Theodicy, intervention and resilience
Gamma Gamaliel
Shipmate
in Purgatory
Yes, we've been here before.
Why does God allow suffering?
Why doesn't he intervene?
Why apparent 'words of knowledge' about minor 'First World problems' and putative 'signs and wonders' in some circles while Gaza burns or someone starves unnoticed and unknown?
I'm starting this thread in response to @KarlLB's question/comment about the 'shitty answer' Job is said to have received in the book that bears his name.
Scritch, scratch, scratch ...
And wondering what possible answer would satisfy - other than, 'Oh, alright then, I'll prevent each and every potential opportunity for suffering from now on ...'
My wife died at the age of 56.
Does that mean I should abandon faith because I'd rather she hadn't?
What about people who never married or found partners in the first place? Or whose lost theirs at a younger age than I did? Or who have debilitating diseases or health conditions or ...
It seems we could go on and on.
The 'scandal of particularity.' The Incarnation happened in first century Palestine? Why not 14th century Polynesia or 3rd century Japan?
Lazarus was raised from the dead?
Why not the whole cemetery?
What was the point? He only had to die again at some stage?
I'm thinking aloud - thinking allowed - and hopefully whilst not diminishing the seriousness and sincerity of KarlLB's question, am wondering what questions I need to address to myself?
What can I do to help alleviate suffering?
How can I take forward my late wife's legacy of common sense, grace and long-suffering into the way I interact with people and treat them with the kindness and equanimity she did?
I'm sure God is big enough to handle the big questions. 'You've got some explaining to do!'
But it seems to me that whilst the questions may be different to those God is represented as making to Job, there will always be questions asked of us. That's often how Christ appears to have answered enquirers in the Gospel accounts, by asking a question in return.
That doesn't solve the problem, of course. I'm not going to resolve the mystery of the universe on the back of an envelope. But there are questions for me to answer. 'When did I see you sick or in prison ...?'
Why does God allow suffering?
Why doesn't he intervene?
Why apparent 'words of knowledge' about minor 'First World problems' and putative 'signs and wonders' in some circles while Gaza burns or someone starves unnoticed and unknown?
I'm starting this thread in response to @KarlLB's question/comment about the 'shitty answer' Job is said to have received in the book that bears his name.
Scritch, scratch, scratch ...
And wondering what possible answer would satisfy - other than, 'Oh, alright then, I'll prevent each and every potential opportunity for suffering from now on ...'
My wife died at the age of 56.
Does that mean I should abandon faith because I'd rather she hadn't?
What about people who never married or found partners in the first place? Or whose lost theirs at a younger age than I did? Or who have debilitating diseases or health conditions or ...
It seems we could go on and on.
The 'scandal of particularity.' The Incarnation happened in first century Palestine? Why not 14th century Polynesia or 3rd century Japan?
Lazarus was raised from the dead?
Why not the whole cemetery?
What was the point? He only had to die again at some stage?
I'm thinking aloud - thinking allowed - and hopefully whilst not diminishing the seriousness and sincerity of KarlLB's question, am wondering what questions I need to address to myself?
What can I do to help alleviate suffering?
How can I take forward my late wife's legacy of common sense, grace and long-suffering into the way I interact with people and treat them with the kindness and equanimity she did?
I'm sure God is big enough to handle the big questions. 'You've got some explaining to do!'
But it seems to me that whilst the questions may be different to those God is represented as making to Job, there will always be questions asked of us. That's often how Christ appears to have answered enquirers in the Gospel accounts, by asking a question in return.
That doesn't solve the problem, of course. I'm not going to resolve the mystery of the universe on the back of an envelope. But there are questions for me to answer. 'When did I see you sick or in prison ...?'
Comments
And the scandal of particularity becomes infinitely absurd in infinite nature.
However much I pray about it, children in Gaza and elsewhere are dying of starvation. Those who are preventing aid from reaching them must take full responsibility - person by person, and with an extra burden of responsibility on those giving orders others must obey.
If God stopped us from doing what was harmful to others, we could absolve ourselves of any responsibility. It seems that God wants us to choose not to do it, to make up our own minds. Therefore God surely cannot intervene to stop us.
God will always help us to bring some good out from every situation though.
Whilst my familiar refrain is that everyone is entitled to believe whatever they like, I'd just say that the acts of the deity as you've explained it are functionally identical to there being no deity.
God doesn’t watch from a distance, but suffers alongside us - God accepts that it is costly to give us the freedom we need to make our own decisions.
