God and Suffering (General)

by dhw, Friday, November 21, 2008, 11:18 (5642 days ago) @ Mark

Mark: Omnipotence never meant belief that God could make truth equal falsehood.
My reference to God's omnipotence was only to the fact that had he wished to, he could have created a world without inflicting indiscriminate suffering. - Before we go any further, I need to stress that I don't even know whether the Christian God you believe in did create this world. I'm an agnostic. But I can only discuss this with you on the terms of your basic premise. - Mark: You accept that a world like this may not be possible without suffering, i.e. it may be logically impossible to create humans without suffering.
That is a misunderstanding. I accept only that this world is full of suffering, and so a world without suffering would not be "like this". It would be a different world. It would be a Garden of Eden, a Paradise, where all creatures live at peace with one another. Christians and Muslims believe in such a world, which some humans will inhabit for ever. If he'd wanted to, God could have done it here on Earth. Instead, according to those religions, he chose to make life on Earth a test, which he spiced up with various forms of random "horrific suffering" devised by himself. - Mark: You still blame God for creating this world.
No. I blame him for creating the indiscriminate suffering. In other words, even if I accept the possibility that God created life, that does not mean that I accept your vision of him as loving. If one of my (now grown-up) children was killed by one of God's special viruses, by a bolt of lightning, by an earthquake, a tsunami etc., I would certainly have difficulty interpreting it as a sign of God's love. This is what is happening every second of every day in every part of the world. You see it as necessary. I see it as cruel. Nevertheless, let me repeat that I am glad to have been given the opportunity to live, whether it came from God, Allah, Brahma, the Incredible Hulk, or an amoeba that swallowed a bacterium. - Mark: If God is wrong to create this world, why is it right for us to keep it going?
I've never said God was wrong to create this world. I've challenged the notion that this world reflects his love. By having children I've chosen to keep things going irrespective of whether there is or isn't a God, loving or indifferent, because I've been happy (and lucky) in my life, and I think it's worth the gamble that my children will experience the same. Better the chance of something than the certainty of nothing. - I think the difference between us is our starting point. You start out from a fixed base: the belief that a loving God created the world, and suffering is essential if we are to have free will and turn into what God wants us to be (I hope that's accurate). I start out from the fact that, much as I love life, I see a world full of pain indiscriminately inflicted. This was the pattern long before man came on the scene, and it had nothing to do with free will. So I look for an explanation. The simplest (Ockham's razor) is that there is no guiding principle behind the suffering. This could be because life arose by chance, or because the creative force doesn't care ... we are perhaps a long-drawn-out soap opera it created for its entertainment ... or it's disappeared altogether. Of course your belief in God's love may be justified, just as George's belief in a purely material universe may be justified. But your rational excuses for irrational suffering strain my credulity (not to mention my sense of justice), as does George's attribution of life's complexities to luck and Nature's laws. The exchange of ideas, however, is what this forum is about, and I'm immensely grateful to you, George, David and others who keep coming up with new insights into these old problems. I find it all stimulating and helpful, especially since one of you must be right!