“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.