I’m rereading Thomas Talbott’s The Inescapable Love of God, the last few chapters on suffering.
“God’s oneness with us, even in our estrangement, is so intimate that, even as we experience our environment through our bodies, so God experiences it as well. Every pain we experience is therefore a pain that God experiences, and every torment we endure is a torment that God endures as well…
“Such a God, so compassionate and so identified with those whom he loves into existence, could not possibly experience a creation such as ours as anything other than a kind of temporary hell. But with this difference: insofar as God sees clearly the end from the beginning and contemplates the glorious future in store for those who endure suffering in the present, he continues to rejoice even as he suffers along with his suffering children.”
Not so much an answer, as a perspective.
Interesting that he refers to our present world as a “temporary hell.” I’m sure many feel that. I do. He says God feels it too.
He also says about himself:
“The idea that we should rejoice in our sufferings, like the New Testament idea that we should love our enemies and do good to those who do evil to us, is indeed startling. One is apt to wonder whether such a thing is even humanly possible, which in a sense it clearly is not. For my own part, at least, I doubt that I could rejoice in the midst of even moderate suffering, not to mention severe and protracted suffering.”
[Below I attempt to summarize three chapters of philosophical content. In a sense, I’m doing it an injustice due to how much I leave out. But I think I hit some of the salient points.]
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Omnipotence and the Mystery of Evil
“Aslan,” said Lucy through her tears, “could you—will you—do something for these poor Dwarfs?” “Dearest,” said Aslan, “I will show you both what I can, and what I cannot, do.” —C. S. Lewis, The Last Battle
“But how, one might wonder, could God be both omnipotent and limited in power?
“Why could he not employ his limitless power, for example, to bring about free will in a fully deterministic universe? The traditional answer is that, whereas there are no non-logical limits to what an omnipotent being can do, there are indeed logical limits. For not even an omnipotent being can create square circles, or bring it about that 2 + 2 = 5”
“So Lewis was essentially right. If we attribute to God the power to make contradictions true, we have not in fact attributed to him any intelligible power at all; and similarly, if we deny that God has such power, we have not denied that he has some intelligible power that an omnipotent being should be expected to have.”
“Do we have any clear idea of the logical (or metaphysical) obstacles that God may confront when creating thinking, feeling creatures that are conscious of themselves as distinct from their environment and from each other? Is it even possible that God should have brought “a society of free souls” into being outside the context of what C. S. Lewis has called “a relatively independent and ‘inexorable Nature’?” I doubt it, even as Lewis did when he wrote:
“There is no reason to suppose that self-consciousness, the recognition of a creature by itself as a “self,” can exist except in contrast with an “other,” a something which is not the self. It is against an environment, and preferably a social environment, an environment of other selves, that the awareness of Myself stands out.”
“Being aware of myself, Lewis thought, requires a contrast between myself and something other than myself; and if Lewis was right about that, as I believe he was, then we must consider how such a contrast might be realized.
“If I were always to get whatever I wanted as soon as I formed the wish, then I would see the entire physical universe, including other persons, as a mere extension of myself and would therefore never realize myself as distinct from my environment or from other people; and if I were not always to get whatever I wanted, then I would experience at least a degree of pain and frustration.
“So perhaps a degree of pain and frustration is itself a necessary condition of a society of independent persons who interact with each other; and if that is true, then perhaps it is not even metaphysically possible that an individual center of consciousness should have emerged in what John Hick has called “a hedonistic paradise.”
“A newborn baby comes screaming into this earthly life in what, from its own point of view, must be incredible frustration; and even in the most loving of families, the baby will continue to experience many periods of frustration as its developing will comes into conflict with its surroundings.
“And for all we know, it could not have been otherwise; that is, perhaps not even an omnipotent being could have created an individual center of consciousness in the absence of all such pain and frustration.”
“In general, then, we know very little about what is, and is not, logically (or metaphysically) possible in the matter of creating independent rational creatures”
“then perhaps God had no choice, if he wanted to create any persons at all, but to permit their embryonic minds to emerge and to begin functioning on their own in a context of ambiguity, ignorance, misperception, and even a good deal of indeterminism.”
“in many cases, we cannot be certain what is, and is not, logically possible; hence, we cannot be certain what God’s options were in creating individual centers of consciousness and in meeting the conditions of their ultimate happiness.
“For all we know, God had no choice, if he truly loved us and wanted us to achieve supreme happiness in the end, but to start each of us out in an environment in which we confront a host of ambiguities and the possibility of some very real evils.”
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Human Freedom and the Quantity of Evil in the World
“If it is not within God’s power to do the logically impossible, then neither is it within his power to make actual every possible state of affairs that he might like to make actual.”
“If there are logical limits to what an omnipotent being can do, then many possible states of affairs, no less than impossible ones, lie outside the bounds of his direct causal control.”
“The upshot, once again, is that God’s options in creation may have been vastly different from what some might have thought. Before thinking the matter through carefully, it is easy to suppose that an omnipotent being could have improved the overall balance of good over evil quite easily; he need only eliminate a bit of pain or a bit of misery or an evil choice here, and perhaps add in something good there.
“But in fact we have no good reason to suppose that any such simple procedure would have improved things at all. The point is not that ours is the best of all possible worlds,
nor is it that every evil is logically required for some specific greater good.
