evil

Evil in God's world is a painful problem, and so is the suffering of good people. How can we square evil and suffering with the idea that God is good and all-powerful? If God is both good and all-powerful, why does God let bad things happen to good people? Trying to answer this question is called "theodicy".

There are a few answers that traditional thinkers give, none of which satisfies me. First, in his Guide for the Perplexed, Maimonides says that humans can't measure good and evil accurately. Because our perspective is skewed, we cannot judge the balance of Good and Evil across the whole wide universe. To this I say: sure, some suffering is just mine, but that doesn't make it any less real. Even worse, some horrors are beyond debate.

The second answer is that God is unknowable - humans cannot understand God’s master plan. Really, that's no answer at all, just another version of The Emperor’s New Clothes. In the same way, only insensitive fools say things like “Maybe his brother died at nineteen in order to make room for someone else to cure cancer.”

The third answer is that an afterlife will balance the scales. This requires a belief in something extraordinary. Even more, an afterlife might be so far off as to be weightless in the balances of good and evil. So the “death of death” doesn't have much value to me today.

Then there's a very old explanation. You'll find it in Deuteronomy. It says there in chapter eleven that if people obey God, God will provide rain, crops will grow and we will eat. If not, we will suffer. Basically, that means that if you do good, you will do well. Our sins cause our suffering.

Of course, we all know that the world doesn't seem to work quite that way. We each know too many people who are pretty blameless and seem to suffer, get sick or die anyway. If we're really unlucky, we even know some really vicious people who seem to have a pretty easy time in life. Quality of the person and quality of the person's life don't seem to match up.

Maybe there's another way of looking at this. Maybe, our sin permits our suffering. If not for our blemishes, this world could be a better place. That is, if humanity didn't have flaws that make us greedy, cruel or worst of all, indifferent, then we wouldn't suffer so much. Each person suffers for the sins of everyone else. What's more, being a bad person has its own punishment. Truly wicked people are empty inside. "The soul that sins shall die." (Ezekiel 18:4; G. von Rad, Genesis, pp. 207-210)

Why are we flawed? I don't know. Maybe God couldn't make us any other way. I think that God wanted us to be free to choose: good or bad, even living with God or living without God.

why be God?

Unlike ancient myths, the Hebrew Bible never explains why God creates humans. Jack Miles, in God: A Biography, suggests that God is incapable to recognizing God's self. So, God creates humans in God's image, to be like a mirror through which God can see God.

Unfortunately, those early humans immediately disobey God. When Adam and Eve eat from the Tree of Knowledge, God turns them out of the Garden. God's relationship with humankind, God's beloved creation, doesn't get better. The people in Noah's generation are so wicked that God must wipe them out; then the same thing happens to the people of S'dom and Gemorrah.

When God finally picks Abraham and his descendants, they fail God in new ways. Shortly after God's revelation at Mount Sinai, the People of Israel decide to make an idol of a molten calf. God is enraged, and thinks of destroying Israel to make a new covenant with Moses alone. The process of God trusting new people, only to regret God's faith, continues throughout the Hebrew Scriptures.

As a mentor pointed out to me, God is the most disappointed character in the whole Bible. So, I had a strange thought: Why did God want to be God? Why did God start creating at all? Was God lonely? I don't have an answer. I suspect it has something to do with God needing to understand God's self through humanity.

This seems to fit with my growing sense of awe about the world ("Wonder", January 4, '08). Maybe the question isn't, Why is there evil in the world?, but Why is there good in the world? Why is there anything? It's a miracle we get to be here at all. God has a demanding, frustrating and thankless job. Maybe we need to start being more grateful.

e8

Last November, Garrett Lisi, a surfer, physicist and snowboard instructor, published a paper called "An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything." In the paper, Mr. Lisi begins to show how everything we know about the world may be described by the relationships of a 248-pointed geometric object called an E8. Lisi says, "I think our universe is this beautiful shape."

Lisi's theory can't be tested until a new super-collider comes on line in Switzerland - hopefully next year. His theory looks promising. '08 might be the year of the E8, I think, and then we'll all be saying "Holy crap, that's it!" just like Lisi did when the idea finally came to him.

As a theologian, anything we say about the universe is a statement about God. Although God is greater than the universe, the universe is a direct expression of God's self. And if Lisi is right, the universe can be explained by relatively simple details. Everything that exists comes out of fairly straightforward interactions among a few basic particles. It's supremely simple and marvelously complex, all at once.

Whether Lisi is right, or the String Theorists are, the E8 confirms my faith in God. The universe has architecture and an architect. God is in the E8 and the creator of the E8. It seems that we live in a world of unfathomable richness and limitless design. Like the whole of God's universe, God is infinite variety springing from humble principles. Like the E8, God is simple, varied, deep, and complex.

wonder

It's hard for me to be satisfied. I'm always looking for more and better. It makes for stressful relationships with friends and family. It even makes it hard to like myself. Last week, when I said the Friday evening prayers that bring in the Jewish Sabbath, I asked God for the patience to appreciate everything that came my way that day, and not to wish for more than that Sabbath brought me. I prayed for satisfaction.

I said a prayer and it worked. That Sabbath was very pleasant, and did not seem lacking in any way. As I walked home from school the next day, I realized something. I've been looking at the world with the wrong idea in mind. As I said in "My Process" (October 7, '07), my work in theology is based in a way of looking at the world that asks why there is evil in the world. Then, I try to find an understanding of God that suits my knowledge about evil.

Maybe my understanding of God is all wrong. Maybe the question isn't "Why does evil exist?" but "How are we here at all?" That is, maybe I can't ask God for an accounting of the innocent suffering in the world. I should just be grateful that I get to experience anything, pleasure or pain. It's astounding that I exist at all. Think of all the physics and biology and pure chance that had to fit together to bring me to the point of living to ask any question about God's world.

My late friend had this sense. People called Joel an optimist. I don't know if that's what I'd call it. I'm a pretty happy person, even with my share of worry. What he had over me was faith. I would like to swallow a bit of his faith, and I want to be open to the real pains of this world. I hope that this new idea will fill me with wonder. I'm trying to be open to that.