There is an advantage to asking silly questions: they never have simple answers. How we solve the problem of suffering is a prime example, for the question is almost impossible to interpret. But as I sat in the corner of a packed lecture hall, listening to the idle clatter of a philosophical combat that veered and tacked every which way around this fraught topic, I think I finally understood the question: I understood that it is unintelligible.
The problem of suffering is that it is unproblematic. We know too much about it, it is too sneeringly matter of fact. You lose a limb, and your nerves object; you lose a loved one, and your heart objects. When children have broken bones, we know that it results from an injury; when the abused have broken spirits, we know that it results from abuse. We know how to deal with it too, when it can be dealt with, and we know that it cannot always be dealt with. Everyone is agreed that the best thing for a long wait is a particular discipline called patience, and most people could tell you a thing or two about how this discipline is achieved. Everyone is agreed that the best thing for a cut is to cover it, and the best thing for a grievance is to air it. Everyone knows that one solution to the pain of losing friends is to have no friends, and that another is to take your mind off it until it takes itself off your mind. If a Buddhist tells you that the first solution is better, and a Stoic tells you that the second is, it is not because there is a ‘problem of pain’. The pain is the unproblematic part. What they disagree over is the problem of probity, which is quite a different matter: philosophers tell you, not what can be done, but what they believe ought to be done.
As a result, I believe many in the lecture hall were confused by the question in hand, ‘whether Christianity or Secularism better explains suffering.’ What kind of an explanation does suffering need? Everyone knows where suffering comes from – as the Secularists were quick to point out, it comes from our needs and desires being thwarted. How we ought to deal with suffering? That depends on whether you believe in the Christian worldview or the secular worldview – which is another question entirely. Which worldview removes suffering? Neither claims to. Which offers better solutions to suffer? The solutions are all on the table: there are band-aids in both worldviews, there are consolations in both.
The debaters, with a truly chivalrous determination to keep the audience entertained, seized upon the bare scrap of philosophy remaining, the question of which worldview allows us to bear suffering more easily. It was, of course, a purely academic question, and had very little effect on anyone’s beliefs, since no one wants to simply take the easy way out, but it did the trick, it filled three hours. The Christians at once insist that their faith solves the problem better, because it provides hope. Immediately, like absentminded walkers who find that they have stumbled into a locomotive unawares, they find themselves shooting off in their panegyrics of Christian hope and protestations against secular hopelessness. And not a word of it to the point; and not a word of it helps their case. If it is a mere matter of who has hope, no one can claim that secularists do not: one does not have to be a Christian to be an optimist. The secularists were not noticeably sadder than the Christians, even if the Christians were notably joyous. There are other hopes than heaven. There are also forms of despair familiar to Christians and unknown to secularists.
But more importantly, the secularist usually finds in the hopes that Christianity affords far less attraction even than they say they do. For when they say they find it attractive, they mean they like the idea, but not that they are drawn to it. I, for one, quite like the idea of a pie: but if the pie is in the sky, I confess with sadness it would not attract me powerfully enough to get my feet off the ground. And so it is with Christianity: so long as one thinks it all pie in the sky, one will not move an inch towards it. One might even move several inches away from it, on the grounds that it is a cowardly proposition; that to face the facts as they are is far nobler than to grasp at doubtful hopes. Even by Christian standards that would be a reasonable response, for Christians are not cowards. To many in our time it seems as fitting for Christians to be apologetic for believing in heaven as they are for believing in hell. Indeed I think that the fuliginous sect that proclaims the damnation of all and the malice of God would receive a readier hearing in our world than the one that proclaims the salvation of some and the damnation of others. The world does not think that there is pie in the sky. But it is sure that if there is a pie in the sky, it had better be perfect and unimpeachable: though the world still won’t believe in it, because it seems unnecessarily, almost disgustingly good. Even the idea of heaven accompanied, as in the blighted Christian version, with a hell, is too good to be true. No one wants to solve ‘problem of pain’ in that style, by thinking up the best of all possible worlds, and insisting that it is real. People feel ashamed to insist, in the face of ghastly sufferings we cannot even imagine, that things are better than they appear. But the Christians assert that things are better than they appear; and they invented apologetics for the sole purpose of persuading people that they have good reason for taking such an unthinkable position. For many Christian hope is not the first hook that draws them to the faith, but the last hurdle before they are willing to accept the faith.
