Here is a question I have been struggling with myself literally for years now. Why would a loving merciful God allow so much suffering in the world?
This question is obviously directed at the people on these boards who believe in God. But non-believers are welcome to this discussion too, naturally.
The usual explanation I hear is what I think of as “The Argument From Cthulhu”; that God is so utterly beyond us, so alien that to him what looks like evil may be good, so we can’t judge him.
Of course, they gloss over the fact that such a claim negates pretty much every other claim they make about God, including him being benevolent; if he’s unknowable and incomprehensible to the extent you can’t judge him as evil, then you can’t call him good either. They also ignore the practical problem that if his actions are indistinguishable from evil to us, why should we care if they are “good” in some supposed higher sense? And they ignore the question of why anyone should follow such a supposedly incomprehensible entity.
It’s a very famous problem, and many “solutions” to the problem of evil have been put forward (see Problem of Evil).
I think the consensus among philosophers is that they don’t work and no-one’s found a particularly robust and not ad-hoc way to reconcile omnimax god and suffering. So, if you find your faith is being tested by this contradiction, it should be.
Raised religious, no connection to it now. The standard “go away kid you’re bothering me” answer the rabbis would tell me, is that someone who’s supposed to be punished in the next world with time in hell (Gehenom), can have their ‘sentence’ reduced by suffering some in this world. When I pressed on what about people who are do-gooders & save lives (EMTs, doctors) or innocent kids, the answer would then be “God works in mysterious ways, and ordinary human beings aren’t on the level capable of understanding His actions”.
The answers are as unsatisfying to hear in person as they are to read. For what it’s worth, my father who survived the Holocaust in concentration camps, firmly believed in God, Heaven, and the religious teachings - he was looking forward to dying since his wife (my Mom) preceded him by 3 years and couldn’t wait to be with her (and of course wouldn’t kill himself since that was a sin). He was sure that his suffering at the Nazis’ hands ‘pre-approved’ his entry, and he’d see his murdered parents & sister there too.
Not religious but went to Catholic school. Standard answer was that God allowed men free will (because otherwise, what’s the point?) and some people choose to be dicks.
The answer I’ve had since I was a little kid was pretty much what Darth Panda said. There is no free will unless there are options - we had the option to end TB many years ago, we didn’t, now we have resistant strains oh yeah!
Plus, many things which many people see as “bad” aren’t bad per se, for example death: there’s kinds of death I wouldn’t wish on my worse enemy, but death per se isn’t bad any more than gravity or light are bad. It’s as much of a natural part of life as birth.
Of course, that immediately falls flat in the face of “natural evil”; there’s a great deal of suffering in the world that has nothing to do with “free will”. It also makes little sense when it comes to evil inflicted on people against their will; apparently, God only cares about the “free will” of evil people, and good people just have to suck up the abuse.
It is only a problem for people who need an interventionist Divine Author. Sometimes “benevolence” may be Benthamite in application, where the greatest good for the greatest number means that sometimes the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.
Never was a problem to me: many of those “natural evils” (evil requires a will, no such thing as natural evil) are a problem with our perception, not with the world; broken bones or illnesses are things we have the tools to deal with (the tools keep getting better), and as for “the will of the good people doesn’t matter woe is us”, the good people have ways to fight back.
Could God microwave a burrito for so long that even he couldn’t eat it?
The notion that I’ve come down to is that the answer is yes - that when God created humanity he also willed himself out of omnipotence in order to give it all true meaning. It’s completely impossible to read the Old Testament without getting the idea that God is learning how to be God. He makes mistakes, he argues with his chosen people, he even makes a few attempts at do-overs.
Alan Dershowitz’s The Genesis of Justice gives a really good overview of the whole thing, I think.
Jerry Landers: If you’re God, how can You permit all the suffering that goes on in the world?
God: I don’t permit the suffering - you do.
“Natural evil” isn’t my term, thus the quotes. As for dealing with them; our tools are still limited, and for most our history we had almost none and no amount of “will” on the part of the victims would have changed that. No amount of effort on the part of someone a thousand years ago would result in a cancer cure.
And quite often no, the good people can’t fight back successfully. Telling someone strapped to a table and being tortured that it’s his “free will” to be tortured is disgusting.
