Part Six

The Necessity of Pain and Freedom

Have you ever look out into the world and reflected on how much suffering there is. Whether its millions starving or millions struggle with emotional pain or physical pain. Have you ever thought about God and said that if this is your world I don’t want to know you? If you are so good why is there so much pain and suffering.
The problem is that we have a faith knowledge that God is good, but we also have an awareness that the good we know doesn’t fit with what we see in the world. This is what is usually called “the problem of evil” there seems to be a contradiction some where.

Adding to the problem of judging God’s goodness is the fact that whatever we know of goodness is due to God’s enablement. As our creator, all our abilities come from him even our ability to judge goodness.

God cannot be mentally inconsistent

That God cannot and does not do what is contradictory has important implications for the problem of evil. To create is a good thing and to create humans with free will is a good power as well. But God cannot grant free will and also guarantee that no one ever uses it to sin. One thing I hope to prove in this article is that freedom and pain are very valuable to this world and are in fact good in the sense that they have a good purpose. Not that pain gives us pleasure, but that it has a moral reason for existing. Without true freedom you do not have an existence.

When God created Adam and Eve they had freedom and they used this good power to chose against what God had commanded them not to do. Once one has chosen to walk away from the good, the only way to bring one back before they destroy them selves is to give a sensation that leads one back if one is willing to the good and that sensation is pain. Pain guides us to back to the good and teaches us many things. That does not mean pain is good in itself, but can be used for a good purpose. For some the doctrine of original sin will be troubling but the bible does say that when they sinned there character was from then on flawed and ever human being born from them was born with this imperfect sin nature. From that one act God cursed the earth and mankind with pain and this environment we now live in is a more difficult environment than the one Adam and Eve first had before they sinned. This pain and environment has it purposes.

God cannot be morally inconsistent

Because Good is perfectly good we should never expect that God would compromise his righteous character to do “good”. When we expect that God always overlooks evil to show kindness we are demanding that he give up the good of justice for the good of kindness (God’s justice is pretty sharp, if you trash goodness you will die).
But such a demand overlooks the fact that justice is it self a form of goodness. Bringing consequences upon the serial rapist or genocidal dictator is a good thing. Bringing consequences for lesser sins is also good and we cannot accuse God of failing to be good when he causes or allows pain as a just consequence. Either God takes some one’s life out because of their evil deeds or he looks over them with his kindness, which lets pain come, which can be used for good to transform people back to the good. This way lets people exist longer and gives freedom the power to change for the good.

Does God have a duty to do good

The idea that a good God ought to have made the world differently or at least managed it differently is largely based on notions about his duties. But our ideas about duties are based on our knowledge of human duties and we cannot necessarily transfer them to God since he is unique. Our duties are based on what is owed. We owe God obedience to his commands and his commands are based on his character. We ought to love for example because God does. But what “ought” God have to do? God doesn’t owe any one anything in fact if he hadn’t created every finite thing it wouldn’t exist. Every thing created owes its existence to God and this is due to his Grace. Everything we have, all our talents, and awareness of love and goodness in all our different thing we do come from him. The one thing about Grace is that it is undeserved. We must remember that God is the highest standard for goodness, he is eternal goodness. We may be tempted to think that God had a duty to make a different world, but he doesn’t. Our life is a gift and if one person lives only to 5 years old instead of 95 it is solely from his grace that this person has had the gift of life for 5 years. No age limit is a right due to them. All goodness comes to us from pure Grace.


Is this the best possible world?

Have you ever wondered if this world is the best it could be, or if it could be better in some way. The first thing we must ask is “best for what?” Best for realizing our personal ambitions? Best for revealing truth to us? Best for punishing moral evil? What most people really mean is the best for promoting happiness for them self. But is that the highest purpose? The best world should be one, which accomplishes the best end and does it using the best methods. As for humans trying to define what would be a better world it is very difficult. We know we need freedom and we know that pain leads us back to the good. But also tragedies in life can bring out a lot of greater good at times. Good can come out of bad situations. So it is not all that obvious how one is to measure what would be a better world. Its not easy to determine if this world would be better if a particular tragedy had never happened or if only 5 people died instead of 50 as one cant measure the total goodness gained and experienced until one see it from the end or from Gods perspective from the beginning to the end. If this is the best world to get to the perfect world, then both realms are part of God’s perfect plan.

