In and Out of God - God and Suffering.

This marks the beginning of a most uncomfortable story. I will be sharing my journey through life, a journey where I moved 'In and Out of God'. Most people know me as a devout Catholic. I was a leader in a prayer group, preached at many retreats, defended the faith publicly without shame, seriously considered becoming a priest, did missionary work, and I became the editor of Vision, the youth supplement of the Catholic News in Trinidad and Tobago. 


I was hoping to save this bit for the end but I realised that some people can't read between the lines very well, and I prefer to be understood than anything else. My journey took me from agnosticism to Catholicism to a hippie-type Catholicism to pantheism back to agnosticism and finally, today I'm an atheist. To be clear, I am an agnostic atheist. I do not think that the existence of God is knowable, at least not currently, but I do not believe in the God I once did or any proposed for me to believe in thus far. 


The journey was not as linear as it would appear to be in the series but it was written this way for clarity and so that a greater number of people would find themselves within the pieces. The titles in the series all take the form 'God and....' because I have noticed that throughout life, we always find ourselves trying painstakingly hard to reconcile our ideas of God with some element of our experience of reality. It results either in a redefining of God, a new perspective on our experiences, or blocking out reality all together and having eyes only for heaven. I experienced all three. And so with that, we begin...

Topics
1) Frosted Flakes and Bloated Bellies - God and suffering.
2) God is good all the time! - God and morality

3) These Golden-Brown Pages - God and the Bible 

4) One unanswered prayer - God and prayer 
5) Just a theory - God and evolution
6) The Final Frontier - God and religious experiences
7) How I try to live my life now

Frosted Flakes and Bloated Bellies

Exactly how far back can your memory take you? Mine can't go far without becoming muddled. I can't remember much of my formative years and I marvel at people who are able to recall like yesterday many of the experiences they had as kids. I only remember snippets, unfortunately, and I want to share a few with you.

I remember praying. My family, from what I could remember, was not a very religious one. Of course, my mother and I would attend 'Children's Mass' almost every Sunday morning, 10am at La Divina Pastora RC in Siparia and I was part of the choir for a few months. Other than that, there was nothing particularly religious about us. We were just the average family, really. 

But, every night before I would lay down to sleep, Mummy would kneel with me at my bedside, teaching me to pray - "As I lay me down to sleep...". Gosh did this annoy the hell out of me sometimes, especially when I was dead tired. But I wouldn't say that out loud in fearful anticipation of a 'back hand slap' - so I obeyed. Over time, she stopped actually kneeling with me, choosing to supervise me from the doorway instead. Maybe it was her bad knees. Finally, she stopped that all together and trusted that I would pray on my own. Her trust was well placed because I found it increasingly difficult over  time to fall asleep without praying that God would take my soul in the case of my death. This, I guess, is where I started learning about God. 

Another memory that burns my mind with more ferocity than the former is that of eating frosted-flakes for breakfast in front of the TV each morning before school. It wasn't the image of the orange tiger on the frosted-flakes box that has kept this memory alive but the images I would see on the screen. You have probably seen dozens of black, little bodies with bloated bellies surrounded by dancing flies while warm, frosted flakes flowed down your throats just like I did. What a disconcerting feeling to have in the morning, but I could never look away. Were these people even...real? The white man, in his blue shirt and jeans, kept asking me to donate money to save one of these hungry children. But I was under 18.  

At the time, I wasn't aware of what was occurring in my feeding subconscious but I started forming concepts in my mind that I now recognise didn't go together when they became conscious to me. This awakening, so to speak, came when I was about 8 years old. I started to think about this God guy. I couldn't understand how a God who I prayed to every night, who I was told would protect me, who I thanked for the provision of food every day at school, would allow such wanton, worldwide suffering. Admittedly, this thought did not cause any intense discomfort until I started secondary school. 

As I graduated from primary to secondary school, my prayer graduated from "...I pray the Lord my soul to keep" to "Just in case you are there, Lord, thanks for the day and wake me up tomorrow. Amen." Just in case. I had started living as though there was no God but praying to him just in case, as though the God of the universe wanted to hear from me so badly that he would overlook my nascent pride. 

