November 4, 2007, 10:25 pm
Suffering, Evil and the Existence of God
In Book 10 of Milton's "Paradise Lost," Adam asks the question so many
of his descendants have asked: why should the lives of billions be
blighted because of a sin he, not they, committed? ("Ah, why should all
mankind / For one man's fault... be condemned?") He answers himself
immediately: "But from me what can proceed, / But all corrupt, both Mind
and Will depraved?" Adam's Original Sin is like an inherited virus.
Although those who are born with it are technically innocent of the
crime - they did not eat of the forbidden tree - its effects rage in
their blood and disorder their actions.
God, of course, could have restored them to spiritual health, but
instead, Paul tells us in Romans, he "gave them over" to their
"reprobate minds" and to the urging of their depraved wills. Because
they are naturally "filled with all unrighteousness," unrighteous deeds
are what they will perform: "fornication, wickedness, covetousness,
maliciousness . . . envy, murder . . . deceit, malignity." "There is
none righteous," Paul declares, "no, not one."
It follows, then (at least from these assumptions), that the presence of
evil in the world cannot be traced back to God, who opened up the
possibility of its emergence by granting his creatures free will but is
not responsible for what they, in the person of their progenitor Adam,
freely chose to do.
What Milton and Paul offer (not as collaborators of course, but as
participants in the same tradition) is a solution to the central problem
of theodicy - the existence of suffering and evil in a world presided
over by an all powerful and benevolent deity.
The occurrence of catastrophes natural (hurricanes, droughts, disease)
and unnatural (the Holocaust ) always revives the problem and provokes
anguished discussion of it. The conviction, held by some, that the
problem is intractable leads to the conclusion that there is no God, a
conclusion reached gleefully by the authors of books like "The God
Delusion," "God Is Not Great" and "The End of Faith." (See discussion
here, here and here.)
Now two new books (to be published in the coming months) renew the
debate. Their authors come from opposite directions - one from theism to
agnosticism, the other from atheism to theism - but they meet, or rather
cross paths, on the subject of suffering and evil.
Bart D. Ehrman is a professor of religious studies and his book is
titled "God's Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important
Question - Why We Suffer." A graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary,
Ehrman trained to be a scholar of New Testament Studies and a minister.
Born-again as a teenager, devoted to the scriptures (he memorized entire
books of the New Testament), strenuously devout, he nevertheless lost
his faith because, he reports, "I could no longer reconcile the claims
of faith with the fact of life . . . I came to the point where I simply
could not believe that there is a good and kindly disposed Ruler who is
in charge." "The problem of suffering," he recalls, "became for me the
problem of faith."
Much of the book is taken up with Ehrman's examination of biblical
passages that once gave him solace, but that now deliver only
unanswerable questions: "Given [the] theology of selection - that God
had chosen the people of Israel to be in a special relationship with him
- what were Ancient Israelite thinkers to suppose when things did not go
as planned or expected? . . . . How were they to explain the fact that
the people of God suffered from famine, drought, and pestilence?"
Ehrman knows and surveys the standard answers to these questions - God
is angry at a sinful, disobedient people; suffering is redemptive, as
Christ demonstrated on the cross; evil and suffering exist so that God
can make good out of them; suffering induces humility and is an antidote
to pride; suffering is a test of faith - but he finds them unpersuasive
and as horrible in their way as the events they fail to explain: "If God
tortures, maims and murders people just to see how they will react - to
see if they will not blame him, when in fact he is to blame - then this
does not seem to me to be a God worthy of worship."
And as for the argument (derived from God's speech out of the whirlwind
in the Book of Job) that God exists on a level far beyond the
comprehension of those who complain about his ways, "Doesn't this view
mean that God can maim, torment, and murder at will and not be held
accountable? . . . . Does might make right?"
These questions are as old as Epicurus, who gave them canonical form:
"Is God willing to prevent evil but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he
able but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and
willing? Whence, then, evil."
Many books of theology and philosophy have been written in response to
Epicurus's conundrums, but Ehrman's isn't one of them. What impels him
is not the fascination of intellectual puzzles, but the anguish produced
by what he sees when he opens his eyes. "If he could do miracles for his
people throughout the Bible, where is he today when your son is killed
in a car accident, or your husband gets multiple sclerosis? . . . I just
don't see anything redemptive when Ethiopian babies die of
malnutrition."
The horror of the pain and suffering he instances leads Ehrman to be
scornful of those who respond to it with cool abstract analyses: "What I
find morally repugnant about such books is that they are so far removed
from the actual pain and suffering that takes place in our world."
He might have been talking about Antony Flew's "There Is a God: How the
World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind." Flew, a noted
professor of philosophy, announced in 2004 that after decades of writing
essays and books from the vantage point of atheism, he now believes in
God. "Changed his mind" is not a casual formulation. Flew wouldn't call
what has happened to him a conversion, for that would suggest something
unavailable to analysis. His journey, he tells us, is best viewed as "a
pilgrimage of reason," an extension of his life-long habit of "following
the argument no matter where it leads."
