Suffering and Assumptions about God

by John Hansen

1825. William Blake. Job Plate 11.

One of the perennial questions in philosophy is that, if God is both all-powerful and all-loving—assuming, that is, that he* exists—how is it that he permits suffering and evil in this world? We may imagine, for example, the gruesome suffering of a child, or a natural catastrophe.

One of the most influential thinkers in this area was John Hick (1922-2012), an American philosopher of religion and a theologian. Hick was an unconventional thinker, to the extent that he was twice the subject of heresy hearings. Yet his arguments on human suffering set the agenda. Hick held, to put it simply, that there is no evil in our suffering, but suffering improves our souls. That is, suffering is ultimately good, and merely appears to be evil.

There are multiple biblical references that suggest Hick's thesis: not only does God permit human suffering, but he actually endorses it. The story of Job is the prototype where God actually allows Satan to harm the righteous person (Job) in order to make him more ‘god-like’.

Since Hick, there have been new arguments, which Hick himself could hardly have imagined. Lately, there has been great interest in B.C. Johnson, who is not a theologian—yet through the strength of his arguments, has gained a large following. Johnson holds, to put it too simply, that everywhere, awful ‘accidents’ happen without the interventions of an all-powerful God. Therefore God is evil, or part good and part evil.

However, we find many unexamined assumptions, in both Hick and Johnson. We here examine some of them.

1. Both Hick and Johnson assume that God is personal—essentially, human in nature. Yet nowhere do they discuss this assumption. Is God human? If so, how? Thus they assign to God human codes of conduct. As a result, their discussion about God is essentially one about human morality. The question arises: do we justifiably refer to human morality, expecting God to conform with what is ‘human’?

2. Johnson assumes that God 'has refused to help' us in our sufferings -- and thus he must be evil. The assumption is that God would help us, unasked. One could conceive of an all-powerful, all-loving God who would not intervene in human affairs unless he was petitioned to do so—through a person with the requisite ‘faith’ to make the request. It would not be illogical to assume that God should be asked, by someone who believed that it was worth asking.

3. Almost every example that Johnson uses to question the goodness of God is found in his use of ‘accidents’. The assumption here, however, is that God has power over that realm. Even an all-powerful God could, presumably, leave some things alone. One could posit that a good God would not want to disturb the accidents of nature, because such intervention could disturb the flow of our environmental process. Perhaps he chooses rather to be all-powerful in the spiritual realm.

4. Hick, on the other hand, asks whether accidents can ever be called evil. In that case, can one assume a motive? A classic example is a hornet’s sting. Was there evil intent? Hick equates moral evil with human wickedness, and non-moral evil as equivalent to human pain and suffering from other sources. The distinction is important because Hick suggests that, in the case of human wickedness, we as free agents are in control. God himself may have no evil intent.

5. Johnson questions the theist’s ‘retreat to faith’ to explain God’s goodness. Such faith, he holds, cannot be justified in a wider context. When one casts an eye over history, God’s record is not good. Yet may it not be a category mistake? Faith is a matter of spiritual ascertainment and may make little sense when applied to human rules or philosophical analysis. Faith may not need to be ‘justifiable’ in terms of our own notions of right and wrong.

6. Skeptics may assume that God should have created the world as a hedonistic paradise devoid of human suffering. Suffering and evil may themselves be interpreted as good. God may have created the world to include pain and suffering. The necessity of such suffering, in turn, would bring about God-like characteristics that are necessary. According to Hick, if God were to eradicate all human suffering, we would drift through life aimlessly as if in a dream.

7. A final assumption of the skeptic is that God knows nothing of suffering. Yet an omnipotent, good God himself may have suffered throughout history, just as much as humanity has done, if not more. Such an all-powerful God may believe that it is necessary for human beings to suffer in a similar way as he has done, in order to become more like him, in a different state of existence.

Whether or not one agrees with Hick’s conclusions, it is submitted that his arguments are more plausible than Johnson’s, in that they do not attempt to analyse an unanalysable faith. We may have no better language to talk about it than this.

* I follow Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan: ‘We refer to G-d using masculine terms simply for convenience's sake ...’

What Is Love?

Posted by Berenike Neneia
     with Thomas Scarborough 

What is love?  There is the unspoken view that what love means to one it means to the whole world.  This is not the case, as I shall demonstrate by exploring the word in my mother tongue, I-Kiribati.

In English, love is hard to define – or rather, it has many definitions – while in my own language, the word itself informs us of its meaning.