I did not have the words to effectively articulate my position in that period of my life but as I reflect on it, I realise that I was an agnostic Catholic. A bad Catholic...but agnostic none-the-less. Agnostic, not in the way I currently use the term, but agnostic in the sense that I didn't clearly know what I believed at all. I just continued praying out of habit and fear of punishment. I was probably not alone in this regard either. 

In the mind of the average child, reconciling the idea of a good God with suffering is an impossible task, not to mention a boring one. It's much easier to just resign thought here than to employ it. Growing older and getting smarter, however, didn't allow for the thought to be discarded. I decided to engage the questions head on.

I happened across this quote picture and was stumped by his logic. I needed to figure this thing out. 

As a believer in God, I wondered to myself:
1) Why does suffering exist?
2) How could a good God allow such suffering?

Why does suffering exist? 

Suffering is the word used to describe the unpleasant feeling of any form of pain, the result of known or unknown causes. When I started playing football at around 12 years old, I developed the infamous Osgood Schlatters disease that plagues the knees of many young 'court sweaters'. It caused great physical pain, and maybe worse, the emotional pain of not being allowed to play football for four weeks. This is a very simple form of suffering.


There are various levels of suffering as well. We can suffer the same experience at varying levels of intensity. My knees would pain the most after I played a game of football which would subside after a few hours of rest. Another example is the suffering we experience when we are hungry or thirsty. Our stomachs ache and sometimes a headache may manifest itself. 


The experience of suffering makes us want to tell other people in hope of gaining sympathy or even help if possible. Guys and girls talk to their friends about lost love and broken hearts. Poems and songs are written and we, the sufferers, read and listen as though it spoke exactly to our experiences. But why, oh why, does it exist in the first place? Couldn't the world just be perfect?


I turned to the Bible for answers. And where better to start than "In the beginning"? Genesis relates the account of creation, where God said "let there be..." and everything, all that we know came into existence. God created everything in stages, it says, and at the end of each stage, he looked at his most recent work and said that it was 'good'. 

Some branches of Christianity (or individual Christians) interpret this to mean that God created the world perfectly. 


Those who believe that the universe was created perfectly had some explaining to do. If it was created perfectly, how did all this imperfection and suffering enter? The only thing that stands between the perfect creation and the imperfect creation is the fall, the original sin of Adam and Eve as described in Genesis 3. The Bible talks about the effects this sin had on creation and on women. Now we have to toil to eat our food, the soil being reluctant to give up. Women, the one who caused it all, was cursed with pain during childbirth. Suffering, therefore, was man's fault, not God's. 


That is the theology I believed and it is how I made sense of my world. Catholic theology, however, gave a slightly enhanced, more attractive perspective. It believes that "the world is the very best possible for the Creator's purpose; it is relatively, not absolutely perfect." The world's perfection is relative to God's plans. It said that the 'design' of the universe which exists in the Creator's intelligence, was perfect but "in the material universe this realisation, exhibited in the purposiveness of each individual part conspiring to the purposiveness of the whole, remains imperfect and is but a vestige of the original design." 


The world, therefore, is an imperfect one moving toward a perfect end. An end where lions would lay with lambs and not fight. Part of this imperfect universe was the suffering that we all experienced. The suffering ranging from tabanca to natural disasters. The idea took root in me because it gave purpose and meaning to my own suffering and that of the entire human population. It elevated suffering from randomness and unfairness to being meaningful and divine. Every man, woman, child and mosquito was suffering all to the finality of perfection.  


Armed with this philosophy, I went out into the world, ready to do God's will. Unfortunately, my mind hardly ever rests. I was forced to re-think this philosophy when I become cognizant of a reoccurring statement I would hear people say. I would hear MTV award winners stand in front of the mic and thank God for blessing them with talent and I would read stories of people who testified about God's intervention in their lives through favourable examination results and restored marriages.

"I just want to say thank you so much, not only to God but to Jesus," Bieber said. "Because I wouldn't be here without Him. He's really blessed me. He's put me in this position. So I want to say thank you so much." Best Male, VMA.

The aforementioned philosophy of a world slowly crawling toward perfection was appealing to me because I did not factor in the idea of an intervening God. I too thought that God had helped me do so well in CXC, that he was the one who removed my shyness and that he converted my family because of my constant prayer. Then, if God could intervene in my life for these types of things, why didn't he intervene with really big problems like the wars in the Middle East or the black kids on TV? Was I really so important to him? I never was good at accepting undeserved love when I knew that it could be better shared in more deserving places with people who really needed it. 