Where it led when he was a schoolboy was to the same place Ehrman
arrived at after many years of devout Christian practice: "I was
regularly arguing with fellow sixth formers that the idea of a God who
is both omnipotent and perfectly good is incompatible with the manifest
evils and imperfections of the world." For much of his philosophical
career, Flew continued the argument in debates with a distinguished list
of philosophers, scientists, theologians and historians. And then,
gradually and to his own great surprise, he found that his decades-long
"exploration of the Divine ha[d] after all these years turned from
denial to discovery."
What exactly did he discover? That by interrogating atheism with the
same rigor he had directed at theism, he could begin to shake the
foundations of that dogmatism. He poses to his former fellow atheists
the following question: "What would have to occur or have occurred to
constitute for you a reason to at least consider the existence of a
superior Mind." He knows that a cornerstone of the atheist creed is an
argument that he himself made many times - the sufficiency of the
materialist natural world as an explanation of how things work. "I
pointed out," he recalls, that "even the most complex entities in the
universe - human beings - are the products of unconscious physical and
mechanical forces."
But it is precisely the word "unconscious" that, in the end, sends Flew
in another direction. How, he asks, do merely physical and mechanical
forces - forces without mind, without consciousness - give rise to the
world of purposes, thoughts and moral projects? "How can a universe of
mindless matter produce beings with intrinsic ends [and]
self-replication capabilities?" In short (this is the title of a
chapter), "How Did Life Go Live?"
Flew does not deny the explanatory power of materialist thought when the
question is how are we to understand the physical causes of this or that
event or effect. He's is just contending that what is explained by
materialist thought - the intricate workings of nature - itself demands
an explanation, and materialist thought cannot supply it. Scientists, he
says, "are dealing with the interaction of chemicals, whereas our
questions have to do with how something can be intrinsically
purpose-driven and how matter can be managed by symbol processing?"
These queries, Flew insists, exist on entirely different levels and the
knowledge gained from the first can not be used to illuminate the
second.
In an appendix to the book, Abraham Varghese makes Flew's point with the
aid of an everyday example: "To suggest that the computer 'understands'
what it is doing is like saying that a power line can meditate on the
question of free will and determinism or that the chemicals in a test
tube can apply the principle of non-contradiction in solving a problem,
or that a DVD player understands and enjoys the music it plays."
How did purposive behavior of the kind we engage in all the time -
understanding, meditating, enjoying - ever emerge from electrons and
chemical elements?
The usual origin-of-life theories, Flew observes, are caught in an
infinite regress that can only be stopped by an arbitrary statement of
the kind he himself used to make: " . . . our knowledge of the universe
must stop with the big bang, which is to be seen as the ultimate fact."
Or, "The laws of physics are 'lawless laws' that arise from the void -
end of discussion." He is now persuaded that such pronouncements beg the
crucial question - why is there something rather than nothing? - a
question to which he replies with the very proposition he argued against
for most of his life: "The only satisfactory explanation for the origin
of such 'end-directed, self-replicating' life as we see on earth is an
infinitely intelligent Mind."
Will Ehrman be moved to reconsider his present position and reconvert if
he reads Flew's book? Not likely, because Flew remains throughout in the
intellectual posture Ehrman finds so arid. Flew assures his readers that
he "has had no connection with any of the revealed religions," and no
"personal experience of God or any experience that may be called
supernatural or religious." Nor does he tells us in this book of any
experience of the pain and suffering that haunts Ehrman's every
sentence.
Where Ehrman begins and ends with the problem of evil, Flew only says
that it is a question that "must be faced," but he is not going to face
it in this book because he has been concerned with the prior "question
of God's existence." Answering that question affirmatively leaves the
other still open (one could always sever the Godly attributes of power
and benevolence, and argue that the absence of the second does not tell
against the reality of the first).
Flew is for the moment satisfied with the intellectual progress he has
been able to make. Ehrman is satisfied with nothing, and the passion and
indignation he feels at the manifest inequities of the world are not
diminished in the slightest when he writes his last word.
Is there a conclusion to be drawn from these two books, at once so
similar in their concerns and so different in their ways of addressing
them? Does one or the other persuade?
Perhaps an individual reader of either will have his or her mind
changed, but their chief value is that together they testify to the
continuing vitality and significance of their shared subject. Both are
serious inquiries into matters that have been discussed and debated by
sincere and learned persons for many centuries. The project is an old
one, but these authors pursue it with an energy and goodwill that invite
further conversation with sympathetic and unsympathetic readers alike.
In short, these books neither trivialize their subject nor demonize
those who have a different view of it, which is more than can be said
for the efforts of those fashionable atheist writers whose major form of
argument would seem to be ridicule.
(In an article published Sunday - November 4 - in the New York Times
Magazine, Mark Oppenheimer more than suggests that Flew, now in his
80's, did not write the book that bears his name, but allowed Roy
Varghese (listed as co-editor) to compile it from the philosopher's
previous writings and some extended conversations. Whatever the truth is
about the authorship of the book, the relation of its argument and
trajectory to the argument and trajectory of Ehrman's book stands.)
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Received on Mon Nov 5 09:56:29 2007
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