The point is that, for all we know, every possible world with less evil than ours and a more favorable balance of good over evil belongs to the set of worlds that God was powerless to create; hence, for all we know, God could not have improved things at all by the mere expedient of eliminating some of the evil that actually exists.”
[This gets long, but worth reading.]
“Try this thought experiment. Try to imagine what God might have achieved if he had eliminated all cancer from his creation while retaining exactly the same persons in it. Our experiment will not be at all technically accurate and may even be incoherent, but it may also be pedagogically useful. To begin with, then, let us delete from the actual world (in our imagination) all the pain and suffering caused by this terrible disease as well as all the psychological torment that both cancer victims and those who love such victims have experienced; then, let us delete all those goods—such as the courageous endurance of certain specific pains—for which the cancer is a logically necessary condition; then, let us delete all the free choices—and all the consequences of such free choices—that either would not have been made at all or would have been made differently if the actual world had been devoid of all cancer. As one can see, things quickly get complicated. If God exists and there is an afterlife, some of the choices deleted may be choices that result in eternal joy and happiness for some persons or indirectly for all created persons. But that is just the beginning of our experiment. To fill out our world, we must also add in all the options, all the free choices, and all the consequences of such free choices that would have been different. If some persons would have become more arrogant and vicious, that must be added in; and if others would have become more humane and charitable, that too must be added in. At this point our experiment breaks down completely. We cannot possibly know what free choices people would have made in a world without cancer, whether they would have become more vicious or less; nor can we know what options God might have had in working with these people.
“And that is just the point. Trying to figure what a world of free persons would be like in the absence of cancer is not like calculating where the planets would be today if they had been in certain specified positions last year. Even if we restrict our attention to physical suffering, we cannot know that the total quantity of such suffering would have been less had there been no cancer. If, in the absence of cancer, more people would have become more vicious, more likely to engage in warfare or to inflict suffering on others, the elimination of cancer might have increased the total quantity of suffering in the universe. God could, to be sure, have created different people or have placed those he did create in different circumstances or have given them different bodies. But once again, we face the same difficulty as before: how are we to know what the consequences of these more radical moves would have been?—whether, for instance, in other bodies we would have become more loving or less loving, more bored with life or less bored with life?”
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God, Freedom, and Human Destiny
“No matter how many eons it takes, he will not rest until all of creation, including Satan, is reconciled to him, until there is no creature who cannot return his love with a joyful response of love.” —Madeleine L’Engle
“I assume that God permits no evil, however horrendous it may appear to us in the present, that he cannot eventually overcome and turn to good; neither does he permit any harm to befall his loved ones that he cannot in the end repair.
“I assume further that, given a long enough stretch of time, the Hound of Heaven can overcome all of the obstacles that our wrong choices present, and he will thus eventually achieve all of his redemptive purposes; in that respect, he is like the grandmaster in chess who, though exercising no direct causal control over the moves of a novice, is nonetheless able to checkmate the novice in the end.”
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On free will and the concept of damnation:
“(i) The very idea of someone freely rejecting God forever is deeply incoherent and therefore logically impossible;
“(ii) even if such an idea were perfectly coherent, a loving God would never permit his loved ones to make such a choice, because he would never permit them to do irreparable harm either to themselves or to others; and
“(iii) the free will theist’s understanding of hell is, in any case, utterly inconsistent with the New Testament teaching about hell.”
“But if God is our loving Creator, then he wills for us exactly what, at the most fundamental level, we want for ourselves; he wills that we should experience supreme happiness, that our deepest yearnings should be satisfied, and that all of our needs should be met.”
“If I am ignorant of, or deceived about, the true consequences of my choices, then I am in no position to embrace those consequences freely…”
“I may reject a caricature of God, or a false conception, but that would be a far cry from rejecting the true God himself.”
“Indeed, the whole idea of someone choosing an eternal destiny, particularly a destiny apart from God, seems remarkably queer and utterly unlike any other choice…”
“Are we to imagine a single choice that, unbeknownst to the chooser, seals an eternal fate?”
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[My final comments]
- My son, Ken Jr, has been visiting us for a week, working from our home. He’s an atheist, who used to be a seminary student. We discussed all this as I was reading. He said Voltaire’s Candide pushed back on some of these arguments. (He’s also a pretty knowledgeable philosopher.) I dunno.
- I’m a simpler person. Evil just exists. Moral choice evil, and cancer. (My wife just had three skin cancers removed.) And broken legs.
Since it does exist, I’m personally left with only two choices (for me);
a) deny that God exists, and carry on with all my pain knowing that it’s all pointless and will never be redeemed/repaired/have any meaning;
b) accept that a Loving God weeps with us, and has promised that he will restore all that was lost, in spades. More than was lost will be restored (Romans 8:18). That it will all end up, for everyone that “they all lived happily ever after.”
I don’t need to know more than that.
All the rest is just so much biblical and philosophical guessing.
Pain sucks. And the Bible is full of saints crying out to God for answers.
WHICH GOD DOES NOT GIVE.
So whether it’s process theology, or Talbott’s answer… it doesn’t matter to me.
I shared this simply as a thoughtful attempt by a theologian who is a universalist to try to imagine what the answer to the question “why” might be.
My answer is to weep with those who weep. To bear one another’s burdens. To seek justice. To pray and work toward bringing the kingdom of God to earth.
DISCUSSION IS OPEN.
At Rest In Him 