Why pain is necessary for physical life

Imagine a world with no pain, would it be the greater place? The reason a harmless world is not a better place is because we are fallen and need it to restrain and shape our characters. Without pain in a fallen world there would be nothing to stop us from doing evil or even caring about it. Look what happens to people who become dictators and have nothing to restrain their behavior. The second reason we need it is that without it we would damage our physical bodies. One only has to read story’s of people who suffer from congenital insensitivity to pain. One baby could feel no pain and at night would eat her fingers off and paint the crib with her blood. As the child got older her parents tried smacking her to stop her eating her fingers off, but she could feel no pain and just laughed at them. Eventually the father left as the child was just like a monster. As this child got older and older she did more and more damage to her self and in the end her legs had to be amputated and she spent the rest of her life in an institution. Pain is vital to tell us our bodies are being damaged and prevent further damage. Pain is a gift that warns us of dangers. One can only think what life would be like if we had no emotional pain, we would kill everything in sight that got in our way.

Why we need pain to grow to maturity

A world safe enough to be painless would be a place with few possibilities for our development. For us to live in a world with no pain God would have to directly intervene in our world constantly. It would have to extend down to minute details of the way things happen. It would be a world that was so frustrating that we would learn nothing from our experiences or achieve much. For example imagine we wanted to build a house, the tools you would work with could not be sharp enough to cut anything because then they would be sharp enough to cut you. The materials could not be to stiff as this could give it edges that could hurt some one. Do we want to live in a world where we achieve nothing and God makes and provides everything, sounds rather boring to me. We could never learn from our mistakes, as we would be stopped before we could even attempt something. What we personally suffer as well as what we see and hear in others comprises a great bank of knowledge that helps us make the most of this worlds possibilities while avoiding its troubles.

Why we need painful predictability

Some bad things happen in life because the world’s physical processes have to operate regularly. Gravity works this way, electricity and chemicals are all good but if we get in the wrong relationship with them we will get hurt. These laws of nature are fairly predictable and if we use them right we will not get hurt. Our ability of pain is what guards us from abusing these laws as experiences will teach us to stay away from them.

Why we need unwanted consequences

Another problem with a world in which God ensures that no one gets hurt is that we would never see evil for what it is. If there were no unwanted consequences we would spend our lives doing evil. God could again intervene every time and block these deeds but then there would be no awareness of the difference of sin or righteousness. The great value of love, joy, pleasure and goodness would not stand out as any value at all. It is the sting of pain that seems to intensify the qualities of the good that make us love them.

How our world keeps us from Selfishness

There is a further problem with a world in which God would prevent all physical pain. As imperfect beings abusing our freedom we are continually tempted to be self-centered. Have you ever meet some one who has always got what they wanted, while always being loving and self-sacrificing for others? No. In this world we can not always get what we want. There are delays, frustrations and disappointments. The worlds natural processes do not bend to our will rather we have to accommodate ourselves to our environment. After the fall God told Adam that life world be hard, it might have been a hard judgement on him, but it keeps the human race in line to think of others and show love, respect, forgiveness, patience, tolerance and joy for other peoples happiness.
So while the world is not deigned to cater to our whims it is a place that can build our moral character.

Living the good prevents much pain
Much suffering is due to foolishness of character. People getting drunk having car crashes, beating their wives and so on. Most people figure out how to avoid physical dangers, but few go on to learn deeper knowledge of the moral dimension of our world. The reasons of so much suffering seem to remain hidden to most people. They lack simple wisdom and show no respect for the good. This does not mean that good people will never suffer, as we know pain has it purposes. But the way of the wicked and foolish is darkness and they do not know why they stumble.

Is any pain pointless?
Is there any pain physical or emotional that has no purpose at all? Even if we cannot understand every reason why something happens, it could just be the way love and compassion is drawn out of others to serve peoples needs. Maybe some people are suffering servants in the hands of God. Their life and troubles are the only things that would shape you and your character to demonstrate love to them. Its one thing to say you care and love others, but can you live it out? Chronic pain can have a ripple effect far beyond one life. Those immediately around the person can become more compassionate, sensitive, and grateful. It can produce compassion even in strangers. It can motivate some in society to develop cures and preventative measures. All suffering has an opportunity to shape our characters in doing good to others. This world is the training ground for heaven.

What good are disasters?
Natural disasters are the most spectacular of natural evils. A lot of natural disasters are due to human failure to do what they ought to. The 2004 Asian tsunami killed 270,000 people yet it was predicted by a geologist at the California Institute of Technology who had studied the region for over a decade. When it came clear that government officials would not listen to his warnings he went directly to the people distributing 5,000 posters and flyers and speaking to churches and schools. Moments after the quake hit, most of the nations around found out that their governments had failed to take warnings and upgrade their warning systems. Though tragedy blinds us to them they often bind people together and force them to work together, breaking barriers of race, class and national origin. Also our abuse of our environment distorts the way it should function.

