Personal Creeds and the Problem of Evil part 4

I’d like to catch up on the train of thought I left off on February 26 with the topic of suffering. To save my readers some time, “part 3“ was about the so-called “cause and effect” response to the problem of evil. This answer replies to suffering by pointing out the means by which suffering and evil came about. Of course, it really is shocking to ponder what small decisions, actions and words can cause such extensive damage. Think of motor vehicle accidents, or firearm mishaps: here we see how empty it is to point out what the causal relationships of traumatic events are. These answers simply do not address the problem of pain at all. Nicolas Wolterstorff, a Christian philosopher who lost his son in a mountain climbing accident, found the numerous books on “the grieving process” to be obscene: he wrote that the problem isn’t the grieving process, but the grief itself. Somewhere along the line we have to face the evils, the traumas, the pain itself, rather than satisfy ourselves with answers that are simply sophisticated sounding avoidance patterns. These ideas, these thought patterns, these "personal creeds" I think belong in the category of answers to the problem of evil that seek to answer the question by avoiding it.

I was disappointed with what I wrote in part 3 in that I don’t feel I had space to flesh out the central argument I wanted to. I know, that sounds dry and stuffy, and going into detail over an argument (an argument in the sense of logic, not bickering) is kind of like aggressively pointing out the load-bearing beams of a beautiful building: drawing too much attention to the structure of an argument can draw attention away from the entire point of the argument. So I apologize to my readers for waxing perhaps too philosophical in this post.

Nevertheless, I do want to flesh out the logic of the argument I presented, if for no other reason than to share an argument that has caused me personally to rule out “Naturalism” as a legitimate way to think of the world around me.

The force of this argument is to take one of the heartbeats of atheistic evolutionary thinking and consistently apply its own way of reasoning to itself. For if the universe consists in nothing but matter, and we are the product of blind chance molecules bumping into one another, then it follows that this longing for an alternate universe with no pain in it was also produced by these chance molecule encounters.

Consider your own creeds about human nature. Non-theistic evolutionary thinking feeds on a particular line of reasoning: survival and adaptation. The Darwinian imagination explains much of our nature as humans by thinking about how attribute x is useful for survival: “We walk upright because it helped us see predators in the bush”, “We developed big brains because that helped us survive and adapt”, etc. But when applying this reasoning to the problem of pain, I found those explanations which make atheism appealing end up undoing its appeal. For to be consistent, it also must conclude that the experience of human reasoning about suffering is there because it serves some adaptive purpose: either that, or it is an unfortunate by-product of some other useful evolutionary development, kind of like that unfortunate bit of "evolutionary residue" we all carry around: our appendix. In the latter case, wishing suffering wasn’t there is an unfortunate and useless quirk of human nature.

Either way, the naturalist must conclude this: nature produced in us a profound longing for a reality that does not exist. Useful or not, nature created a powerful urge for which there is no satisfaction in nature.

Perhaps someone may not find this reasoning all that much of a blow to their atheism or skepticism. For my mind at least, it provides an argument that continually serves to remind me of where a world with no God must logically lead: those things in life that stir me the most, that churn up the strongest emotions and most rigorous mental and artistic exercises is nothing more than mere nature bustling about its own irrationality.