God lets us keep making excusing for His absent absence.
What, for our free will?
A modern-western-faith understanding of God's omnipotence seems typically to be based on a scientific/spiritual conception, of God being all powerful in a scientific sense in the same way as He is all powerful in a spiritual sense, without examining too closely what that means in detail or in practice.
As well examining how we today understand God's omnipotence, it also seems worth examining how that understanding has changed over the last 2000 years.
The questions pour forth.
A few of the many - word for word:
Always: When? Under what circumstances?
Help whom: The sufferers, the affected observers, the distanced and "safe" observers, the bystanders, the children of the sufferers to the 6th and 7th generation, or children of those imposing suffering, the dominant caste?
Us: precisely whom?
Some: how much and of what quality?
Good: good for whom and by what standard?
Situation: What situations count as those from which God will help "us" bring forth some good?
The weak problem is to ask why God doesn't intervene more often or more obviously to make this universe a bit better.
I think that as long as I think the strong problem is ok - and I have two children which would be unethical if I thought it wasn't - I can live with the weak problem. It means I can't pay much attention to reports of the miraculous or providential intervention as evidence of God, but that's not why I believe anyway.
I incline to think that miracles like the resurrection are not God changing this creation, but God preparing a new creation. That is good news in the long run, but we're still living in this one although with hope we (try to) live as if in the new.
I think that's roughly where I am, with the proviso I'm far from sure there's a God at all (which is another solution to the problem of course). The best solution I can come up with to the weak problem is that intervention would make it less real and more a holodeck with the safeties all on. Which is fine, but isn't real.
I want miracles that can't be explained (and which objectively and clearly only benefit believers), I want big firey letters seen on planets when we turn our telescopes to them, I want an explanation for things that makes things clearer rather than requiring a prerequisite belief in a bunch of unlikely things.
If this is really the best that a deity can do, and we are all supposed to sift through it to come up with the "right answer", then the deity is a bit pathetic.
Which would appear to be a contradiction, hence easier to disbelieve in deities.
A good starting point in this area can be found in the book The Problem of Evil and the Problem of God by the late D Z Phillips
OUR free will.
Creation is made of matter. Matter decays. Bodies are machines - entropy is built in. A geologically dynamic planet seems to be required for life to begin. Dynamic geology = eathquakes and weather events.
We seem to be tied to an anthropocentric view of creation ..... maybe that is part of the problem - it certainly is for the rest of the natural world.
I'm kind of with Leibniz that we live in the best of all possible worlds ...... and the rest is up to us.
Yes, that makes sense to me. If God intervened all the time, it would be a magical universe. If God intervened occasionally, that seems unfair. If God doesn't intervene, good night Vienna.
Sure. My wife died of a cancer that wasn't life-style related in the slightest.
How do I explain that? I don't know if I need to. Why shouldn't any of us die from things that aren't anything to do with the way we live? I'm not saying I have the answer/s of course.
I didn't want my wife to die and my daughters to lose their Mum but she did. We have to deal with it.
Christ's response to the question about the Galilean's killed in the rebellion or the 18 people crushed by the fall of the tower of Siloam raises some interesting issues:
https://biblehub.com/luke/13-3.htm
@KoF - fiery writing appearing on distant planets. Sure, we'd all like that. Rather than the lack of such apparently convincing proofs, it could be argued the other way. The fact that people believe despite the lack of flashing lights and writing on the wall may indicate not the feebleness of a deity but their power. After all, if someone's going to try to base their life on something without some wham-bam sign from heaven it may indicate the power of that belief. It doesn't 'prove' it of course - but as I've often cited on these boards, a wise RC priest once said that the opposite of faith isn't doubt but certainty.
WHAT about it? Is it something we've got that HE hasn't? Please point to it. Not HIS, OURS. How does it justify HIM being a useless, arbitrary, judgemental bastard without an unnatural trace?
Why should they benefit only believers?
That only makes sense if God’s primary purpose in doing them is to prove to us that he exists. But what if that’s not the reason he does them? What if he flat out refuses to do miracles for that purpose, as Christ refused? (Matt 8:12).
My own experience with miracles is that they don’t affect human belief in the long term. Those who wish to talk themselves out of believing can always find another explanation. And if I’ve seen this, how much more God?
I think it’s a mistake to assume that God is so eager to prove himself that he will adopt the methods we propose for him—and then rail at him because he doesn’t.
