Recently, I posted about the existence of the spider wasp and the logical paradox it represents for the existence of a benevolent God. This has led me to further consider the wider problem of the presence of suffering in the world, and in this post I would like to share some of my observations and conclusions about the broader issue.
With regard to the suffering inflicted on human beings by other humans, I have personally always found it sufficient to recognise that such a possibility is the natural consequence of a reality in which we all have the ability to choose our actions. I have always believed that humans have the responsibility of free will and therefore we can choose to do good or we can choose to do evil things.
Before we continue, we should recognise that not everybody subscribes to the view that we actually have free will. This view is known as determinism, and it is a big subject in its own right, but essentially, determinism states that all our apparent choices are just illusions and are really the product of past events, conditions or circumstances; the product of a myriad cause and effect relationships.
Intuitively, I have come to reject the idea of determinism. Personally, I believe I genuinely have the ability to choose and with that power comes a certain responsibility to behave in a way that does not deliberately cause pain and suffering for my fellow human beings. I also accept the laws of nature are there for a purpose, so if someone walks off a cliff they are likely to be injured as a consequence; and I also accept that it would be wrong for me to push someone over a cliff, though I might have the power to do so.
The above proposal has often been advanced by others to explain the existence of suffering caused by other humans. The difficulty is that such reasoning does not provide a sufficient explanation for the existence of other kinds of suffering such as that caused by natural disasters like earthquakes or that it does not explain animal suffering. These are very good questions. The existence of animal suffering is evidence enough, for me, that physical suffering is not there so we can learn and improve, as C.S. Lewis pointed out.
The classic Biblical text on the subject of suffering is the book of Job, said to be one of the oldest books in the Bible. It describes the suffering of a righteous man and completely debunks the idea that suffering is some kind of payment for wrongdoing. Job’s comforters all believe that he must have sinned for such terrible suffering to have come upon him, but if there is one very clear message in this book it is that such a proposition is completely untrue.
At the end of the book, we have God speaking to Job. It is a beautifully poetic passage that is full of inspiration. It puts humankind right in its place. We know so very little about the process of creation and the nature of reality; and that’s what I find so wonderful. Despite tremendous advances in knowledge over the 3,000 years since the book of Job was written, the same is true today.
Many commentators have taken this rebuttal to mean that we cannot know the mind of God; and, whilst that is undoubtedly true, I personally believe there is much more to God’s reply. God asks Job, for example, where he was when the foundations of the Earth were laid and he also asks Job why the ostrich should exist – a bird that is flightless and not very careful about her eggs. The inference, for me, is that there is an answer to the question of suffering to be found in making that analysis.
At the time of Job, he would have been unable to talk about tectonic plates, but if he had known about them, he would also have known the cause of earthquakes (natural suffering). Similarly, had he understood something about the business of natural selection he might have understood something of how the ostrich came to be flightless. For me, in this passage, God is explaining that there is a kind of free will in nature which is a consequence of the processes that built and now maintain the Earth.
Of course, this position perhaps raises the question of why God chose to use those particular processes and initiate those natural laws rather than create others. Perhaps that is a deliberation for a future post, but for now, I believe that inappropriate use of human free will remains the best available answer to the existence of suffering imposed on human beings by others; and, by extrapolation, the action of natural law (what we might call free will in nature) is the best answer to the question of animal suffering and suffering caused by natural disaster.
In closing, I think it appropriate to state that what God said to Job about his complete lack of knowledge on the subject and how it hampered his ability to understand also continues to apply to us today. Modern knowledge about how nature works might well astound Job, but I believe it still would not really impress God because it is far from complete.