How could a good God allow such suffering? 


Job's story is a gripping one for any human reader because you can find yourself easily within his existential experience. Job was described as 'blameless and upright' and a man of 'mark' among all the people. As it would be in any world that made sense, Job was also a rich man, blessed with loads of children and cattle. The majority of us could relate with Job's goodness. We may not be perfect, but we surely aren't wretched either. 


Satan, unfortunately, didn't take liking to Job at all. Satan told God that Job loved Him for 'nothing'; that if God were to take away all of his blessings, Job would abandon him. God mulled over this for a second and gave in. "Very well," Yahweh said to Satan "all he has is in your power. But keep your hands off his person." God gave Satan free reign to test Job's love and faithfulness to Him. Game, set, match!


While Job and his family were eating one day, not one, not two, not three, but four messengers came to Job in succession relating to him his predicament. Satan killed all of his animals, from cattle to sheep, and finally killed his kids. (It says that Job was at a meal with all his sons and daughters at his eldest brother's house while receiving these messages, but the fourth and final messenger says that his sons and daughters were killed while at his eldest brother's house by a gale of wind.)


The story goes on to relate that Job's wife told Job to "Curse God and die" because she could not understand why God was being so horrible. Job retorted "That is how foolish women talk. If we take happiness from God's hands, must we not take sorrow too?" Maybe it's beside the point that an upright Job would sign on to such a sexist collocation.

Satan smiting Job with boils as depicted by William Blake.

The next 40 chapters of the story tells of Job's arguing with his friends over the justice of God. In the end, God himself shows up in all his regalia saying "Has your arm the strength of God's; can your voice thunder as loud? If so, assume your dignity, your state, robe yourself in majesty and splendour." In other words "who is you to question Me?" 


Drawing inspiration from Job's story, some argue that God doesn't intervene in suffering because he is testing us. God is testing our faithfulness, checking to see how far our love for him would endure suffering and pain. It is true that when we are sick, we seem to lose the will to be good. It feels justified for us to let it hang and curse a bit or even be a little impatient. God, therefore, wants to see if we really love Him or if we're just putting on a show because he was treating us nicely.


I struggled with this thought. This isn't a nice thing to do at all is it? Just think for a second if your significant other were to say this. Imagine that your lover promised you that he would always be there for you, loving you, protecting you at all times as long as it is within his/her power. Now imagine this significant other standing idly by as you are being anally raped by Fleece Johnson. Then imagine Fleece zipping up his pants and going on his merry way while  your lover says to you "well done my good and faithful lover. You are now fit to spend the rest of your life with me." 

Yes. I can see you falling head-over-heels for your lover now that you are finally worthy of his presence. Right. If this isn't palatable in real life, why do we give ear to a God who says the same? You would probably call a person who does something like this to you an insecure bastard. But we don't do that with God. Love is like that. Love blinds you to obvious madness; it makes you come up with excuses for the failure of a lover, excuses that make the stomach of your parents who see the truth sick with disgust. It just so happens that with God, your parents probably love Him too. 


The more horrifying thing about this argument is that if it is true, God not only tests Christians who know who he is, he tests that bloated-bellied black boy who does not know his name. God sets a test for students not in his school, unable to even read and write. Something was definitely wrong with this picture.

43% of football fans attribute Tim Tebow's winning streak to God's intervention.  

The former argument shows a passive God who tests our love. Another argument is that God himself is not the cause of suffering but simply allows suffering to occur because he has the power to bring good out of it. Romans 8;28 says "We know that by turning everything to their good, God cooperates with all those who love him, with all those that he has called according to his purpose." In this argument, God brings good out of the bad but he does so only for his lovers. At least God actually intervenes but it is unfair that people who don't know him still suffered, especially since these people were unfortunate enough to be born in the wrong place. But I wonder, did God really intervene? If he did intervene, why didn't he just do so by removing the suffering in the first place?


Maybe the 'good' to be brought about by God's intervention is not a one-size fits all standard. Maybe he brings about good for me by giving me good grades but he brings about good for the poor children working in Chinese sweat-shops and India's diamond mines by sending them to heaven. Yea, that's it. Those kids go to heaven. But...what's the point of earth then? 