While the Christians are condescending to portray Christianity as a kind of temptation, for the sake of answering this embarrassingly academic question, the secularists are also tangled in their shoelaces. They have (doubt it not) already started on the injustice of God, in allowing suffering; and the cruelty of God, in ordaining suffering; and the caprice of God, in ending suffering only for some, and only after letting a good deal of it through. They think this will secure the debate for them; they shall go away satisfied that no sane person could believe in God. Once again, not a word of it is to the point. For a Christian – no, rather, anyone who affirms the goodness of the gods – has already considered these things, and decided they are no object. They have suffered like everyone else, and seen sufferings in others, and concluded that they can still believe in God. The most dashheady businessman in the world is compelled to sleep; the most pessimistic person in the world might feel compelled to believe in God. As for that avalanche of an entrepreneur, we might snag him by the sleeve as he cascades from the threshold of Meeting Room 73A, and explain to him that if he is to achieve maximum efficiency, and become the force of nature he boasts of being, he ought to drive from his head the crazy notion of lolling insensible on a featherbed for six hours every evening. We would expostulate on the absurdity and underline his error and drive home our moral with a thousand blows – that sleep is fundamentally opposed to action. But he will not listen. He will sweat and temporise and fall back on the fact that nature demands he believe in sleep as well as work. And in the final agony of desperation, when he is trammelled and cooped like a bear in a corner, he will savage us with a statistic about the effects of good rest. For though the poor man has not had the leisure to understand the science behind sleep, he cannot get around the practical effects. And in the same way, the theist might be hammered and hounded with the inconsistency between an evil world and a good God, and they will perspire and backtrack and trip over their words, and chime to high heaven that nature demands they believe in God – and when they are driven to the brink of doom, they will savage us with a statistic about the myriads of sane and suffering people that have believed in God. They might not be deep enough philosophers to offer a solution, but that does not mean there is no solution. Even the knottiest riddles are not always insoluble.
Theists are quite aware that their assertions are paradoxical, and none are more paradoxical than the Christians. The secularists are those who started from the Christian position of the West, and, swept along by a fanatical passion to affirm nothing paradoxical, have ended by affirming nothing at all. The fact of pain, and the practical solutions to it, which are agreed upon by all, are enough for them. Short of a miracle their position is impregnable. The only thing that can be said against it is that it is also unsatisfying. And if they are satisfied with it, nothing can move them.
The Christians, on the other hand, say a great deal more about suffering than anyone else. If you are to find fault with them, the only fault to be found is extravagance. They say that suffering is evil, that it exists in spite of the ancient and deep-seated goodness of all things, but also that it perfects all things. They say that there is one being who is beyond suffering, but that he deemed it better to get around this limitation. They say that God does not like pain, but chooses that it should exist: they believe that a resurrection is something grand, so they believe that death is worthwhile. They believe in pain that is punishment, pain that rebukes or threatens: but they also believe in pain that is a purification, and that the perfect person is the one who suffers the most. They believe in justice, and that all sorrows will be recompensed; but they also believe in injustice, and that many sorrows are undeserved. They view suffering under almost every light imaginable: they talk, like the East, of ‘the evil that is in the world because of desire’; they talk, like the Ancients, of the petulance of ‘the Ruler of this Age’; they talk, like the Muslims, of the will of God; and they talk, like the Germans, of the death of God. At the end of the day, their gospel is the end of all pain, but their emblem is a gibbet.
The secularists pride themselves on saying nothing metaphysical about pain; the Christians pride themselves on having the best and broadest metaphysics of pain; and from a purely physical perspective each of them ‘explains suffering’ in basically the same way. The Christians think that on this issue the secularists are flippant, and the secularists think that the Christians are mad. I have learnt one thing from the debate: that each party believes that they provide the easy way out, in the matter of pain, and that no one cares for the easy way out. We cannot shake our absurd, impractical and inexplicable passion for courage and for truth.
theparsnipoftime 