The PROBLEM of PAIN and the PROBLEM of PIFFLE: Part One
The PROBLEM OF PAIN and the PROBLEM OF PIFFLE
Part One: Monotheism and Atheism
Here follows the first of a six-part series of columns exploring the metaphysical and philosophical implications of monotheism versus atheism, comparing the paradoxes each must address.
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Monotheism involves one crucial paradox. Atheism involves many.
The crucial paradox confronting the monotheist is how to account for the evils permitted to afflict the innocent in a cosmos under the sovereign reign of an omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent Creator. This is traditionally called the Problem of Pain, and it is not a question the faithful Christian ought lightly to dismiss, nor leave unanswered.
Nonetheless, the paradoxes of atheism are more serious ones, since they are self-contradictory to the root, afflicting every branch and aspect of his world.
The arguments below include monotheism in general, in every form, not Christianity in particular. The particular claim differentiating Christianity from other monotheistic philosophies or faiths, i.e., the messianic divinity of Jesus of Nazareth, need not here concern us.
Atheism denotes disbelief in God, but it connotes a wider skepticism about all things not open to empirical verification, not just supernatural reality, reincarnation, resurrection, angels unfallen or fallen, but also, if taken to its logical extreme, faculties of free will, conscience, creativity, vices and virtues, objectivity of abstract universals, the certainty of knowledge, the nature of being, the axioms of existence. None of these things are known to the empirical world.
Hence, if the atheist insists that the lack of empirical evidence of spiritual reality is itself sufficient to justify disbelief in spirits, the same lack must likewise justify disbelief in all other non-physical realities: this includes the disciplines of metaphysics and logic, the nature of truth and knowledge, the relation of symbols to reality, the voice of the conscience, the justice of the laws, the standards of art, the revelation from the divine. The consistent atheist disbelieves all. One thread pulled out of place unravels the whole tapestry of reality.
To be sure, there is many a man who calls himself an atheist because he is disloyal to the Church or hates Christ, but adopts mystic occult belief, such as theosophy, or mystic cult belief, such as communism. These inconsistent souls are not concerned with the logical coherence of their worldviews, and need not concern us here, aside from a note to remember such bewildered sheep in prayer. A heretic is closer to the truth than an infidel, and a witch closer than an atheist, because even a crosseyed view of spiritual reality is better than blindness.
The atheist worldview begins with doubt about God, but, if the principles of the worldview are carried out consistently, results in doubt about everything. This includes doubts about the faculty of reason by whose auspices doubts are raised and sated.
Moreover, a Christian confronted by the paradox of pain who has no sound answer at hand can and must trust in heaven’s providence as a nursing child trusts his mother. He can take on faith the assurance that there is an answer, even if currently unknown to him. His worldview applauds faith as a cardinal virtue. Hence his act of faith need not hinder the Christian life.
Contrariwise, any atheist reaching the final step of doubting reason itself must take everything in his worldview on faith, but faith is the one thing his worldview condemns with most reproach, and calls blind. His doubts hinder his life, or cripple it. An atheist who takes atheism on faith is not an atheist.
There are, to be sure, other puzzles and paradoxes monotheism must answer, whether Christian or otherwise, and mysteries of the faith where human reason is left unsatisfied, but experience shows that these are either specific cases of the Problem of Pain, or are trivial, on the level of asking whether God can create a stone too heavy for Him to roll away, a heart too stony for Him to soften, a cross too heavy to bear.
The dilemma of a benevolent, omniscient, omnipotent creator ruling a universe where evil reigns is this: To make God the author of evil calls into question his benevolence; to say the evil arose beyond his expectation calls into question his omniscience; to say the evil arose due to an adverse power, without his permission, calls into question his omnipotence; to say that evils arise not of his making calls into question his role as Creator. Evil visiting evil men in due proportion poses no puzzles; it is when evil visits the innocent, who deserve no such pain, that the paradox arises. It is the question of Job.
To say the evil is judicial, punishment for the sin of Adam visited on his children, offends the basic principle of justice that the innocent cannot suffer for the crimes of the guilty. Of course, on the other hand, any universe that allows the innocent suffering to atone for the guilt of others allows for Christ to save all souls.
To say the suffering to be medicinal, a pain that is needed to affect a needed improvement in character, cannot answer for those cases where no improvement is needed, or possible, as in children or madmen, and cannot answer why a Supreme Being would need to resort to evil to make good come of it. On the other hand, a Supreme Being cannot be confronted by any evil, no matter how dark, from which he cannot make spring forth a greater good, infinitely bright.
All of these arguments and rebuttals have endless counterarguments and counter-rebuttals in turn. To explore them is beyond the scope of my present column, perhaps beyond my scope altogether.
Myself, I believe the answer is for the most part ineffable, something to be lived, not open to being put into words, for the answer is a living being and a new life: Christ is the answer. No other answer, aside from the living person of Christ, satisfies Job’s question.
There are, nonetheless, many centuries of sound theological thinking addressing the question of Job. Unfortunately, even the most insightful theological or legal argument to justify the ways of God to Man, cannot soothe the human heart, if divine justice, be it ever so pure, has the same appearance to the tear-blinded eyes of men as pure injustice.
Even a good theological answer is not good enough when one is in despair, overcome by pain, suffering dismemberment, blindness, wounds, or crippling blows, physical or mental, scourged by sin, betrayed by false hopes, bearing scars for which there is no balm on Earth. The answer given Job is not an answer, but a series of questions, and, strangely, it is Job’s inability to answer God’s questions that wins him the reward of divine blessing, and his worldly goods are restored to him.
