God and Suffering (General)

by dhw, Sunday, November 23, 2008, 20:21 (5842 days ago) @ David Turell

David has given us a very concise account of how the weather, earthquakes and evolution work. - Thank you for "jumping in". The more angles we see, the better the chance of a clearer picture. I have no problem with the above. Nor do I have a problem with your statement that: "If life were the Garden of Eden, it would be boring." I also agree totally that humans must fend for themselves, that with our freedom of will we create evil, and humans who are not capable of learning will suffer more than those who are. In my view, you have described with great accuracy the way the world functions. The difficulty that I have is with the pattern imposed on this system by, in particular, the Christian interpretation of the force that brought it into being. Most of the points I have raised in my discussion with Mark will therefore not be relevant to your panentheism (with which I am much more in sympathy), but there is one passage in your own account that causes me a problem. - In relation to natural disasters, you say: "Where the free will comes in is God gave us a portion of His intellect, so we can handle these dangers in the way the Earth must be constructed." You are taking an overall view of humanity, whereas I think of the individual men, women and children (who could easily be me and my loved ones) swept away by tsunamis, crushed by earthquakes, ravaged by diseases. I cannot see how their individual free will could have saved them. Nor can I equate such deaths and such suffering with a loving God. Nor, indeed, can I envisage any purpose behind their suffering. Of course we are stuck with the world as it is. But the Christian view, if I have understood it correctly, is that this is how it has to be if we are to fulfil God's purpose by becoming what he wants us to become. I just cannot swallow the argument that millions of generations of animals tearing each other to pieces, followed by thousands of generations of human beings ravaged by natural disasters which are not of their own making, all constitute part of a master plan to make some humans behave themselves. Nor am I convinced that such a plan could be devised by a being that is all good and all loving. There are other interpretations of this scenario that seem to me more coherent: e.g. that there is no master plan; that God (if he exists) is indifferent or absent or dead; that life is a free-for-all governed partly by individual talents, and partly by the laws of Nature and chance. This thread was opened with a view to putting the case for a loving God and for the necessity of suffering in pursuit of a divine purpose. For me the three elements of this theory still don't hang together.