He might not be thinking on those lines at all.
I'm not proposing these things. These are literally things that various believers claim happen. But it is so unclear and unpredictable and unfalsifiable that it is impossible to see any difference between believer/unbeliever and believer/believer-in-other-religion
Also, I don't want to talk myself out of believing, I just don't believe. And see no reason to accept any of the claims the thousands of different kinds of belief in the various deities.
Believe whatever you like, but don't bring me into it.
I'm not sure I follow your reasoning. Are you saying that because you consider the creation of the universe to be an ethical choice, that your progenation of two children is also ethical (or, at least, not unethical)?
I disagree, because with nothing you get nothing - so no love, joy or beauty either. Labour is painful, but people still choose to have children.
No pain, no...
If that's directed to me, nobody is bringing you into it. You do as you like. I thought we were having a discussion on this thread, and responded accordingly.
And I declared that the dead,
who had already died,
are happier than the living,
who are still alive.
But better than both
is the one who has never been born,
who has not seen the evil
that is done under the sun.
The only people for whom this is true are the ones already living. One of the most comforting thoughts one can have is that being dead will be exactly like it was before one was born. How was that experience (pre-life, or pre-conception for those who need to go that far)? Easy right? The act and/or mechanism of dying remains terrifying, but not the aftermath.
It would make a load of difference if this was palpable in literally any way.
Quite, but that’s why I don’t think it is straight forward. The ethical solution to the strong problem of suffering is to do nothing under what ethical framework - you can argue it either way ?
On a crude level some forms of hyper-Reformed Christianity has God painted into a corner such that he is 'unable' to forgive or to act unless and until certain conditions are met. I won't go further with that at the risk of caricature.
FWIW I think much talk of what God 'can' and apparently 'cannot' or 'will not' do rather self-defeating. Like speculating as to whether God can create a rock too heavy for him to lift.
That doesn't mean I am not interested in the sorts of problems posed on this and similar threads.
But in some kind of inchoate way I sense that they are really missing the point. I'll probably be accused of taking refuge in Mystery but it strikes me that any talk of God is going to end up there. How couldn't be otherwise? This isn't a physics lesson.
(ETA that I'm sorry for the loss of your wife.)
Thanks for your condolences. I do appreciate that.
Where is this information found?
This idea of morality as a thing that somehow exist of itself, apart from God, and in fact cages God--that is certainly a very odd idea. If it were true, we should have to ask where it came from, and who set it up. If you say "God," then you are back to it flowing from his own nature again; and if you say "somebody else," then we have another deity to search after, don't we? Again, if you say "it was always existent," then you will have great difficulty showing that something is self-existent and yet is not an outflowing of the self-existent God's nature. There are logical traps all over the place.
I don't think they'd see 'morality' as a 'thing' that exists in and of itself - irrespective of whether there is can God or not - but as the product of various social exchanges and forces. A range of social and evolutionary imperatives that make collaborative and morally acceptable actions vital for survival.
But I may have misunderstood you.
There are a number of people here who seem to regard God as inconsistent, capricious and something of a 'bastard' based on their understanding of certain texts and how they've heard them presented. No matter how many times you or I or anyone else might say, 'Weighing up the sum total of all the texts we can demonstrate that God is all-loving and always consistent', there'll be an objection.
'What about this verse? What about that one?'
But you know that already.
The traditional theistic answer (in those traditions that do philosophy) is that created goodness is a reflection of God's nature. In traditions influenced by Plato it's an actual participation in God's nature; in others it's an imitation. As Lamb Chopped has already said.
The idea that morality is no more than a set of rules commanded by God goes back no further than the late Middle Ages / early Modern period - not coincidentally I suspect like the divine right of kings.
As for where that information is found, the answer is a lot of philosophers and theologians trying to think logically through what goodness entails.
Humans can manipulate ants and ant colonies and make them do things that they might not ordinarily do. It would be weird to think that humans had the ability to act as humans but were constrained by behaviours that were ant-like when interacting with ants.
Well that must be the case with God and the whole of His infinite creation, because He does it as if He doesn't.
Given "The strong problem is to ask, given the choice between creating this universe and creating nothing, whether creating nothing was the ethical choice."
As touched on in other posts, I'd say the underlying question is whether God Himself abides by an ethical framework. Personally, I think not. For example, consider whether God can experience an ethical dilemma - eg the trolley problem.
As Lamb Chopped says, He acts according to His nature.
Or design.