You are reading The Tower of Babel, Part One. You can leave a comment or trackback this post.
Posted on May 10th, 2008 by Chris.
Categories: Chris, General/Misc., Philosophy.
There are many objections to Christianity. Some of the most well-known:
While many people have raised and tried to answer these objections, let’s take this in a bit of a different direction. If these are legitimate objections to Christianity (and let’s assume they are),
why not redesign Christianity to remove those objections?
Well, here goes.
We’ll start with suffering. Assume the following postulates are true:
The answer to this problem is absurdly simple. Since God can do anything He wants, He can simply will that humans are in a world where they do not suffer. All the things that cause suffering in this world–tsunamis, torturers, earthquakes, etc.–would simply vanish, and be removed.
Let’s look at possible objections to this amendment and responses. If any of these holds up, we’ll need our new, more perfect world to address the symptoms without causing more suffering.
As an introduction, we’ll look at all of these before attempting to redefine Christianity.
1. Suffering is necessary for human growth.
The basic premise is that human beings were meant to experience difficulty in life because it challenges them to be better people. Humans even subject themselves to such hardship voluntarily, so it’s not entirely out of the question to imagine that God might choose the same.
The questions we must ask are: First, why can’t we be as good as we can be without the use of hardship; and second, will we really be able to account for everything that happens to us as something meant for us to grow?
a) The first question is pretty easy to answer, from an intuitive perspective. The army puts its soliders through basic training; colleges put premeds through hell; parents don’t give their kids everything they want; sometimes we even voluntarily endure suffering. So we can be reasonably sure that hardship can be a good thing for growth.
b) The second question–is everything really going to make us grow–is an obvious objection. Why should hundreds of thousands of people, many of whom have never heard of God, be swept off the face of the earth? Instantaneous death does not leave much room for personal growth.
Sometimes hardship can offer valuable life lessons, however most of us would agree that, if we were benevolent Gods, we would control the suffering and limit it, much like parents don’t discipline their kids in ways that are permanent (i.e. kill them). Getting arrested for stealing would be ok; a hurricane killing millions without warning wouldn’t be permitted by our new God.
2. Human suffering is caused by the choices of humans, not God; God gives humans free will and that is why they suffer.
This is also a legitimate explanation, and it has some grounding in the Adam and Eve story. However, as in argument 1, it ignores the obvious counterexamples: If a murderer kills an innocent man, why should the innocent man suffer? If a natural disaster strikes, how could one say the victims are responsible and not be considered a lunatic?
In fact, to legitimately use this argument, one must take it farther. Not only are humans liberated, to do as they please; but further, they are put in a liberated world, where natural laws are free to act as arbitrarily as they wish. The question to ask if we embrace this theory is this: Why would God release himself from control of the natural world?
Any world that exists as different from God begs this question.
3. Without suffering, there would be no understanding of pleasure or happiness.
This is a question that involves a bit of psychology. What is happiness? We could probably call it a mental experience that the mind wishes to remain in.
If we as humans were always in a state that we wished to remain in, we would never have a desire to do anything–an Eden-like situation. While this generally kills all ambition and growth, in a perfect state, wouldn’t both be unnecessary?
4. God wants us to suffer or doesn’t have the power to stop it.
One way of looking at this situation is by arguing that suffering simply isn’t that important. Perhaps, as humans, the suffering we can experience is minuscule in perspective. This doesn’t offer much, if any, solace, to someone who experiences disproportionate grief of any kind; but why should the suffering we experience be the worst possible, just because we can’t imagine something that makes it look pleasant in comparison?
Reconstruction
There are three primary paths by which, we, as God, could make a world without the things to which we as humans object.
1. SuperJust World
If we make a world with sentient beings who do not suffer, then we can presume that we cannot inflict suffering to make them change. We would then potentially have beings who do not develop, or beings who have only rewards and no punishment. (Is the absence of reward the same as punishment?)
If we assume there is no arbitrary suffering, then we have a world where a being can succeed by being perfectly rational. (”I do X because God gives reward Y.”) This would be a good time to bring up one of the unsaid assumptions that underlies the writing so far–the distinction between rational morality and developed morality.
As human beings, we have a sense that we do certain things not because they are rational, but because they are right (whatever that means). If we actually believe that there is a difference (Kant would), then having a world that is perfectly rational prevents us from ever knowing whether a person has a developed morality or is simply a rational sociopath.
Does total rationality lack some element of humanity? (Is there some element inside us which judges things as good or bad without using logic, and is it key to our humanness?) This question is one we should answer before we can accept the Infinitely Just World, but it reflects in a titillating but incomplete manner, on the difference (or similarity) between us and robots.
I could create Infinitely Just World now, simply by creating an electronic simulation that has rules and organisms that follow those rules or pay consequences. That we find that unsatisfying is either a result of: having made a machine (humans) that is too complicated for us to be disappointed by, or by a fundamental difference between a human and an algorithmic being. But, to understand whether or not a Just World would work, we need to know what that difference is.
And we also need to know what good it is to create humanity in other beings in the first place.
And why we would want to develop them or have them do the right thing on their own in the first place.
2. Sorta Just World
This argument is a bit of a cop-out, so I won’t press it. But it raises all the questions of Unjust World (to a lesser degree) and all the questions of SuperJust World (to a lesser degree)
3. No World?
[originally started January 19, 2006, 23:58]
1 comment.
Pingback on August 24th, 2008.
[...] last time we discussed this, the subject was the problem of suffering on earth. This time, we will address [...]
Comments can contain some xhtml. Names and emails are required (emails aren't displayed), url's are optional.