A woman crippled by lifelong illness, a bride betrayed by a faithless lover, a parent cradling a dead child, every evil from famine to plague to war to loneliness to despair are evils the Christian faith says will be cured and made whole, if not in this life, in the next, and all tears be wiped away, when the mercy and justice of the Judgment Day arrive, and all the dry bones stand erect, wrap themselves in glorified flesh, and live again.
It is a promise impossible for men to believe.
The pain of crucifixion, the agony of thorn and scourge and iron nail, the hideous engine of torture called the cross, cannot be imagined to somehow transform into sign of glory and goodness, and the cross become an instrument, not of torment, but healing, not of death, but life, not of life, but life eternal. Can our sufferings in this life undergo a similar transmutation? When we reach the Days of Light and sit crowned and throned at the feast, will present pains seem not only worthwhile and necessary, but, indeed, will in those days earthly pain be seen in hindsight not to have been pain at all? Lost loved ones will be on hand to comfort us for our loss.
To this writer, at least, such a miracle of change is impossible to imagine. A man in the grip of a nightmare cannot envision the clarity of waking. But I am comforted by the promise that what is impossible for men is possible for God.
Such is the paradox of pain all men of faith must wrestle. On the other hand, a paradox equally as grave and deep confronts those without faith, and it fathers endless further paradoxes.
The evils abovementioned afflict the innocent in the cosmos of the secular man as well. The innocent are not innocent, because there is no law to keep, and no judge to find them not guilty.
The cosmos of the secular man’s imagination is an uncreated cosmos, meaningless, mad and blind, running onward like a clattering, hissing, roaring, lifeless machine of orbiting stars and rotating molecules, change and decay, one huge millwheel of indifferent eons grinding all life to dust, obliterating all monuments, until the final star is quenched in universal night, and even the last proton decays. The fate of all things is to be forgotten, of all hopes to prove vain.
Those insincere atheists who flinch back from the empty-eyed horror of the dead and roaring cosmos perhaps comfort themselves with hopes that astrophysics may one day prove an eternal return will run entropy backward into a new cosmos, an endless pearl necklace of one continuum after the next like the snake who eats his own tail. Since insincere folk betray their atheist convictions. Such as they have merely retreated into theosophy, or a primitive form of faith simpler and less serious than Hinduism, where life is an endless wheel. Bending time into a hoop, however, if anything, promises a hell as inescapable as Dante’s, because the suffering of life never ends.
Less simplistic atheists might toy with notions that myriad continuums might have one leading to a last condition where entropy is defeated, death no longer obtains, hence the signal of approaching death, called pain, has passed into numbness and nonbeing.
Such an atheist is an atheist no longer, but a mystic. Even if he cloaks his mysticism in pseudo-scientific terminology, he is repeating an ineffable and esoteric conclusion, not based on empirical thought, no open to empirical proof or disproof. It is also not unlike the teachings the Buddha, which hold out hope for escape from endless life’s endless pain by entry into timeless serenity without selfhood, called nirvana.
Let it not be supposed I here mock the poor, benighted atheist for his self-contradiction. To the contrary, stepping from atheism to mysticism decreases the number of self contradictions needed to prop up his foolish model of the universe. The inaccuracy of the model decreases. The airtight prison box of materialism now has a crack in it. Hence, there is also greater chance to return him to a human view of humanity, and perhaps to save his soul.
To seek nirvana, if wrongheaded, is, at least, a first step back to faith, for further struggle and farther insights might lead the soul of such a mystic to wake up to enlightenment, and wonder at whose almighty word the light within his soul was called into being, and called good.
But otherwise, in the secular infidel’s cosmos, there is no sovereign overseeing the roaring mute juggernaut of the universe, but there is still pain and suffering; albeit now there is no hope whatever that the pain has meaning. Nothing has meaning.
If nothing has meaning, asking heaven for justice is gibberish. Hoping for hope is hogwash. Seeking answers is bosh. Finding the inner meaning of life is malarkey. There is nothing to find.
If nothing has meaning, then reason is vain, wonder is futile. All philosophy, including this one, is folly, all thoughts, words, deeds, and ambitions are but pipedreams and delusions, distractions and diversions, hogwash and humbug, folderol, fiddlesticks, and guff.
It is not just that life is pain. Life is poppycock and piffle. None of it means anything.
Saying that, in a meaningless universe, a man might make meaning for himself is merely a turn of phrase without meaning; for if meaning is something he makes, rather than finds, it is subjective rather than objective, a hobby rather than a calling. Hence man’s search for meaning is a self-deception at worst and a pastime at best. Anything man makes as it suits him, he unmakes as it suits him.
A meaningless universe means you are trapped in a cosmos-sized iron coffin no one made, condemned to entropy and oblivion. There is no way out and no place to go. The lid is shut.
There is no reason why this is so. It is not a joke nor a punishment. Fate did not decide it. No one and nothing decided. It merely is.
The only “meaning” in life beneath the coffin-lid is whatever you can find to pass the time away in the dark while the air lingers.
This problem has no traditional name, because the ancients were not foolish enough to imagine an unguided and unliving universe, or to conjecture nature without supernature, or to name oneself as a body without soul, but, if I may, I propose this paradox be dubbed the Problem of Piffle.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
