The Problem of Suffering and Evil

 

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!