Tsunami, relections on God and the Problem of Evil

[Selwynn]

Catastrophic tragedies like the tsunami brings one religious question into sharer focus than all others: If God is all-powerful, why does he allow horrible things like this to happen?

The other day I made a partial reply to a post asking if anyone was questoning their faith in light of recent events. I went on to write out an more thoughful response which I would like to share with you now:



Sadly, I fear that it is the misconception of omnipotence and omniscience that often leads to a crisis of faith. It is the fundamentalist interpretations of what God is like that leads to such brutal feelings of utter betrayal - when the uncompromising forces of reality tear down the straw houses of simple answers and petty literalism.

I do not have any personal illusions that a God of love either causes catastrophe or could stop catastrophe and chooses not to. When we choose to apply the concept of Love to our analogies of God – and I do choose to do that – we necessarily imply certain things and unavoidably rule out other things. We know that love implies freedom and uncertainty. We also know that love cannot be coerced and that there is no escaping the reality of risk – there are no guarantees.

We accept these realities of real love we personally experience, and yet when it comes down to the nature of God’s relationship to creation, we balk. We balk because even many who reject God want to conceive of the God they reject as in total control – having power over everything. That way, there is something to blame for the unfathomable depths of pain this world is capable of inflicting on those of us who live in it. Even many who profess no belief in God still have irrational anger at the God they don’t believe in when things go terribly, terribly wrong. Having a scapegoat for our grief is easier than embracing the alternative – a world in which even God takes a risk in her choice to create; a world with an unknown future, in which even God does not enjoy coercive control.

It is because I believe that what I understand about Love tells me a lot about what God is like that I do not experience a “crisis of faith” even as I weep over the catastrophe of recent weeks. I do however find comfort in the nature of her love – as I understand love to include compassion and grace in its composition - even in the midst of the very, very worst. God's promise that she will "never leave us nor forsake us" wasn't for the times when things were going great - it was for the times when things have collapsed into utter shit.

It is God’s promise to be in the utter shit with us that makes faith worth everything – her promise to hold me when I cry and cry with me, to patiently take care of me when I’m having trouble taking care of myself, and to be ever-present even in my darkest hours. I don't expect my human friends and loved ones to have supernatural powers when I grieve. But by the very fact that they are my friends and loved ones, they will be there with me and they will comfort me and carry me when I can't carry myself. That is why I cherish them. It's the same with God, only magnified and more personal in some ways - that friend that sticks closer than a brother.

I don't love and cherish my relationship with God because she is a kind of amoral "superman" that is able to prevent tragedy but frequently doesn't. I love and cherish my relationship with God because she is a friend, and she loves me and I her, and she gives me grace and comfort for whatever I face. There is nothing that God can do, that she isn't actively doing for everyone at every present moment. Certainly what God might want to do is often curtailed by human ignorance and resistance, but I don’t believe there is ever anything God is deliberately holding back. God's covenant with us is not that she can prevent all human suffering or tragedy, because by the very nature of her character of love, she can’t. Love is free, not coercive. Love is risky; it is clearly not certain. So too is this world.

Creation itself was a risk of love, not a coercively controlled machine. God's covenant with us therefore is that with her, no matter what we may face in life, we can experience a life worth living. Not one free from suffering, or loss, or hardship or even catastrophe. But one where, no matter what things we face, her comfort and gentle strength can fuel our human resolve, and fortify our hope and determination to go on living and risk again, rebuild, and start anew.

God's covenant promise to her children is that if we walk together in fellowship with her, we can come to the end of our lives, look back on totality of our lives (including even the most personal catastrophes) and say to ourselves "living my life was worth the cost of drawing in that final breath.” There is only one Gospel promise at the heart of faith, and that is the covenantal promise of God that with her we can look back on our lives and say in all sincerity, “if I had it to do all over again, unable to change one thing - I would."

This is the promise of faith: a life that is worth it. I believe everything else is a distortion of what actually matters. I don't love God because I think somehow she is able to prevent catastrophe. I love God because of her covenant with me to go with me and before me even in the darkest hours of my life. I love her because of the constant examples of her faithful outpouring of grace and strength over my life, all while tirelessly working hope out of even my deepest despairs. This faithfulness has proven true, even in times when I could see nothing but darkness, and all I could hear was a still small voice.

