Ch. 5 The Quest (continued)
The Problem of Evil
Issues: Moral and natural evil existed and challenged the goodness attributed to God. The problem of moral evil was a soft pitch that I had batted away as a child acknowledging it as an unfortunate consequence of free will so my concern was natural evil. Possible solutions to the problem of natural evil included the following: (1) This is the best possible world; (2) Evil is just the absence of good or an illusion; (3) God's purposes are inscrutable to us; (4) The devil causes evil; (5) Evil is the result of karma or original sin or current sin; (6) Everything will balance out in the afterlife; (7) Evil and suffering are necessary for spiritual growth.
My Take: (1) It was inconceivable to me that God could not have created a world for us without natural evil. This was G-O-D we were talking about. Even if we did benefit from suffering as I will discuss in #7, did we really need so much of it to get the lesson? A better creation with less suffering caused by natural disasters and disease certainly seemed possible.
(2) Evil was more than the absence of good or an illusion based on good and evil's merely being two aspects of the whole. If flooding caused water damage to my basement, that could be considered an absence of good or an unfavorable circumstance that highlighted the goodness of my basement's usually being dry. A tsunami’s killing 250,000 people in Indonesia in 2004 was more than the absence of good or an unfavorable circumstance that highlighted that usually 250,000 people did not die in a catastrophic natural event. The indiscriminate killing of the good, babies, mean people who may have had a change of heart the next week had they continued living was evil, not merely not good and not an illusion.
(3) While we may always have to continue to strive to know God, I was confident that God did not play by a different rule book where up was down and left was right and evil was good.
(4) I had not believed in demons since my exercise with the sewing needles and tweezers when I was four. I believed in a Supreme God not challenged in kind.
(5) I had already decided that the doctrine of original sin reeked of an unfairness unworthy of God and that karma was an unverifiable way of blaming the victim for something that supposedly happened during a previous life. The problem with believing that the suffering caused by disease or natural disasters was deserved was the indiscriminate nature of disease and natural disasters. Bad people did not all congregate in a building which then collapsed in an earthquake while all the lovely people watched safely at a distance. Disease did not only afflict the mean-spirited. Everyone dies: the good, the bad, the strong, the weak, the young, the pregnant, those who earnestly love God. How could that be justly deserved?
(6) This promise that it would all work out after death was just the sort of kicking the can that led Karl Marx to suggest that religion was the opium of the people. Accept the unjust evil all around you now because after you die and no one can verify it, you will go to a magic land to get your just reward.
The theodicy that evil and suffering were necessary for spiritual growth (7) gave me considerable pause. Yes, it was true that valuable lessons in compassion, self-sacrifice, and interdependency were born of suffering. Socially, natural disasters invited disparate groups to come together to face a shared challenge. Individually, overcoming obstacles built character and strengthened us for further challenges ahead. If all suffering were karmic or just, then we would be far less likely to grow spiritually from it because, instead of feeling compassion, we may just feel smug knowing the suffering person deserved it. Unjust suffering taught us important lessons that just suffering might not. I had learned important lessons from suffering but only because I had survived my suffering and was capable of learning. There was the rub. The people who died during a natural disaster did not benefit by learning valuable lessons in compassion, self-sacrifice, and interdependency. Babies who suffered did not benefit by learning valuable lessons in compassion, self-sacrifice, and interdependency. Severely and profoundly developmentally disabled people did not benefit by learning valuable lessons in compassion, self-sacrifice, and interdependency. Actively psychotic people did not benefit by learning valuable lessons in compassion, self-sacrifice, and interdependency. The animals that suffered or died did not benefit by learning valuable lessons in compassion, self-sacrifice, and interdependency. I sat with this for some time. I could not figure out how God could care for each one of us individually and still allow the suffering of babies and mentally challenged people and animals who could not benefit from their suffering. I could not understand how someone who died in a natural disaster grew spiritually from the experience. In my commitment to face a fact though it slay me, I came to a conclusion that troubled me very much at first: I decided that God did not care about us individually.
