experiences that seem as intense as the positive experiences that led one to God. Horror, suffering, temptation, these experiences have their own phenomenologies, that literally invert the phenomenologies of humor, joy, play, etc. They come to us as indicators, as signs that the world is a terrible place, where joy is ultimately destroyed, where death will reign over life, and there is nothing to hope for. Their very nature is to threaten our sense that the world is ultimately meaningful. Worse yet, they may point to a kind of maltheistic worldview, the view that there is an ultimate reality and it is evil and hateful, rather than loving and good. The writings of HP Lovecraft capture this sense better than any source I know. The horror he captures is the horror that comes with the sense that god is not good.

The simple fact is that the problem of evil and innocent suffering represent the best counter-argument to the proposition I put forth earlier. And I think, ultimately, no religious person can also claim to be a person of reason if they fail to account for it properly. There has been an endless line of theodicies, attempts to make sense of or justify the reality of suffering in the face of the Reality one posits as a result of all the affective experiences that were written about at the beginning of this apologetics project. Put in it's rawest form, the problem of evil is this: how can one believe in a reality ultimately grounded in joy and hope given the vast amount of sense data that points to a world of terror and horror, and all the experiences we have that pull us away from our commitment to the positive encounters with the world that we spoke of earlier?

The first and most important thing that a person who is a believer or who wants to be a believer should do is realize that this problem is only real for the smallest part of the universe. Most of the universe is a place of beauty. Beauty is to my mind a more diffuse and less intense but very real form of goodness. Remember the experience of beauty whenever you reflect on the problem of evil. If the experience of beauty, which is one of the experiences I spoke of earlier, is taken seriously, than we see our first partial answer to the problem of evil. For one of the most shocking things that science has brought to the forefront of the religious person's worldview is just how pervasive beauty is. The universe is beautiful at every conceivable level, and that beauty is vast and impressive. So powerful is beauty that one of the ways scientists use to adjudicate between good and bad theory is aesthetic value. If a theory is not beautiful, it is probably not true. But what did we say about beauty before? That it comes to us as informational, as sending us a message. It tells us something about the world. Now that feeling may be just a feeling, and you can choose to ignore it. But if you made the move I suggested before and you have chosen to take this experience seriously, then you will see the world as mostly giving us a message of hope. The horrors, the genuine evils and ugliness, is operative in only the thinnest slice of the world.

But those horrors are genuine and must be addressed. Most of the ways in which they are addressed by most believers are absolutely terrible. Some will attribute suffering to human behavior. People get what they deserve, some people believe. I don't see how anyone can hold this view. How does one look into the eyes of a child dying of cancer and tell them they deserve it? On some level, the people who hold this view must know that this is a lie. Good people often suffer, and bad people often get off with good and easy lives.

The standard free will defense doesn't work for me either. Free will may be a necessary part of God's plan, but much of the evil visited upon the world has nothing to do with human agency. Nobody's sin causes tsunamis, despite what Pat Robertson might say. Further, it isn't clear why God can't infringe upon human free will to stop genuine horrors. If I stop you from killing someone, no one would say I 'infringed on your free will', they will just say I did the right thing. Why does God get a pass in a similar situation?

Dualism is one way to solve the problem. Positing a God of light and a god of darkness not only makes sense of the fullest range of human experience, but makes sense of both the good and the evil in the world. But I reject dualism on the grounds that it would make the adventure of good and the adventure of evil equally meaningful. If the quest for the meaning of life ends in non-moral terms, then it isn't a quest worth engaging in. Besides, this violates the sense we got from our moral awareness, and natural beauty.

For me, I believe in a God who is, ultimately, Suffering Love, and as such is limited in what He can do. God can do important things, He can't do everything. God provides freedom for the world, empowers it to act, invites it to act in the right way, and what's more God co-suffers with all those who experience horrors within the world. God is, in Whitehead's words, "The Co-Sufferer Who Understands". All evil in the world is visited upon God Himself. Think about cancer. Cancer is when a part of us goes haywire, and attacks the rest of the body. The cells themselves use their freedom to hurt the rest of the organic whole that makes us up. Evil, too, can stand over against God without being another god outside of Him. There could be no world, no future, and no freedom if God did not give power to the world. But God does not have the power to exercise that power over others. God is the source of all moral direction, and of every good experience, for all the power needed to make the world 'happen' comes from God. But the control of all power is delegated to the hands of the created. Some of the beings God has created have rebelled against God. That is true of the natural world as much as the human and social world. God cannot ultimately be over come, but in individual cases the world will not be what God wants it to be. But no experience is ever lost, for God shares in all that happens to every one of His creatures.

This is the reason why the Christian message appeals to me so strong. In The Book of Revelation, Jesus Christ is called the Lamb Slain From the Foundation of the World. Within this vulnerable being, we are told, is the power and force that is truly ultimate in the world. And over and over again our world produces stories, movies, and movements that insist upon the Ultimacy of Love. But that Ultimacy is not power as we normally understand it. It is not the power to force or control, it is the power to persuade and inspire. It is real, and it is the primary truth of the world. But it has limits, because there are somethings that love simply cannot do. There is a difference between being the Greatest Power and having all power. Jesus is the living embodiment of the nature of God: God as suffering love, not as controlling might. This God, a God who creates through His vulnerability and not through His strength, is not a God we can rightly hold responsible for the horrors of the world. Nor should those horrors surprise us, as vulnerability always implies the possibility of genuine suffering. In this way, I can hold on to the fullest range of human experience, taking all those affective encounters with the world I wrote about earlier seriously, while also taking seriously all I know through the senses and through the phenomenology of all that hurts and confounds me.

Conclusion

These are not all the possible objections one can make against my way of 'doing' religion. But these are the big ones, and they are the ones I think are most relevant to the argument I have made so far. So here I am, I think I am reasonable, but I am also religious, and I have told you why I think the one and am the other. Once one gives oneself to this kind of life, a journey begins. At first you don't know where it will lead, at the end perhaps one gives up the commitments made earlier. But for me, rather, the journey has led to more and more confirming evidence in favor of all I have said so far. Up to this point, I have appealed to religious experiences that I think everyone can relate to. I have tried to be as non-confessional as possible, and to give premises and draw conclusions that everyone can understand, if not agree with. But next I will be going into a far more confessional place. I will be talking about mystical experience, which is far different from the religious experiences we have spoken about so far.