I love God for hope, not certainty. And that is why this catastrophe breaks my heart, but not the covenant.

Sel


EDIT - formatting

[Selwynn]

1. Does anyone have any thoughts or opinions on this?

I just bump because I wrote this several days ago and I was wondering how any other person of faith felt about my response to the classic problem of evil question...

Sorry if that's vanity.
Sel

[Stunster]

2. Yeah, I do

God does not intervene. What God does is to actively relate to us and to the world. God does this by endowing us with free will, and endowing the universe with a rationally intelligible nature, and sustaining both us and the universe in being, thus allowing us to be rational, moral agents in an intelligible world, and thus able to relate to the world and to one another. And to God.

I don't believe that God suspends natural laws or free will in order to actively relate to us. I don't believe it is either necessary or desirable for God to do that in order to actively relate to us and to the world.

I believe that the laws of nature are quantum-mechanical, probabilistic statistical generalizations. God builds into the laws of nature God's timeless 'response' to human prayers, needs, and desires. But I do not believe that it is logically possible to create unharmable human beings. But since omnipotence does not include being able to do the logically impossible, God not being able to create unharmable human beings is compatible with God being omnipotent.

God has a choice to create or not to create us. On the whole it's better that we exist than that we don't (or so humans seem to think---suicide is a distinctly minority taste). But for us to exist, we have to have the physics of our world, or a physics remarkably close to the actual physics.

Unless one can show that there is a logically possible alternative physics which would produce physical beings endowed with intellects like ours and moral autonomy like ours, but which would result in significantly less natural harm, then there is no reason to think that God should have instantiated a different physics from the physics that actually obtains. Nor is it obvious that God should not have created us at all.

So if it's ok for God to create us, then it's ok for God to instantiate the physics of the actual universe. Built into that physics are quantum mechanical probabilities. Some quantum events have very low probability. Those which do, but which nevertheless then occur, and which result in human events bearing profound moral, spiritual, and religious significance, are what we can reasonably call 'miracles'. No suspension of natural law need take place, since all subatomic particles have a certain probability of being found in one place rather than another upon observation. But such low probability events by definition cannot be such as to be frequently repeated, or predictable. Miracles cannot be common. Logically cannot.

All the evil in the world comes from free will and the laws of physics. To blame God for creating free will and instantiating the laws of physics only makes sense if God logically could have done something else which would have been morally preferable. But we have no good reason to think that God could have done something else which would have been morally preferable. Think about it.

If God abolished free will, that would violate the reason God created us in the first place, which was to create beings capable of loving God. Imagine you wanted to create a being capable of loving you. If you created an automaton that couldn't help 'loving' you, you would know its 'love' would be a sham. Creating such a being would not realize your purpose of creating a being genuinely capable of loving you.

If God did not instantiate, or if God had even slightly varied the laws of physics, we wouldn't have been here at all.

If God constantly intervened to 'suspend' the laws of physics, or made nature radically unpredictable, that would also destroy free will, since a free agent must be able to predict how his or her choices will turn out with reasonable certitude. If I choose to shoot you, I must have rationally grounded expectations about how to go about doing so otherwise my power of effective choice is nullified. But if all evil choices were nullified in this way, then my power to choose good or evil would be destroyed.

If God nullified some evil choices, but not others, God would be unfair to the victims of the evil choices God does not nullify. But if God nullified all evil choices, then God would nullify human autonomy, which would nullify the point of creating autonomous humans.

If God made it only look to me that my bad choices were actually harmful, but prevented them from actually being harmful, then God would have to deceive me. My life would be an illusion.

There are in fact good reasons for creating free will and instantiating the actual laws of physics. Together, they make human life and human loving possible.

Making human life and human loving possible---are these things that all the moral evil and natural harm which accompany them render less than worthwhile? Most people think that even with all the moral evil and natural harm in the world, human life and human loving are worthwhile. Are they all mistaken?

Apparently God does not think so.

Is God mistaken? Would it have been better for this world never to have been created? Most people don't think so, though most people will perhaps experience the temptation to think so, at some time in their lives. But suppose that this world is not our only world. Suppose there is a world to come for us, in which all our suffering and sin is overcome and gives way to eternal bliss and love? Then, even more so will people think that it was better to create this world, with all its miseries, than to create no world at all.

