the·od·i·cy \thē-ä-de-sē\, noun, (modification of French théodicée, from théo- the- (from Latin theo-) + Greek dikē judgment, right): defense of God’s goodness and omnipotence in view of the existence of evil.
(http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/theodicy)
The issue of theodicy means grappling with evil and innocent suffering in the world, even as you want to believe that God is all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good. This is the main problem of all theology. If it seems that good people suffer (and bad people get away with it), how can we say that God is a very good God? If God knew what was happening, wouldn’t God stop it? Doesn’t God have the power to do something?
There are a many answers people that people have offered since the Hebrew Bible, ("Evil", January 18, '08), but the simple truth is that any theodicy is easier to say when you live in a generally good world, and evil is relatively rare, or at least far off. That is, I’m safe in my suburban home, and even though my 37 year-old friend has leukemia, and I know about the genocide in WWII, it’s not affecting me every moment of every day. Even my experience of suffering when I was in the Peace Corps in Cameroon was sufficiently insulated not to rock my theology too much. We can look at evil as something limited that we just need to “solve” for those exceptional cases. If we can make the suffering of Sudan fit into our safe lives going to work and to church, then we’ve squared the circle of theodicy. And it doesn’t require truly re-ordering our perspective about God to make it work.
Working as a chaplain at an urban hospital takes away my detachment. Every day, I’m confronted regularly with gun-shots, cancer, sexual assault, illegal migration and grinding poverty and homelessness. There’s no way to view it as “out there” because it’s in my own city, just across town. And what I see is that evil and suffering are not exceptions - they’re thoroughly wrapped up in life. It wasn’t that my friend got this unlucky cancer and then died young, it’s that cancer is part of living each day. So are torture, floods, and gang violence. We can’t be here, or anywhere for that matter, without suffering. In a way, it’s not suffering at all; it’s a natural by-product of living. Death is the back on the coin of birth.
So, what do I do with God?
I’m experimenting with something new. I’m willing to say that God isn’t all-powerful. God and God’s universe are very, very wonderful, and generally very good, but not perfect. We live in a “pretty good” universe, and the Master of the World is flawed, strong but not all-strong. My bet is that God is very powerful, the most powerful part of the universe, but has some weaknesses. God is competent, supreme, but not ultimate. God couldn’t make a perfect universe. Not one that worked, anyway. The astronomic evidence seems to support this. A “perfect” universe, where all the matter was evenly distributed, wouldn’t have stars, planets, or people. It would be a residue of dust. God’s universe has to be uneven for anything to be at all.
So, God isn’t perfectly powerful. God is generally a well-meaning God, but doesn’t always have the ability to stop every bad thing. Does this make God still worth praying to? I think so. It’s like ants in an ant farm. Don’t you imagine those ants think their human minder is god-like? Isn’t little Timmy incomprehensible to that ant colony? Don’t they think of him as supremely more powerful, awesomely bigger than they are? I bet they pray every day that Timmy doesn’t forget to feed them again. Maybe having a less than all-powerful God implies that there are other powers beside God. Here, I don’t think so. Maybe there just isn’t enough power in the universe to perfectly manage all the ions, plasma and quarks that started with the big bang.
We’re living in an imperfect world, ruled by an imperfect deity. It’s not so scary. Being here is a nice thing. For example, every single person at the beach yesterday was in gleeful awe watching dolphins play in the surf at sunset. Once you realize that your suffering isn’t personal, just a regular part of getting to be here, then it’s actually a relief.
Sunday, July 13, 2008
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I haven't done the work you've done in Cameroon. I haven't done a hospital chaplaincy, at least not yet. My experiences of suffering and disaster are rather things that I know about; distant and safe, like you described your own experiences of evil before your chaplaincy. I think that in many ways, that probably disqualifies me from an opinion. Nevertheless, opinions and worldviews are as much a part of human living as are fortune and disaster, and I love having mine reshaped, challenged, honed, etc. Despite my lack of qualifications, I'll throw my own view of Divine perfection against your claim that God is not perfect, and we will see what we can make of it.
Your view of God, as you described it, is consistent within itself, and it still leaves God superior to all of creation. But it does not, of course, allow God to be the ultimate being, beyond perfection, that Judaism traditionally needs God to be. You are seemingly comfortable with that. I wonder how many of your congregants/ students/ patients will be?
Okay, my own view of God as perfect:
This world, as you said, must have entropy as a fact of its nature. Otherwise, we would have no time or space or separate being.
Although all things that exist exist separately from each other, everything is interconnected by various aspects of their nature. They all have the same origin in the Big Bang, at which time all was one singularity; They are all made of the same subatomic particles; they all interact with each other and affect each other. This is what can be observed scientifically, but it still leaves all matter and energy being highly interconnected and interdependent.
But then, Martin Buber would leave us with our Radical Amazement at the grandeur of such a universe; how it could exist at all! How it could have all come from one infinitessimal dot! How there could be no chronological time before the Big Bang, since time was developed as a dimension of the physical universe! But what brought the dot into existence?
Spiritual intuition, and not simply the inability to grasp and therefore invent a First Cause for our own sanity's sake, can be sometimes forced open to sense that there is a Mind, a Soul, that is the origin and essence of all of this; that all that exists is bound up in oneness beyond even the Big Bang's singularity!
Faith in that also brings individuals a great deal. I've noticed, on a small scale, that people who are generally trusting of the Universe or of God; emunah of trust rather than of theological belief; tend to have things go well for them, and to intuit well what decisions to make. Conversely, I've met people who are utterly pessimistic, have dirt-poor self esteem, despite whatever strengths or talents or kindness they have, and everything does seem to go badly for them at every turn.
There, I see room for believing in a God who hears prayer, and for a God who rewards good (I see goodness as an inevitable part of faith. That alone, though, would take forever to explain....)
I don't make this the whole of my theology. I would never take it to the extreme conclusion that all suffering is our own fault. Like you said, it's part of the mix. But faith, when it doesn't prevent suffering, does give the strength to live with it and to survive it. Read Victor Frankel's "Man's Search for Meaning!"
As for how to reason that a perfectly just God would allow genocides to happen, or for natural disasters and diseases to destroy the lives of innocents, I don't answer that question. If I had a perfectly self-consistent theology, then I'd have a very limited view of God! I think a good theology has to have room for "I don't know, I just have faith."
Entropy is a part of existence, like you said. Where I see room for a perfect God is that only in an entropic universe can there be room for growth. Without death, suffering, disaster, destruction, nothing new is born, nothing new is made. There's no evolution without it.
Okay, that was long enough to be a blog entry in and of itself. But then, you posited a theology, and a theology can't be answered with a single short paragraph!
When I do my own hospital or prison chaplaincy, we'll see how well my own theology keeps together!
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