In Book 10 of Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” Adam asks the question so many of his descendants have asked: why should the lives of billions be blighted because of a sin he, not they, committed? (“Ah, why should all mankind / For one man’s fault”¦ be condemned?”) He answers himself immediately: “But from me what can proceed, / But all corrupt, both Mind and Will depraved?” Adam’s Original Sin is like an inherited virus. Although those who are born with it are technically innocent of the crime ”“ they did not eat of the forbidden tree ”“ its effects rage in their blood and disorder their actions.
God, of course, could have restored them to spiritual health, but instead, Paul tells us in Romans, he “gave them over” to their “reprobate minds” and to the urging of their depraved wills. Because they are naturally “filled with all unrighteousness,” unrighteous deeds are what they will perform: “fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness . . . envy, murder . . . deceit, malignity.” “There is none righteous,” Paul declares, “no, not one.”
It follows, then (at least from these assumptions), that the presence of evil in the world cannot be traced back to God, who opened up the possibility of its emergence by granting his creatures free will but is not responsible for what they, in the person of their progenitor Adam, freely chose to do.
What Milton and Paul offer (not as collaborators of course, but as participants in the same tradition) is a solution to the central problem of theodicy ”“ the existence of suffering and evil in a world presided over by an all powerful and benevolent deity. The occurrence of catastrophes natural (hurricanes, droughts, disease) and unnatural (the Holocaust ) always revives the problem and provokes anguished discussion of it. The conviction, held by some, that the problem is intractable leads to the conclusion that there is no God, a conclusion reached gleefully by the authors of books like “The God Delusion,” “God Is Not Great” and “The End of Faith.”
Now two new books (to be published in the coming months) renew the debate. Their authors come from opposite directions ”“ one from theism to agnosticism, the other from atheism to theism ”“ but they meet, or rather cross paths, on the subject of suffering and evil.
The comments posted after the original article are very revealing. There is a lot of anger at God for human “suffering” out there. I have seen enough death to understand that we are but mortal flesh which is born to live, reproduce, and then decay. Along the way “bad” things happen (as defined by man). Why do people blame God for the cycle of life. We should be thanking Him for the time we have. Indeed, those lives that have touched me most are those that have shown their faith through life’s most trying times.
In many parts of the world, life is very difficult, people seem surprised and grateful when pleased things come along. We have grown up in such blessings and luxury that we seem surprised and upset when difficult things come along. What odd creatures we are that we can become so ‘entitled’ so easily and I am as spoiled as the rest in my comfort.
It’s strange how many people miss the idea that God is the “author” of the universe. Consider a human author, say Nathaniel Hawthorne. His characters often suffer greatly. Could a character in his book assume that because of the evil they experience, that either
From our vantage point, we know N.H. is not all-loving, but he is certainly all-powerful w.r.t. his novels, and it would be strange to say that every evil thing that happened in his books shows him up as malevolent/sadistic etc.
Why do people insist on putting God to blame for bad things that happen here, but are willing to give authors a pass on bad things that happen to their creatures?
It’s because they think of God being an inhabitant of this world (which He was in the person of Jesus, but not the way people seem to want) as opposed to the author of the world.
I have never understood the vast volumes on the subject. The proper question to ask, when posed with the issue of the presence of all sorts of dying and misery, is “Well, what DID you expect to die of, or did you expect to live forever?” Since we are all going to die – at least, I hope we all are – wht difference does it make what you die of? Is drowning in a flood worse or better than dying slowly and miserably of cancer? Is being IED’d in Iraq better or worse than Alzheimers? WE have to die, fortinately, and God has arranged it as an integral part of intelligent design. This is not evil and bears no particular relation to sin.
Should God have arranged our deaths without any misery connected with them? Like what? WE suddenly disappear in a puff of smoke? But of course not. Evolution does not work that way. We die of natural causes as we live of natural causes, if I may put it that way. There is no evil here.
The tale of Adam and Eve a mere myth, as you all know, even though it tells us, as an origin tale, soomething important about men’s inherited motives and about the nature of free will. The issue of sin is a different matter, quite separate from evil. In the natural world, there is no evil. All is as it has been designed and it cannot work as a coherent system any other way. What is bad for mammals is good for fishes, so to speak. Sin speaks to motive. so that when I covet my neighbor’s wife, it is sinful, not evil. Satan is to be found in our motives, our values, which generate our actions. The natural world goes on doing what it must, not what it will, and it is all obediant to The Law because it cannot disobey. So earthquakes occur and people die. What then? We may grieve for the deaths of those we love, but the deaths are part to God’s love, which is The Law, and a harsh but necessary law it is. To assume tht God’s love, his care for mankind, and his mercy are in fact our versions of what these mean is egregious, impudent, and absurd at once.
Suffering and dying is nasty? Think what the case would be if we did not suffer or die at all.