Personal Creeds and the Problem of Evil part 3

"Cause and Effect"

I have heard a number of answers to “the problem of pain”, some in academic essays, others in casual conversation, discussion board posts, etc. Generally, Christian books and speakers on the topic make a distinction between intellectual answers and pastoral answers. That is, some answers are for satisfying the intellect, others for satisfying the suffering heart. I’m not a big fan of this distinction for a couple of reasons. The first is that I’m never quite sure if I’m dealing with someone who regards pain as an intellectual query, or someone who is currently bleeding inside. Treating a bleeding heart like a research paper is insulting, and treating a research paper like a wounded soul makes you look stupid. Besides that, no one ever completely separates their heart and their head: my whole point in my first two blogs was to demonstrate that intellectual creeds and life experience and emotions go hand in hand in forming one another. So while the “heart/head” distinction might make for a well-organized speech or book, its usefulness falls apart in day-to-day conversation.

Allow me to examine one particular answer to pain as it relates to the heart and the head. I would call it either “the naturalistic answer”, or “the scientism answer” or “the cause and effect answer.” It takes several forms, but in general, it looks something like this: Death in Haiti? Plate tectonics. Car accident? The number of newtons it takes to shatter a rib cage.

I found this answer sustained my soul for a number of years, because most of my life’s “sufferings” consisted of brief pain. Some jerk makes a snide comment. I get a bad mark on a paper. I stub my toe. These are all easy enough to explain: “Bob is a jerk, caused by his jerk family that raised him”, “I failed the test because I didn’t study”, “Kicking someone in the butt hard enough will damage nerves and bones in my foot.” (That’s a true story btw.) In all of these, my pain is explained to my satisfaction, and the problem of evil bothers me no longer.

But then I experienced a new kind of pain: enduring pain. I would put things like the loss of a loved one, chronic disease, persistent psychoses and bad habits, and annoying relatives here -those kind of things, where the suffering doesn’t go away, and isn’t expected to until death.

To explain to someone with brain cancer that “That tumor will just keep growing until you die due to the rapid reproduction of cancer cells”, and expect them to be satisfied with your great insight and wisdom is a little naive.

Cause and effect is the most obvious answer to suffering. But it’s also the most obviously unsatisfying answer. Some commit themselves to this unsatisfactory answer, and talk themselves into being satisfied with it. Not to pick on the atheists, (Christians sometimes satisfy themselves with this answer too) but this was exactly the answer of Dr. Leikind, atheist and senior editor of skeptic magazine, in a debate on evil and suffering. Cause and effect -end of story, suck it up princess.

While reading some epic Greek poetry, C.S. Lewis found himself swept away in longings for a different world. It was here that he found his atheism glaringly inadequate -for what natural processes could possibly have created a being which longs for something that does not exist?

The very popularity of the question of evil testifies to the human heart needing more than a cause-and-effect answer. Pain and evil demand an explanation: some seek to exact that explanation from God, others chalk it up to the mysterious and eternal laws of Karma. Cause and effect is an inadequate answer, if for no other reason than the extent to which we cry out for a better one.

“Personal Creeds and the Problem of Evil.”

Part 2 “The Creed Birthed in Pain.”

What do you believe? A relative of mine was once asked this question in a post-secondary class. Go ahead, jot it down, point form, single-spaced. What are your most important beliefs? Try to describe to yourself the intellectual house you are living in.

Hopefully, something about God appears on this list, either positive or negative. What is God like? Regardless if you believe in God, describe him/her. I know this sounds like a weird question to ask if your position is disbelief, but surely if you disbelieve in God, this God you disbelieve in must have some characteristics that make him worthy of disbelief?

Intuitive to most people is the affirmation that God is powerful, good, created the universe, and in some way continues to run it. In my many discussions about religion with many different people, not one person, committed Christian, agnostic, or atheist, has ever stopped the discussion to define God. As soon as the term “God” comes up, there is an assumed working knowledge of this term that needs no definition. Whether people are born with this knowledge or just learned it growing up isn’t relevant here: the point is that all people have this “God-data”, roughly corresponding to the above characteristics I’ve mentioned above: God is good, powerful, creates and runs things.

People reason with this basic “God-data”, and form personal creeds out of it. Now I grant that I’m making this sound awfully book-ish and abstract. In reality, this “God data” isn’t terribly interesting until you put it in a context of pain and suffering. Or perhaps it is interesting, but I think people don’t become terribly committed to this data one way or another until something in life pushes them to make a decision, to do some reasoning and to plant their mind somewhere that they can live in the midst of pain.

