In "Midwinter," we start with a question from a religious teacher, "Could you love God in a world without death?" This question belongs to a school of reasoning in Christianity called theodicy, or the attempt to explain how evil can exist in a world governed by a God who is both all-loving and all-powerful. This question from the teacher is kind of a weak offering in this school. It's akin to the "if there were no evil, we wouldn't appreciate good" line of argument. A better argument for those who try to reconcile God and suffering is to appeal to free will, stating that God did not want moral slaves, because He wanted creatures capable of loving Him and obeying Him freely. Such freedom HAS to allow evil to exist, Christians argue, but the ability to love freely also means the ability to choose not to love. If nobody can hurt other people, then love is meaningless. There are downsides, like ALL THE SUFFERING EVER IN HUMAN HISTORY, but freely given love from an agent with free will is enough of a good that it outweighs all the bad that exists. (I'm intentionally kind of mangling the argument there, but even expressed well, it's not much more convincing, at least to me.)
I've always thought this made God seem like kind of a negligent parent. As human parents, we also want to allow our kids to grow up to make their own decisions, but we also understand we can't let them knock the bloody hell out of other kids "or else they will never really be free." I don't understand why free will has to be an absolute, such that God really could not occasionally stop talking and having wine with the other deities long enough to come back to the playground and break up a fight or two. Why can't God have the same sense a human parent does? Why do we have to allow for the fullness of human depravity in order for love to mean anything?
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| As Shakespeare put it, "There was never yet philosopher that could endure the toothache patiently." No matter how strong your philosophical argument for why suffering is possible with a loving God who has the ability to end it, it will never satisfy the existential feeling of suffering. Even those who don't directly experience suffering on this scale ought to have enough empathy to realize the universe doesn't make sense. |
"Midwinter" works as a fictional short argument against theodicy. The children are unable to answer the question their teacher poses to them. They are thinking of their uncles, away in Korea in "the winter after Inchon." That is to say, in the winter of 1950, the winter that would make David Halberstam call his brilliant history of the Korean war The Coldest Winter. Their uncles are carrying things: "a bazooka, canned peas, pictures of us." (And here, the callback to "The Things They Carried" was almost so hammy it broke the spell, but not quite.) Those "pictures of us" bring us an ironic parallelism. The uncles are away in a war that makes no sense, a war that challenges theodicy. But they attempt to hold onto their beliefs by thinking of their loved ones back home. Meanwhile, those loved ones back home are having the very beliefs the uncles need to hold onto challenged by thinking of what the uncles are enduring.
In spite of attempts to skirt around the question, such as the response of one class clown, "probably for half an hour," there is no getting around the fact that there just isn't a good answer to it. The students can feel this more than they can reason it out. That's the real problem with theodicy arguments, I think--they might have some power in an abstract sense, but they really do nothing to assuage the sense one gets while enduring suffering that this just isn't right. The story ends with the students wondering why nobody has fixed the squeaking heating system, which reminds them all of hamsters going around on endless wheels. We end with a mini-allegory of man and God:
Oil it! We said under our breath. Who knows why it never happened--who skipped a day on the task chart, who was distracted, why that small trapped creature is still advancing, there in the darkest month, in the cage of a circular journey.
God is the negligent maintenance man, and all humanity is the hamster stuck on the wheel, uselessly going around in the middle of bleakest winter.
I never understood what suffering had to do with God. Fundamentally, if the question's not about justice, but about order, comprehensible order, (that's what people really mean: X doesn't make sense, which presupposes not justice -- a concept usually oriented towards self-pity -- a notion of order that does not map onto reality), who's to say we get it, and who's to say that a divinity would have much interest once everything's set in motion: providing an order is justice enough, even if we don't get it.
ReplyDeleteThat's interesting, to think that all we can require of a maker is order. We might lose every game, but if the rules are there, then we can't blame the creator of the game.
DeleteThis is where logic and existential reality diverge. If I don't enjoy playing the game I'm made to play, then I still question the rightness of the game designer, even if the rules are comprehensible and consistent. We are humans who feel things, and the nature of the universe is such that we are awfully unhappy. Suffering is so common that it's the truth from which Buddhism begins. It's hard for me to see a universe, even a lawful and ordered one, in which we develop the ability to feel and are loaded down with things that make us feel unhappy, and not somehow feel that whoever put us here did wrong by us.
I think all I mean is that, if, as believers, we consider some instance of suffering unjust, we suppose that there must be rhyme and reason, otherwise what's to complain about? There should be some predictability, one might say, about reward and punishment: that speaks to a kind of order. And to lament that things don't work as they ought, is to doubt the order. In your example, you demand that there be some kind of justice to the circumstance: and I would argue that's an appeal for order that you might understand because the implication is that the alternative implies you not receiving your just reward (happiness or whatever). So that's a demand for order in the sense I mean it, which I think is more basic than justice.
ReplyDeleteReally nice, Jake. The best explanation I ever got - assuming the triple-O personal God to begin with - is that evil is the price of free will. But it's all dancing on the head of a pin.
ReplyDeleteI just can't buy the idea that evil is the price of free will. Like, it's God. Surely he's able to come up with some system that allows both? Or, if not that, then why does free will have to be so absolute? With humans, we let our kids do their thing, but if they get out of hand, we intervene. This lets them develop independence but also not kill each other while they're doing it. Why can't God cut off free will at some point, like the point when children are being sold into sex slavery or genocide is about to happen?
DeleteYou're talking about a God who killed 11 people and tortured a man for months purely to win a bet; and then, when it was over and he gave the guy a better wife and kids and more cattle and riches and called it even, and the guy still gave him lip, said, "Hey, I'm God, you wanna do this running the universe thing and see how well you do? Shut up and let me work, 'cause you have no idea of all that's going down."
DeleteAnd that's where all this stuff inevitably ends up: we can't know the will of God, but he knows best.
(in case you haven't noticed, I'm not arguing with you)
It doesn't explain theodicy, but it maybe does explain why we invented an afterlife where justice is finally meted out. Because otherwise, life would be too unfair to bear.
There have been arguments over the centuries about the "best of all possible worlds" and the necessity of darkness to know light, and goodness growing out of evil. Steven Pinker insists we're living in the least violent time ever. He's probably right. But it sure doesn't seem like it sometimes.
Thanks, Jake, as always.
ReplyDeleteI have several times in the last few weeks said to my wife that I am now coming to accept that I can at one and the same time hold two views which are diametrically opposed to each other and the validity of one should make the other invalid, and yet I continue to hold them and am perhaps still sane. This is, I think, one of those situations. No, I think we cannot hold God to be all-powerful and all-knowing and allowing all the evil of the world and yet believe and still on some bizarre level I do. It is an untenable position and I hold it. "I believe, Lord, help my unbelief." I know and accept all the arguments for unbelief yet I also accept that 'faith is a gift.' "There in the darkest month..." well, I think we are in it and in order to continue to put one foot in front of the other, somehow, every day I have to continue to recite the Creed.
Thanks for your insights.
You know, Andrew, I can totally accept holding two contradictory beliefs at once. And I am fine with a theist being a theist as long as the theist accepts that there are some contradictions inherent in the belief. There really is no argument I can make to someone who feels a direct experience of God, nor would I want to make such an argument.
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