This was all getting too complicated. Why would God bring 4 million babies into the world each year, only to take them out of it before their first birthday? Trinidad and Tobago has an infant mortality rate of 28 per 1000 live births. This says nothing for the number of still-birth, premature, down-syndrome children; it says nothing about the mothers and fathers who have to suffer these losses or burdens, the expectant older brothers left with life-long disappointment. My cousin gave birth to a boy who has cerebral palsy. He can't do anything for himself, his head is always bobbing and weaving on its own accord. What test did these children have to undergo? Whose sins are they paying for? Adam and Eve's? Is God so unforgiving that all of creation have to suffer for a sin committed since the beginning of time and the only way out of the mess was to send his son to be a blood sacrifice to himself? If you sense the change in my tone you are gaining insight into how I felt. I felt angry.


If you are a believer, your psyche is probably attempting to ameliorate the disconcerting feeling welling up in your chest at the moment. You are probably thinking, "But Jesus died for me! He suffered too...". There is a word for this. It's sadomasochism. It's not pretty at all. I used to preach in detail about the Passion of Christ, toying with the emotions of the crowd, trying to guilt trip them into loving God. But when I sat and thought about it, I could no longer feel any love from the thought of a God who sent his only son to be tortured and killed to expiate my sins. I feel almost ashamed of my past self for thinking it a loving gesture. 


I am sure that if you can come up with more creative ways to show love to your friends, family and lovers, God could do the same without inflicting unnecessary pain upon himself/Son or any of his creatures. I wish God would just come take a drink with me you know? Some Smirnoff. I would have definitely felt God's love if he had died for me in pure Hollywood style, leaping in front of a bullet, or by pushing me out of the path of an oncoming bus, getting run over in my place. Instead, he died by taking my place on a cross, vicariously redeeming me from the punishment of my sins. I don't like the idea of casting my sins on anyone else. I always take full responsibility for my actions, good or bad. 

CS Lewis, a man who I credit with restoring in me a love for reading that ran away when I was a kid, argued in his book 'The Problem of Pain' that -


"Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself."

CS Lewis. I am indebted to this man. 

This is the culmination of a beautiful argument. What it means is that suffering is inescapable in a world where nature is ordered and free will is possible. Even in a perfect world, for example, there would need to be danger signs around fire. The ordered nature of the object makes it flammable and the fact that you are free to do what you want opens up the possibility of you being hurt by the flames if you choose to touch it. 


Free will also puts all of us at the mercy of each other. A person can choose to hurt me just as much as they can choose to love me. Lewis says "Free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having."


The argument rests on two explicit assumptions and one implicit. It first assumes that nature has an intrinsic order and that free will exists. It also implies that God gave us these two things so as to enable the possibility of "love or goodness or joy worth having." 


The assumption that nature is inherently ordered is not entirely true from a scientific perspective. Science is always discovering things that seem to defy previously held theories and laws of nature. We perceive the world to be ordered but it is an unscientific assumption. I am willing to let this one slide though because I am not a scientist and neither was Lewis and the point of his argument can still slip through here. 


Free will is also a debatable topic. Neuroscience and evolutionary theory have revealed that free will, is not as absolute as we once thought, and I have given up trying to think about it independent of neuroscience. I value the scientific approach because it is like holding up a mirror to our brain's functions. There, we can scrutinise it with more objectivity than by philosophical reasoning. Neuroscientists have discovered that our brains' waves reveal a large part of any decision we believe we actively make is created seconds before we became aware/conscious of the decision. In other words, the decision was made before you thought you decided. The study is not conclusive but it does put the once glorified free will on a more earthly level. 


In spite of this, giving free will a chance, I recognised that our 'free will' is limited by our knowledge, ability and available choices, which makes some of us more free than others. If you are a cripple, you cannot choose to walk. If you are not aware that there is food around the corner, you cannot choose to eat it. If the profession of being a doctor is not available in your country, you cannot choose to become a doctor. This limitation on our free will puts limits on the amount and type of evil that we can commit but also the love with which Lewis seems enamored. My cousin who has cerebral palsy can neither love nor hate me. He is indifferent to the world around him because the processes of his brain have been impaired. 

Free will is irrelevant sometimes. 