In the midst of suffering, this all-powerful God that runs everything isn’t terribly appealing. In the midst of suffering, we want something soft: A sick bed. Some salve for our wounds. A fellow-sufferer. The omnipotent divine administrator is akin to sandpaper and rocks in this context.

While we suffer, we can easily reason: “Well, this suffering is so horrible, this whole ‘good’ thing of God’s can’t be right, especially if he’s running everything, so he must not exist.” A common one among believers is “Well, I’m not willing to give up the belief that God is good: I believe he exists, and that he’s good. I can live with that. But a good God wouldn’t allow this suffering I’m going through to happen. So I’ll ditch the belief that He runs everything.”

All of this reasoning can happen in the blink of an eye; it occurs at the moment of pain. And why shouldn’t it? Shall we expect someone who just had their arm ripped off to carefully sit down and rationally compose their pain into a logically ordered syllogism?

My basic observation is this: Creeds are formulated informally: situations arise, and we form beliefs accordingly, and we form those creeds to suit our needs. Suffering is one of those things we form beliefs around much like intellectual scar tissue.

“Personal Creeds and the Problem of Evil.”

part 1: “A Testimony of Belief”

I must confess myself to being a person who probably spends too much time in his head. I mostly look at the world through a lens of creeds -what I believe, what a person believes, and what our actions tell us about what we believe.

Strangely, I have found this way of thinking either bores a lot of people, or comes across as highly irrelevant. Perhaps so. I have enjoyed the company of not a few down to earth folk that insist I explain myself in liveable, applicable, straight-forward terms. Touchée. What are creeds for but to live by, right?

Though I may be a theoretician in heart, it still stands that all people, great and small, educated and not, live by certain beliefs, “creeds” that they hold deep in their hearts.

A creed is above all, something deeply personal. We are proud of our knowledge, we cherish our understanding of things -it’s hard to imagine trying to live by anything other than what we understand. Personal creeds are those beliefs which we hold to be true, and attempt to order our lives around. Christians have creeds, Atheists have creeds, Skeptics and Agnostics have creeds, for we are all believing creatures: thinking and believing comes as naturally to us as breathing air.

Some beliefs have different characteristics than others. Some we can articulate as clear as day. Other beliefs run our lives for us without us really thinking about it. Some beliefs puzzle us, some we hold tentatively, some we care little about, others we would lay down our lives for.

When someone becomes thoroughly convinced of something, they in a strange way, cease to think about their beliefs unless that belief is brought into question by someone or something. A person becomes convinced that God is at work in every moment. From then on, their thought-life becomes one big prayer list, and the Lord is seen around every corner. He guides the world, he creates chance encounters, and all things fit into his divine purposes.

Others become convinced that life came about through natural selection operating on mutations, and all of life takes on an “evolving” flavour: governments, history, and especially biological reality all can be seen through the lens of the Darwinian imagination.

For some, God becomes a sufficient explanation for what goes on in life. For others, natural processes make good sense of the data. Whether Christian or not, we all have these “thoughtless structures of thought”: lenses that we perhaps thought hard about once upon a time, but now simply becomes the intellectual house we wake up in every morning.

Evidently, the person who is aware of what he believes is in an infinitely better position than the one who is thoughtlessly captive to the daily churning of his “thoughtless thoughts.”Sometimes upon close examination, we catch ourselves believing truly ludicrous things that we know can’t possibly be true -but we hold them dear enough to live by them! Think of the young girl who, upon some reflection realizes she genuinely thinks having the latest fashionable garment will make people like her. Or the religious person involved in a frenzy of churchy activities because he supposes God is impressed with his industriousness.

In a manner of speaking, our beliefs enslave us. If we think something is true, we will order our lives accordingly. Beliefs aren’t the only things that run our lives for us, or cause our actions, but I think they’re influential enough to be worth thinking about. Have you ever asked yourself “Why did I do that?” Related to those actions are those unspoken “thoughtless thoughts” we live by every day.

In the following blogs, I would like to explore the formation of such personal creeds, specifically as it relates to “the problem of evil”. Some, in the face of great evil, have found profound basis for faith in Christ. Others find in the same evil solid justification for the non-existence, or irrelevance of God. The following blogs (I have no idea how many) will be my thoughts on the issue.