Part Five

True Tolerance

We live in a world where every body thinks they can live by one virtue and not the rest that being the virtue of Tolerance. We hear the claim all the time from many different groups, lifestyles or personal passions “You’re so intolerant of people views”. But do we have to tolerate everything and what “ought” we have to tolerate? Also what is a Virtue?

Our culture has distorted the understanding of what virtues are of which tolerance is one of them. For now we are told that the meaning of tolerance is ethical neutrality. We must accept that indifferences are good and if we do then we are call “tolerant” and if we don’t approve we are labeled as being “intolerant”. But is the purpose of tolerance to by pass our ethical judgements and accept everything? This we know cant work and the fatal flaw in this understanding of tolerance is not hard to find. Suppose that tolerance really were nothing but a kind of indifference. Shouldn’t we at least be consistent in our difference? And if we are consistently indifferent, then we must be indifferent about tolerance itself. Which means tolerance can mean anything we like and if there is no objective standard of right and wrong the claim that one is not being intolerant is an irrational statement. The fact that they don’t tolerate that person view which they dislike show that they are not being very tolerant. So it just seems to be that tolerance means something a little different than moral neutrality.

Virtues are not just rules, they are built in character dispositions, and they are objective and aid and inform moral choices. It is an objective good to for us, towards a right relationship with other goods. True tolerance is not an art of tolerating, it is the art of knowing when and how to tolerate. It is not forbearance from judgement, but the fruit of judgment. We may disapprove something for the love of some moral good, the key is practical wisdom. Like every virtue, true tolerance interacts with all of the other virtues.

If tolerance is an objective good virtue then there must be an objective moral standard to guide our judgment virtues. This objective standard of right and wrong is Gods moral law. There is an objective standard and we must tolerate those who fall in error or make mistakes in their learning due to their development of good character. Evils and human weakness must be tolerated in just those cases where their suppression would involve equal or greater hindrance to goods of the same order or any hindrance at all to goods of higher order. As J. Budziszewski says “Consider a father who values nothing but kindness. There will be something lacking in his kindness as well; utterly unable to give his children pain for any reason, he will never allow them enough responsibility to fail in any undertaking”. If there is not an objective standard of right and wrong in ethical matters, not preferences or tastes on what ice cream you like, then tolerance is meaningless.

Some times true tolerance will deny oneself things that are innocent in them selves if others can’t bear them. It is about looking for the highest Good for the development of moral character. The question must be asked, “what kinds of life are good?” they are good when lower order goods are judged according to intrinsic goodness that meaning the higher good. Some things that are of the lower type can be good, but if use wrongly are not good.

A Government fails when it declares that all must treat people with equal concern and respect in a neutral way. If this is good for society then the Government is not being neutral about the good life. Neutrality is a meaningless law and some may say that “more than one way of life is good” implying the diversity of good makes it relative. But just because there are more ways then one way does not follow that no way of life is bad. Does the diversity of good melodies refute the principle of harmony, and confirm the pleasure of noise? What about the skeptic who denies the objective standard and says “No one can know what is really good for human beings, you cant impose this standard on us”. Well if the skeptic cant know what is bad for humans then he cant be so sure that anything the state does is bad and if you cant be sure how can you object to the objective standard.

Our culture struggles so hard to make rational moral statements because it rejects’s the existence of an objective moral standard. Some acts may give us pleasure, but that does not mean all acts are good for us. Having compelling desires does not make something right. I mean people use this argument to allow the acts of sadism, masochism, cacophagy and so on, but you never hear it proposed as an argument against heart felt murder. If free will is an objective good thing to have then it must work according to the intrinsic objective moral standard. That being a lower good working towards a higher good. The above argument is what ground’s human rights, humans are intrinsically valuable because of the objective standard of goodness and value which is grounded in the metaphysical necessity of Gods nature and image.

When if comes down to the breaking up of the family unit and gender confusion and a culture that is driven by pleasure rather than commitment or seeking higher goods it is not wise to shout at those who don’t tolerate these acts of unfaithfulness and confusion.

All pleasure if it is “objective normal pleasure” that strives to develop a higher moral character, which is good for society as a whole is what we should be openly tolerate about and promote. Pornography and graphic sex dehumanizes people to mere objects or commodities that can be brought and thrown away as pleased. This does not seek the development of objective goodness for all people. Again this is neutrality without any care for the common good of mankind. The same with abortions, it takes no concern to be tolerate of others peoples right to live and prosper.