In English, ‘love’ may be traced back thousands of years to the Sanskrit ‘lubh’, which means ‘to desire’.  Its meaning has not changed much since then.  Today the Oxford English Dictionary defines it as ‘a feeling or disposition of deep affection or fondness for someone’.

To many, this is unsatisfactory – mostly for the reason that affections may change – alternatively, that they believe love to be deeper and wider than mere desire.  In English, the only real alternative to this is the religious meaning of the word, which compares our love with the love of God which is sacrificial and unchanging.  Yet this, too, is simply called ‘love’.

In my own language, the word for love is ‘tangira’.  It comes from two words, namely ‘tang’, which means ‘to cry’, and ‘ngira’, which means ‘to groan.’  Crying may be both positive and negative, in the sense that a person can cry if they are happy and if they are sad.  This already reveals something important about love.  Love does not change when it turns to crying, or where there is groaning.  This is by definition wrapped up with love.

'Ngira' has a further, related meaning, which is 'to sacrifice'.  Thus a person who is in love will engage in self-sacrifice.  This, in turn, needs to be mutual, to be shared equally between a husband and a wife, so that it will build a good and lifelong relationship which brings glory to God’s name.

Sacrifice, too, should rule out the possibility of violence.  In my culture, men may abuse their relationship role, and use it to gratify themselves alone.  In some instances, in which wives are violated by their husbands, men argue that they do such things out of love.  Then their behavioural beings, called ‘aomataia’, change and become violent.  This creates disunity and disorder.  But ‘ngira’ as sacrifice implies that a husband will sacrifice himself for his wife, and vice versa.  This lies closer to the religious definition of love in English.

‘Ngira’ has a social aspect, too.  People often identify themselves by the power they hold, and not by love.  The more people hold high rank in government, church, or non-governmental organisations, the more they are likely to define themselves as superior within the family, society, church, or country as a whole. Sometimes this quest for importance causes people to do harm to others because they want to be placed higher.  While power is not harmful in itself, it needs to be founded on sacrifice, to the benefit of all.

There is a related word in our language, to ‘tangira’.  It is ‘onimaki’, which means ‘belief, faith, confidence’.  This word clarifies the love that binds couples in marriage.  If both have faith in each other, it is assumed that there will be no violence, which leads people to separation and divorce – although this does not mean that they will not quarrel.  In spite of such things, there is a possibility that they will find solutions for their problems, because they believe that they are faithful to each other, and to God.

The meaning of ‘onimaki’ should rule out unfaithfulness.  Therefore, remaining a virgin is very important for unmarried women in I-Kiribati culture, and is still practiced nowadays.  If daughters are found not to be virgins during the first time they have sex after marriage, they will be returned to her parents and family naked.  To return the woman naked is to embarrass her, because she is not good enough to be a daughter-in-law, as she has already given her body to someone else.

Faithfulness also implies provision.  Sometimes marriage relationships are destroyed through the wife or the husband being lazy.  For instance, if a wife is lazy in the sense that she cannot look after her husband and in-laws, then if she lives in an extended family, as most women in Kiribati do, she can be chased away by the in-laws. This also applies to men, but is rare compared to women.

It will be seen in this exploration of the I-Kiribati definition of ‘love’ that it matters a great deal what we think of a word, and what it means – love being one of the most important words of all.  Yet some words give us little guidance in themselves, so that we profit from teaching ourselves their meanings.  The examples of ‘tangira’ and ‘onimaki’ in my language serve as an illustration of the value of knowing.

There is a tendency today to say that meanings are not defined but absorbed.  This is especially prevalent in religion.  Sometimes, however, there is great reward in reflecting on what our words mean, and applying these meanings to our personal and social situation.

God: An Existential Proof

Posted by Thomas Scarborough

Ernest Hemingway has one of his characters say, 'The world breaks everyone.' In crafting this now famous line, did he hand us a new proof for the existence of God?

It all rests on the way we are motivated, and the changes our motivations undergo in the course of a lifetime.

What is it that motivates me to plant a garden (and to plant it thus), to embark on a career, or to go to war? Today there is little disagreement that, basically, I am motivated when I hold up the world in my head to the world itself. Where then I find a difference between the two, I am motivated to act. It is, writes neuropsychologist Richard Gregory, the encounter with the 'unexpected' that motivates me.

Now consider that, in one’s early years, one's motivations are fresh and new. The world in one’s head seems to offer one high hopes, pleasant dreams, a good view of humanity, and enthusiasm to spare. Yet as one progresses through life, 'the world breaks everyone'. It breaks them, not so much through the hardships it brings to bear on the body—if this should matter at all—but because of the way in which it assails the mind and emotions.

