The Problem Of Pain

Roses are red.
Violets are blue.
Sugar is deadly,
and so are you.

Fooled you. You were ready for "sugar is sweet". Well, it is; but that isn't the whole story on sugar. Sugar is also deadly, but nobody was thinking in those terms when the verse first appeared. Who imagined that sweetness and death could be so closely connected? What else can we say about sugar? It's sticky. It's an antifreeze. It's a cheap dietary source of energy. It's a mood altering substance. It is used in the making of alcohol. It has made slavery profitable. It causes tooth decay. None of that, though true, belongs in a love poem.

Here's another love poem.

Whoever does not love
does not know God,
for God is love.
(1 John 4:8 New Revised Standard Version)

It has been said that God is good: powerful, wise, persistent, just, intentional, active, trustworthy, and reliable. The poet chose here to speak of love, which may indeed be the best part of goodness. We need a place to keep our thoughts about goodness. God is that place, an empty symbol that we fill up with the lessons of experience as we struggle to survive.

Good-bad duality leaves us with a question: why would an all-powerful, just and loving God allow bad things to happen to good people? We can answer with elaborate speculations about Christ, Satan, Heaven, Hell and Eternal Judgment, or we can learn from experience and admit that the ancestors may not have got things completely right. To explore that possibility, take a thought about God and turn it inside-out or leave it out of things altogether and imagine how the world would work.

Take justice. A just God would reward virtue and punish evil. If that were not so, or not always so, would the world work? As a matter of fact, it is an excellent description of how the world mostly works. Justice does not apply to viruses and bacteria competing for nutrients in the ocean, or to mature trees reaching for the sun and casting shade on saplings below, or to elk fighting for reproductive dominance. Justice has evolved in our species as a way of stabilizing human societies, and that has happened on this speck of dust we call Earth during the last click of the cosmic clock. Justice improves our fitness for survival in the same manner that hollow bones make it possible for birds to fly. We haven't perfected justice yet, but it has given humanity such an advantage over other organisms that we are in the process of sterilizing the globe, which begins to look like injustice. Sweet and deadly. We need to re-think the meaning and reach of justice.

Trust and obey. We have presumed that God is reliable, which means if you do things a certain way, you get a certain result. What if you did things a certain way and got an unexpected result? Well, as it happens, that is normal. Doing something a certain way may improve the odds of getting an expected result, but there are no guarantees. Consider the alternative; God doesn't take bribes and dispense favours. God's indifference to the pleas of our enemies sounds positively virtuous. But if God can be trusted, our enemies should expect God to treat us with the same lack of consideration.

The alternative to divine justice is indifference. Life is a lottery. Occasionally you win. At some point you lose. Our belief that God is reliable is based on an error of intuition called confirmation bias. We take note when we get an expected result and ignore those times we get a different result. When the church collapses while the faithful are praying, that is God being consistently arbitrary while people delude themselves that they can get a free ride. Maybe people should learn from their mistakes and build stronger churches.

The problem of pain is that there is no problem. There is pain, which is the driving force behind evolution. There is pain which we avoid by doing things a certain way. Imagine a world without pain: no being eaten and therefore no eating, no disease or accident and therefore no death, therefore no survival of the fittest and therefore no people, a world where nothing happens because everything is as it should be, completely uninteresting and nobody present to take notice. A world in the care of a God you can depend on, sweet and dead.

Love has evolved as the answer to the problem of pain. Pain is the reason love has emerged from the uncaring chaos that birthed everything. Love and pain are partners. You don't get one without the other.