Again giving free will a wide berth, if I remember correctly from the Bible, God never seemed to have a problem with intervening in our choices. The Bible says that God "hardened" Pharaoh's heart when Moses tried to persuade him to free the Israelites. I used to glance over this story but I couldn't continue doing so. If God could intervene with Pharaoh, couldn't he have stopped the Parsley Massacre from happening? President Trujillo ordered his men to go to the borders that divided Haiti and the Dominican Republic and hold up a nip of parsley while asking the people living on the borderlands what it was. If they failed to properly pronounce it in its Spanish form, they were killed. Twenty thousand people killed just like that.  


Getting back to Lewis' argument, how exactly does this account for the suffering inflicted upon us by natural disasters? Lewis did not address this phenomena in 'The Problem of Pain'. All the arguments I have read that tried to address this problem tried to do the same thing - preserve the goodness of God and highlight the sinfulness of man. Original sin was said to have affected all off creation in a way that disrupted its ordained order.


The arguments always assume the existence of a good, creator God and a depraved humanity. This is a classic case of making your facts suit your pre-existing, independent theories. It's like a girl who tries to convince you that her cheating boyfriend really loves her; she comes up with some pretty cool ways around it but you, as a friend, can't help but feel sorry for her because you know that it's all bullshit. 


Now, Lewis' argument does have some merit. It acknowledges a simple truth that I think many are unwilling to accept, including me. Suffering is unavoidable. It is an unfortunate part of experience as finite beings in an indifferent universe. Understanding why there is suffering in the world does not need the inclusion of any idea of God.

The Simple Truth

Trying to reconcile the concept of a good God with the reality of suffering is a task that many have taken upon their own shoulders, each of them ultimately falling back on "you just can't understand God." I admit that it is quite possible that we just cannot understand the ways of God, but I am not willing to admit we should not try. And the fact that it takes intellectuals, pseudo and otherwise, to defend God's goodness in the face of a suffering child just doesn't add up to me. 

I can offer a much simpler explanation for suffering that requires no divine-nature interplay. Human beings are the imperfect products of millions of years of evolution. We have not evolved perfectly, only suitably to our environments which change over time, leaving us with vestiges of once useful, now burdensome traits no longer necessary for surviving concrete jungles. While we were evolving, evolution occured around us. Bacteria and viruses evolved and became more insidious with time. Mountains shot up and trees grew, Pangea separated into continents and we are left with limited resources for an ever growing population. 

Today, we may have enough food to feed the world's population, but this is as a result of industrialisation and capitalism. Left to nature alone, our population would never have grown this large. Malthusian theory with a slight tweek would have kept us at bay. Due to human genius and industry, we have learned how to mass produce and even though we probably have enough food to feed the world, the food is not evenly distributed. This is the result of unfortunate geography and demography. Some Christians say greed is the cause. Greed is not the cause of the suffering itself, but the removal of greed would definitely help. 


Nature is neither good nor bad, but indifferent. She runs along her laws without consulting us unknown tenants in her decision making. Sometimes her decisions turn out to be in our favour and we worship her, like thirty minutes of rainfall during a drought or stars winking at us on dark nights, reminding us of our smallness and making our chest tighten. Other times, nature walks past us like a brute in a crowd of plebs, brushing us aside with her strong arms as though we're not even there. When her bed sheets become uncomfortable, she twists and turns, the earth trembles and our houses fall. When her seas grow to warm, hurricanes restore balance and we are forced to restart our lives. We are the ants she steps on without noticing, ever so often we feed off the crumbs that fall from her table. She is an awesome and terrible hostess.


Conclusion


I am not sure where this leaves you, but it left me in tatters. I just couldn't, or didn't want, to understand it. Whenever I got ill from this point, I was put in the strange place between habit and reason. I would resist the urge to pray when ill as I normally used to. Some may interpret my unwillingness to do this a sign of arrogance, but I saw it as a sign of my honesty. I could not honestly pray to God for help anymore, and I'm sure if I did, he being omniscient and all, would have known I was not genuine.


"Either there is no spirit behind the universe, or else a spirit indifferent to good and evil, or else an evil spirit." CS Lewis - the answer he said he would have given had he still been an atheist. 

At this stage in my journey, I just accepted that God probably was too big for my head...but only for a little while. I came up with the brilliant answer - I just did not properly understand what was meant by the goodness of God :). Look out for the next part of the series entitled God and morality.