Out of curiosity, why begin by assuming omnipotence that later got willed away? If you’re comfortable with an Old Testament narrative where an argumentative God makes mistakes while learning how to get the job done, why not take that as the starting point instead of postulating something extra?
OK, I don’t believe but here’s a shot at it:
The soul is infinite, just the body is finite. Nothing can hurt the soul. Think of earth as a big video game. When we’re playing Call Of Duty, our video game bodies suffer, but *we *do not. The soul is like that. Nothing that happens here really injures the *real *you.
Issues I have with this: it seems to then allow just about any type of behavior, since in the long run, nothing matters.
As I see it; If God is all knowing, and knew ahead of time that Satan would be evil,and rebel, he let him survive, and destroy his creation known as humans, who he also should have known would not obey him, then a few centuries later he regretted creating Man, so destroyed (even little babies and innocent children) but saved a few, doesn’t sound like a loving being to me. Free will is not, if one says to their child You can go to a movie or anyhting else you want to do, but if you don’t do as I wish then I will kill you, doesn’t make sense to me!
Also known as the “Why are you hitting yourself” defense, it makes the claim that God isn’t responsible for his own creations while also claiming that he controls everything from atoms to universes.
nm
Entire libraries have been written about this question, with little to show for it.
The most common response is that evil deeds have a good outcome in the long run. Christianity often holds up the story of Joseph as an example of how this works. Christianity also emphasizes that our suffering is temporary and ephemeral, and will be followed by rewards in this life or the next. Why God requires bad things to happen before we arrive at the good things receives much less attention. Hence, “Faith” is the idea that we trust God to make the right decisions, even if those decisions look crappy to us mere mortals.
The second most common answer is that God has granted us the ability to make our own decisions and that our free will is a precious gift, even though some people misuse it. I don’t have much faith in this one. It explains that people are permitted to be evil, but doesn’t explain why. Nor does it address suffering apart from that inflicted by human choice (disease, famine, weather, etc).
Other religions argue that the basic assumption is wrong: Because evil and suffering exist, God is not all-powerful or not merciful (at least, in any way we puny mortals can understand). Various Gnostic interpretations hold that God is distant, disinterested, and incomprehensible to us. In this interpretation, the world is inherently flawed and evil and we must work our way through it before we can eventually be united with the distant God.
Interestingly, Buddhism claims that the only reason we suffer is because of how we cognitively view the world. Life sucks, and everybody knows it, so we have to change ourselves so that we accept our condition as it is and cease to desire a better condition. Once we free ourselves of desire and all that comes with it, we will be enlightened and permitted to graduate to Nirvana.
If I had to sum it up in a single conclusion, I would say that people have fought over this for millenia and we still have no clue.
There’s a bit in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Evil article that suggests, as a criticism to one of the more modern defences, that the dystheist position is not implausible. The article is a wee bit technical but covers a lot of ground, and the overwhelming impression I get is that the author holds the same essential position that Mijin does - that the defences are not effective.
There’s this Yiddish proverb that I frigging love: If god lived on earth, all of his windows would be broken.
My take on it is we are God’s children and are all ‘gods’ with powers that can be used for good and seemingly evil. We are placed in a area where our powers are moderated but still work. For instance a parent tells their child they will never amount to anything, and the child does not, the parent had used a god ability to curse their child. All evil comes from us misusing and not using out god powers correctly, every disease, every disability every evil is from one of God’s children not realizing what they are doing.
What is needed to stop this progression of unintended evil is the process of self awareness, just like a human being needs to become self aware, we also need this self awareness on a godly level, it is to that point that we realize that we are gods that we start the healing process. Apparently some when realizing who they are go off and try to do things their way which is a entirely different aspect but it boils down to the same thing, it is only those who they can deceive into doing evil unintentionally do they get their power from. So evil has no actual power in our world but can only deceive those who care into seemingly evil acts.
Why does God allow this system? My take is we are made in the image of God, we are actually God’s natural offspring and what happens naturally when God (male) and God (female) get together (which ‘both’ of those ‘gods’ is fully one God, along with all the offspring - God is One). Could God change this, yes i’m sure, but perhaps there is something about the natural process of Love that is superior to changing us into no longer made in the image of God.