After the initial shock wore off, this idea began to trouble me less. I had grown uncomfortable with individual salvation because it seemed like a lot of supposedly religious people were more concerned in reaping rewards and seeing “other” people suffer than pursuing, loving, and living out God. I felt like heaven and hell were impediments to people's purely loving God for the sake of loving God. As long as you were concerned for your personal salvation, you were not really focused on God. I had been intrigued by the Eastern Orthodox concept of deification and the Hindu goal of Brahman and Atman uniting once the Veil of Maya had been lifted. In Conscience: Its Freedom and Limitations, a Catholic theologian, Ewert Cousins, posited:
“The reason why one’s deepest individuality coincides with the greatest universality is that in their moral centers all men coincide before the absolute call of God…Here in the moral decision, where man touches God, the opposites coincide: what is most individual with what is most universal; what is most immanent with what is most transcendent. At this point of convergence moral maturity is reached. The morally mature man is at one with himself, with God, and with the universe…At this point of convergence he is beyond conflict, for in pursuing his true self he is pursuing God and in pursuing God he is pursuing all things.”
The point of convergence was the goal, not a personal salvation. The death of a baby in a flood did not help that baby grow spiritually but it did invite others to grow and at the point of convergence that baby was one with all of us and with God. We were all in this together. That was why Jesus was so concerned with how we treated the least of our brothers because that you do unto me. Convergence. It was a breakthrough moment for me. Convergence was St. John Chrysostom's wisdom in On the Gospel of St. Matthew: “We cannot be saved by seeking just our own individual salvation; we need to look first to the good of others.” Convergence was St. Julian of Norwich’s wisdom in Revelations of Divine Love: “For in the sight of God all man is one man, and one man is all man." Convergence was Giordano Bruno’s wisdom in Cause, Principle, and Unity: “Anything we take in the universe, because it has in itself that which is All in All, includes in its own way the entire soul of the world, which is entirely in any part of it.” Convergence was Swami Adbhutananda's wisdom as cited in God Lived With Them: “When we bring God into our lives, distinctions lessen and we feel that all people are our own. On the physical plane there is a difference between myself and others, but on the spiritual plane we are the same Satchidananda.” Convergence celebrated our interconnectedness and properly valued our personal salvation in the context of our loving relationship with others. If we had not moved beyond our self-concern, we had not yet moved to God and we were not yet saved. When we reached out in love to others as agents of God’s love, we converged with God and that was our salvation. Convergence. I was so happy to have found it because had I not the problem of natural evil would have bested my belief in a good God.
My belief was not quite bested; however, I will admit to you that the problem of natural evil remains the weakest link in my faith in God. If I was unwilling to build my foundation on a religion that suggested bad things about God, how could I build a foundation on a God that established a natural order that led to evil? Well, I could interpret natural evil as necessary for inviting convergent spiritual growth since the impersonal and undeserved quality of natural evil invited the love of neighbor in a way that a deserved evil would not. Okay, but how did inviting convergent spiritual growth through the atrocity of natural evil differ from God’s somehow inviting spiritual growth through the atrocities ascribed to God in the Bible and other holy books? The best response I could come up with is this one: Natural evil invites the movement of love in the world. When we hear about the victims of disease, we donate money to help find a cure. When we hear about the victims of natural disasters, we send money and supplies and travel to the site to help in any way we can. On the other hand, when we hear of God's supposedly threatening parents with the death and cannibalization of their children or ordering the genocide of an entire people including babies and livestock or killing sons for burning the wrong incense, we just think badly of God. We come to fear God rather than love God. When we hear that God condemns those who have not believed in the name of His “one and only Son” even though many, many people were at a severe disadvantage to ever hear his Son's name, then we think God is unfair or we decide that we, too, have license not to love these “other” people. The atrocities ascribed to God in the Bible and other holy books do not invite the movement of love in the world; so, I could logically defend my building a foundation on a God that established a natural order that led to evil while refusing to build my foundation on a religion that ascribed atrocities to God. While my position on natural evil's inviting convergent spiritual growth could be defended logically in my head, my heart was not at all satisfied: “Really, God, how could You?”
