Thy Kingdom Come: Circles in the Midst of Spheres
How can we begin to justify suffering and evil?
A normal human being will experience a certain level of distress when observing the overt suffering of a living thing. Indeed, witnessing the suffering of a much more innocent thing than an adult human, for example, such as an animal or a child, more often than not, engenders in the observer a sense of injustice and despair in the natural order of things. Why should such things suffer when they have not done anything to merit such suffering?
I therefore invoke the time honored Deuteronomic Theology of History, which states “…very clearly in Judges: unless the people of the Covenant remain faithful and obedient to Yahweh, they will suffer the due consequences of disobedience, whether it be an overtly willful act or an unthinking negligence in keeping the Covenant promise.”
What we fail to recognize, however, is that our actions do not necessarily equate to consequences. In other words, not every reaction is an equal response to every action. If we do believe in an ordered, structured, and regulated Universe in which forces, laws, and structures are in place, anything we determine in defiance of them must be evaluated. For example, a fruit or an animal in an early stage of its development seems counter to what we deem “good.” Although this simplification appears naive in the face of suffering/evil, it is nonetheless appropriate IF we accept an ordered universe.
However, the Gentle Reader of my prose will issue an unwavering repugnance to my argument in light of what they feel is REAL. How can you discount my suffering, my pain, or the evil I have experienced in my life?? How?? I am reminded of a book by Abbott generically known as Flatland in which a 2D world experiences a 3D world. Any correlations cannot be made in any tangible ways because of the tremendous dissimilarity in form. Imagine being a circle and trying to relate to sphere. All you can see as a circle is the 2D feature of the sphere, so another circle, BUT, you lose out on all the other “data” that is there. I therefore postulate that in our lives, we cannot make absolute conclusions based on the limited “data” to which we have access.
Thus, when considering the meaning of life, we must reflect on what has to be in light of a universe governed by a perfect eternal engineer. If we hold onto this maxim, everything else must derive from it as a mathematician would expect in a proof.
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