I try to evade writing about this subject because a) Over the centuries gallons of ink have been spilt on this subject without a definitive solution b) Any "solution" proposed is in danger of trivializing the profundity of the question and usually withers away to nothing in the fierce heat of real suffering and evil.
However, as I recently attended a church session on suffering and evil I thought I'd better make a quick showing on the church FB page of how far my thinking has got on the subject and I reproduce that quickie FB post below; it is based on some ideas I expressed in a blog post I once made here. It's a bit tongue in cheek though.
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How can an omnipotent/sovereign loving & personal God
tolerate suffering in the world He created? Shifting responsibility to human
and satanic responsibility doesn’t work because that simply reflects back on
the Creator’s responsibility in creating beings with such a propensity to screw
up and fail so badly. Forget it.
Here’s a quick back-of-the-envelope solution to the biggest
problem of all time.
OK, so if we demand our Creator deals with suffering, where
does He start? Which suffering does he knock out of cosmic history? Well,
because the cosmos, like Jesus' garment, is a seamless whole with many
interlinked dependences it is very difficult to remove suffering in a piecemeal
fashion; it has to be dealt with as a whole. The result is that the demand to
remove suffering & evil entails removing all of it from day one,
effectively shifting creation into another very different universe and a very
different history to the one we know……Because our own existence is seamlessly
bound up with the world we are part of this would mean that us sinners would
have to go as well. For me that presents a very personal dilemma: Either
suffering goes and me along with it, or the suffering world stays. The other
thing I’d miss in a perfect world is that my favourite Bible verses, Phil
2:1-11, wouldn’t exist either. And I’m sure that if I found myself in a perfect
world it wouldn’t be perfect for very long!
These considerations turn the problem of suffering and evil
on its head: Viz: We have a big, big dilemma problem in the absence of
suffering and evil. But perhaps because of Phil 2:1-11 the Sovereign Creator
(bless His name) has selected our cosmic story for reification from among the
many possible stories that can told. That reification must have cost Him a
dearly in emotional pain. I suppose that's what we call grace.
QED(?).
Well, perhaps not QED, but the above can be the basis of more sophisticated thinking!