The alternatives to creation, with its attendant pains and sufferings, are what?

No creation? No human beings? No human autonomy or freedom? No possibility of human love for God and neighbor? No human spiritual development? No physics that conforms to mathematical reason? No heavenly life for humans?

Yeah, that's what the Devil wanted. God said no to the Devil and went ahead anyway, for the sake of love, and became incarnate in the human world God made, and thus became vulnerable to those God wished to relate to in love. If those creatures wanted to kill the incarnate Word of God, God said ok, I will let them do that, because I will insist on showing that my love for my creatures cannot be stopped--even if they torture and kill my incarnate Word to them. In fact, their doing that, and my continuing to love them despite it, will only reveal my love more profoundly, and thus conquer the Devil's will to anti-love.

[Selwynn]

4. That took a long time to read! :) But it seems compatible...

..with everything that I was saying, would you not agree?

I do have one comment to make:


Is God mistaken? Would it have been better for this world never to have been created? Most people don't think so, though most people will perhaps experience the temptation to think so, at some time in their lives. But suppose that this world is not our only world. Suppose there is a world to come for us, in which all our suffering and sin is overcome and gives way to eternal bliss and love? Then, even more so will people think that it was better to create this world, with all its miseries, than to create no world at all.


I question whether or not it is even possible for God to have not created. Our language fails us sometimes when talking about these things, and we tend to create a kind of (I believe) arbitrary division between "God" and creation, where I believe creation is a natural and unavoidably outpouring from this source and ground we call God. In simplest non-technical terms, I don't think that God could have not created, and I don't think God could have created any other world than this one.

God does not "intervene" - if by that we mean a kind of coercive intervention that usurps creaturely freedom. That is one of the points the point I made in my post. However I think there is value in the Christian concept of "God With Us." God does not coercively intervene, but she does relationally participate in and of and through creation. Her relationship to her creatures does not break the bonds of love by subverting the freedom of personal agents - that would go against God's very character. But her participatory presence is there just the same - we might metaphorically think about it as a luring, loving presence of influence without coercion.

What we much say and say strongly is that this notion of an all "powerful" coercively controlling God is unjustifiable and logically troubling at all levels. However, that does not mean we must reject the personal experiences of "God with us" even if she does not coercively control all aspects of our unknown future, she promises two walk with us through that unknown, and that is an encouraging thought.

I assume your additions were meant to be complimentary to what I had written. However, if you felt that what have said somehow stands in contradiction to your thoughts, I'd encourage you to read again. :)

Take care!
Sel

[Stunster]

5. Sorry, philosophical theology does not lend itself to soundbites

without misunderstanding being liable to result.

These are terribly complex, difficult issues for human beings to get a handle on. But so is Einstein's conception of space and time. Doesn't mean it's not worth delving into, and formulating, even in terribly complex, difficult mathematical language. Nor does it mean that Einstein's conception must be mistaken.

A lot of people spout off on the Bible, without having the slightest acquaintance with modern Biblical scholarship. The latter is complex, difficult stuff, too.

I agree with you to a large extent regarding how one is to think about whether God had a choice about creating the world. Language fails.

One of the reasons I think it fails is because God is not in time. There was therefore no time from God's point of view, when God had not yet created the world. From God's timeless point of view, spacetime (timelessly) exists. Huw Price has written some suggestive stuff about this from the point of view of a physicist, in a non-theological context. http://www.usyd.edu.au/time/price/TAAP.html

In other words, God's eternal will is that the world exist. God timelessly wills it so. It's not as if one day, God woke up, and said "Hey, I think I'll create a universe today!" Augustine understood this 15 centuries ago.

God's will to be incarnate in the world God wills to exist is also timeless, eternal.

But I still say that God's creation of the universe was a free act. Nothing compelled God to do it, against God's will. God's will and God's being are not two different things. God's being = God's will.
God's will is that there be this world, etc. The timeless being of God makes it so.

In other words, a free timeless act, to a being in time, looks very like a necessary act--an act to which there is no alternative. But in a sense this is an illusion due to temporal perspective.

[Stunster]

3. I also have this post

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=214x4004