The one that wont go away

By Helen Watson White in All Sorts

thoughtful comments on the perennial problem of why there is evil in the world

I was ready for Joe Bennett's article in the ODT
on November 26 called "Some folk surpass all understanding". He was ridiculing Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury, for his response to the Paris terror attacks. Welby had, in his own words, been "left asking why the attacks happened and where God was in the French victims' time of need." Bennett finds it incredible that it's taken so long for Welby to experience the sort of doubt so many others have felt before, over the suffering caused by senseless acts of cruelty -- "Man's inhumanity to man", as Robert Burns put it, in Man was Made to Mourn. If you don't believe in a God of Love, maybe ours is a pretty bleak kind of existence anyway; but if you do, your faith is going to be severely tested: irrational barbarism just doesn't gel with the idea of Love reigning in the world.
Bennett's column is called Sleeping Dogs, from the proverb "Let sleeping dogs lie." But he's unable, as I am, to let this particular dog sleep on. The problem of evil is the most serious issue we have to cope with -- and it won't go away.
I said I was ready for it, however, having just finished a book by Ron Hay, Finding the Forgotten God: Credible Faith for a Secular Age, which won the 2015 Ashton Wylie Award. Hay meets the challenge of all things incredible, such as the problem of suffering, and "the classic objection to faith first expressed by the Greek philosopher Epicurus
around 300 BC: 'Either God wants to abolish evil and cannot; or he can, but does not want to. If he wants to, but cannot, he is impotent. If he can, but does not want to, he is malevolent. But if God is both able and willing to abolish evil, then why is there evil in the world?'"
Ron Hay turns the question around, quoting St Augustine: 'If there is a God, why is there so much evil? If there is no God, why is there so much good? He heads his chapter on the "The Problem of Suffering" with the same point made in another way, from Lord Hailsham's 1990 book A Sparrow's Flight: "I do not believe in an uncaring deity. I do not believe in an irrational universe. I believe in goodness, truthfulness, loving kindness, beauty, generosity, loyalty. They all exist and they are qualities which demand an explanation as much as malevolence, cruelty, ugliness, meanness, and treachery... We must not forget that enjoyment is as difficult a thing to account for as misery."
Bennett's article used the phrase "wilful acts of cruelty", bringing in the idea that humans have free will, and choose to do these things (or not). This capacity to choose in another direction from natural instincts is an ability which marks them out from animals, with whom they otherwise have so much in common. Ron Hay points out that a great many of the world's evils are man-made, and I would add that in this decade the realization is finally dawning that some of the "natural disasters" of floods (caused by deforestation and erosion), cyclones and other weather extremes (caused by burning of fossil fuels) are man- made too. So that leaves a smaller proportion of the evils, like purposeful cruelty, that are due to human choice.
Cruelty: I often think about this when watching nature programmes where strong, healthy and extremely beautiful predators fasten upon equally beautiful but much weaker, smaller creatures and hunt them down in order to tear their flesh apart with strong, healthy and extremely large teeth. The whole of the animal kingdom is designed to work on the basis of fruitful function: evolution rewards our abilities to hunt and kill by the fact that they work for the furtherance of the species, by gaining us food. Where is the tenderness? Only, perhaps, in
the action of a mother licking her cub after she got a bit mucky around the carcass from which she was being taught to feed.
Love also has a fruitful function. Just as cruelty begets further cruelty in a vicious cycle of revenge, love begets more love, in what playwright Bruce Mason called a Virtuous Circle. But how does such a virtuous circle begin, in an animal kingdom that has evolved on the principle of dog eat dog? Good question.
I like Shirley Murray's phrase "energy for good", which can be stretched to mean "energy for/of God", meaning Love as it works in the world, as it empowers those who are weak, comforts those who are suffering. Helping is a human capacity, just like hunting and fishing, and it was present in the aftermath of the French attacks, the London attacks, the Christchurch earthquakes. Because we have at our masthead the principle, "Finding good in everyone, finding God in everyone", I have to consider yet another question, not Where was God in the victims' need? but What is there of God to find in the perpetrators? -- these versions of 'everyone' we are meeting for the first time. If I were able to have one of the perpetrators come into my home, not knowing they were terrorists, I have no doubt I could sit with them, share food and drink, even offer a bed for the night, shake hands, ordinary things. In so doing I might find the humanity in them. But that's never going to happen without a context. We are separated by age, gender, culture, language, religion, experience, geography -- everything you can name. We would not meet on a 'level playing field'.
That's why my kind of church would -- and does -- spend all its energy trying to level the field, to make contexts in which people who are different can meet, and share their humanity. What's this humanity? Not just a category in nature, but something extra, it means compassion and goodness, 'that of God', as the Quakers say. Or, to put it in a less grand way, they could meet and be themselves, and discover they're not very different at all.
Helen Watson White