Try this. Faced with a daunting or even insuperable “problem of evil”, attempt the mental exercise of constructing an imaginary world without evil. It leads to interesting conclusions. The challenge to faith presented by some sudden catastrophe is usually in the form of “How can there be a God who loves us if He allows this to happen?”

It is a concrete form of the old paradox, that an all-loving God would want to prevent suffering and an all-powerful God would be able to do so; therefore the existence of suffering proves that God cannot be both all-loving and all-powerful. So what does this hypothetical “world without suffering” look like? Much suffering results from mechanical failure, for instance from metal fatigue in an aircraft part which might cause a catastrophic breakage leading to tragedy. So does our all-powerful, all-loving God ensure that no metal parts ever fail from metal fatigue, and by, the same token, that no engines ever fall off because somebody forgot to tighten a bolt?

Clifford Longley    London Tablet

But what then is the point of maintenance, or research into aircraft safety? We are postulating a world where, every time some unforeseen misfortune overtakes an aircraft in flight, a miracle is performed automatically to put it right. And we have to say the same about every other form of human activity. In every single case, God stubs out our cigarettes before they can cause a fire, stops our ladders from slipping when they are not erected correctly, guarantees that no matter how fast we drive, we are always within our stopping distance (a kind of divine ABS braking system.) We can certainly throw away our breathalyzers, for God has agreed to ensure that no drunken driver ever kills a child again.

It is, in short, a world where the law of cause and effect has been abolished, and where our every mistake (or sin for that matter) immediately and invariably sends out a supernatural 999 call for a team of invisible angels to come and put it right.

Actually it is worse than that. The principle of cause and effect is the fundamental reason why we find the world rational: do this, and that follows; do it over and over again, and we have a scientific law by which means we can begin to make sense of the world. Furthermore there is an extraordinary (and surely divinely arranged) association between the rationality of the world, and tile rationality of our minds. If the world was irrational, because of the constant interference in its workings by miracle-working angels, our minds would surely be irrational too. Would we even exist?

1 Comment

Stephanie
Mar 6, 2011 8:14