Disillusionment sets in. And this, presumably, means coming to see things for the way they are. As we grow and mature, we come to see that the world is a place where hopes wither, dreams die, good turns to bad, and our energies are sapped. We become jaded, tired, and disinterested. 'My hopes were all dead,' Charlotte Brontë has one of her characters say. 'I looked on my cherished wishes, yesterday so blooming and glowing. They lay stark, chill, livid corpses that could never revive.'

With no world now to hold up to the world, because we have finally seen the world for what it is, we lose our motivation—ultimately all motivation—because motivation is the 'unexpected'.

And so we lose the ability to live. Ernest Hemingway had no motivation to go on. He famously shot himself with a double-barrel shotgun. It is 'the very good,' he wrote, 'and the very gentle and the very brave' who go first. As for the rest—they, too, shall be found.

What then to do, when we are broken? How may a person restore any motivation at all, when they have come to see the world as it is?

It needs to be something beyond this world—and though we here 'appeal to consequences'—the argument that it must be so—indeed it must be so. We cannot go on with a view of this world which is born of the world itself. Small wonder, then, that it is central to religious thinking that 'whether we live, we live unto the Lord, and whether we die, we die unto the Lord'. We continue to strive—but we strive for something which is other-worldly.

There may be another, logical possibility. If not something beyond this world, then we need an interventionist God who through his being there, changes our expectations—a God who reaches down into our reality—a God who acts in this world. The world is not, therefore, all that I expect it to be. This, too, is a dominant religious theme: 'For by you I have run through a troop,' writes David. 'By my God have I leaped over a wall.' He could turn the tables, through his God.

What then is that motivation which lies beyond this world? What then are the interventions of God? This would seem to lie beyond the bounds of philosophy, and in the realm of theology.

Paradoxically, if we accept the 'God option' as the basis of all true motivation, then this would seem to be the option of deepest disillusionment—at the very same time as it offers us the greatest hope. One has no need for a new and fundamentally different motivation, in God, unless the world in one’s head is no longer found to be worth holding up to the world.

Poem: “Then … Forget It!”

The Democracy Complex of the Arab Spring 
 
Posted by Chengde Chen*

Love Letters by Jiang Zhi

Democracy is to follow the will of the majority,
but the will is divided into the ideal and reality.
When you poll the Arabs about the Arab Spring,
the result develops organically, from a Yes to a No.

If you ask, “Do you want to get rid of dictatorship?”
the majority will say yes, like seeds wanting to sprout.
If you ask further, “What if it has to be through war?”
the majority will say, “Then … forget it.”

Compared to the devastation of bombing and ruin,
a life without a ballot box is nevertheless a life.
War turns the majority into refugees rather than heroes;
fleeing from it is voting with their feet for peace – any peace.

Democracy is a beautiful but cowardly dream.
Please get it right what the real democratic wish is.
Man is an animal for whom bread weighs more than ideals,
so he’d rather have sex-without-love than love-without-sex.


* Chengde Chen is the author of Five Themes of Today, Open Gate Press, London. chengde@sipgroup.com

Poem: Friendship

Posted by Theo Olivet *

Original painting by T.A. Marrison

A central question of life is that of where may I find firm ground as I search for my own position? Subsidiary ones are: Does friendship help? Is it possible to obtain support through common suffering? Or to define one's future position? And to what extent may one find strength through the weaknesses of others? 

Friendship
Translated from the original German by Pi Editors

Come, let the two of us bow down
at this, our so familiar place,
so many stubs you stubbed out here,
the white smoke rising from your face.

And then, in that deep silence
to which we often yielded,
A raw cough I coughed
and my eyes from yours I shielded.

At times a gentle word fell,
'I run from me, tomorrow.'
And you in turn, said frankly:
'My man has not been found, though,
I guess I am my own first foe ...'
I asked:  'You mean, above, below?'
Then we wept aloud.

Those were the days! I tell myself.
So awesome! they won't come again,
yet we stood there, all four feet
in a sea of tar then …

Come, give me one of yours
since mine are dull in taste,
I am changing, it would seem to me,
this house has all but gone to waste,
my doors are much a'rattling,
oh, were my sails by new wind chased.

The cigarette, yeah …  I say thank you,
the way it tastes, the smoke reminds me
how oft you fingered stubs and drew.
You … yes you … I wish once more to be
with you

---

* Theo Olivet is an author, artist, and retired judge in Schleswig-Holstein
The original German language poem appears at Gedicht: Freundschaft