GOD AND EVIL

A Cyrilsophy

GOD AND EVIL

Why suffering O Lord if you are there?

Introduction

The agonising question as the how a world of so much suffering and pain could be reconciled with a God of love and power is one of such magnitude than many thinkers (especially those of a more mystical bent) suggest that perhaps the best response we can come up with- and the only one worthy of a person of religious faith- would be humble, thrustful silence. But such apparently hasty retreat behind the bulwark of mystery and blind faith can seem equally offensive to many of our contemporaries. Nor can we blame too easily those who scoff at such a response as a convenient escape that tries to cover up our ignorance, unfeelingness and laziness. It is also a safe bet to say that this phenomenon of evil and suffering is the biggest stumbling block to religious faith in the world and that every day more numbers are added to the list of lapsed believers and drop outs from the ranks of those whose naive religious formation has not been able to help them integrate a painful human experience of suffering or the death of a loved one into a personal conviction concerning all-powerful and all-loving God!

1.1 The word “theodicy”

The controversy has indeed spawned a specialised term to refer to the whole issue, theodicy. It comes from two Greek words, one of which, theos, is an old friend which means, as we all know, God: the other, dike, means justice. In other words, theodicy would be a word formed in parallel with jurisprudence and the law courts, where a defence lawyer would try to justify (prove innocent or just) someone against whom some charge or the other had been introduced. In effect, the philosopher would see himself as the self-appointed lawyer to God, trying to acquit the all-loving and all-powerful divinity of the charge of the colossal mismanagement of the cosmos. The whole endeavour smacks of the arrogant and the presumptuous (not to mention the blasphemous and the impious), in the sense that a puny human being has abrogated to himself the need to rush to the defence of the infinite whose behaviour as seen by us from our limited human perspectives, has been found to be negligent! Be this as it may, it was the German rationalist Gottfried Leibnitz (1656-1716) who coined the phrase and preserved it in the title of a book… whence it passed into vocabulary of most major European languages.

But however much we might regret the implications of the term, we cannot deny that it points, albeit clumsily, to a serious question that we can’t afford to brush aside too easily. If we understandably baulk at justifying God, we certainly can try to understand God’s “ways to man”, as Milton put it. If there are proud and irreligious theodicies, there can also be humble and sensitive approaches to this mystery which we are struggling not to comprehend, but apprehend. This is all the more so when a fair-sized part of our effort consists in clearing up mistaken and misleading assumptions on which much of the issue is based. If we refuse to even wrestle, however unsuccessfully, with the God and Evil enigma, our faith might helplessly find itself mired in sinking sand in a moment of crisis.

1.2 A problem or a Mystery?

Many thinkers prefer to speak of the problem of evil rather than dub it a mystery. This is because they are averse to the penchant of religious leaders who try to squirm out of having to answer difficult questions by involving the useful cover-up of mystery! thus, ignorance and lazy cowardice is given a respectable cloak of pseudo-religiosity it’s all a mystery. Ours not to question why, ours but to believe and die!

However, I would still persist in referring to the issue as a mystery. But here I am not using it in the usual sense of “something too complicated for our limited minds to understand” and hence left aside as not meant for us to trouble ourselves about! rather, I am using the term in the sense of Gabriel Marcel. I call evil a mystery in the sense that I do not see it as a baffling riddle, a disorder which I view from the outside (in other words, a typical problem in the Marcelian conception), but as a disturbing reality that has its roots within me! Evil is not a mere matter of “the wicket world out there” with its unjust structures, false values and criminal acts. Their lurks within me a selfish craving, an urge to use others for my pleasure or benefit, a drive to exploit those weaker and poorer than myself:  the call of evil outside of me finds a responsive chord within me. It is a sobering and easily-forgotten truth that when we wrestle with horrendous fact of evil and wickedness, we are struggling to make meaning out of a powerful aspect of ourselves. indeed, a serious plumbing into the depths of our own self-seeking urge will more likely throw a lot more light on its nature and origin than a detached survey of it from outside.

1.3 Gathering things, Old and New

There remain some questions to answer and pretty radical ones at that. For instance, why is there within us a tendency to evil at all? Whence does it come? Could such a natural tendency, involving a drive for selfishness, come originally from God? why. indeed did God make us free at all, granted that he had the foreknowledge to see how we human would abuse this awesome potential? And what about all those other evils that can’t be blamed on a perverse misuse of human freedom-cyclones, floods, earthquakes and so on? What about diseases like cancer, which is all too often strike wholly innocent people, who have done nothing to bring on the malady? What about little babies being born deformed or handicapped? Was it really necessary for God to have given us a world in which there would be killer viruses and microbes that could cause lingering, painful deaths? Finally, why did God make us embodied? After all, it is only because we have bodies that we can feel pain, sicken, grow old and eventually die. All this would have been avoided if God had created us bodiless spirits, like angels. Then we would be immune to suffering, disease and death. We must grapple with each of these questions in turn, upsetting though they be.

1.4 Reviewing God’s omnipotence

God is omnipotent, or almighty, to use a more Anglo-Saxon word. But all too often, people think that this means that God can do “anything at all” square circles, a whole which is smaller than a part and even (as some people think is the case in christian doctrine of the Trinity) 3=1! But this is definitely not the case.

God cannot do anything that involves a flat contradiction. To do that God would have to contradict his/her own nature which is also truth. God cannot make square circles and all that sort of thing, just as God cannot sin! The fact that God cannot do these things, as we shall see, does not stem from some lack within God, but from something self destructive in the thing itself. 

Now, the fact that I can sin and God can’t, might make it seem, at first sight that I am freer than God- I m able to do something God cannot bring Himself/ Herself to do! A little reflection should help us to realise that the ability to sin Is not so much an expression of freedom as resulting from deficiency of freedom! Freedom, remember, is a means to an end: liberation, because we are not fully actualised or liberated, it is possible for us to choose something which brings us fulfilment in only on isolated area of our many-faceted existence, while ending up in harming our total personal growth (in other words, such an act make us less liberated)

We will try to show, quite soon, that God cannot make finite persons who are not embodied, not placed in an evolutionary world (a world where things are not finished products) and so on. For God to do this would be equivalent to making square circles or round triangles. If God could have done otherwise making square circles or round triangles. If God could have done otherwise but did not, then one can raise valid doubts about God’s goodness or omnipotence. But such was not the case, as I hope to show as we proceed.

2.1 Approaches to the Issues

The way one views a problem cannot but have an impact on the kind of response one would make it. The man who views something as mere stumbling block will reach to it in a very different way from the one who sees it as a stepping stone! A river may be viewed plainly and simply as nuisance, something to be got over as quickly as possible so as to get on with ones proper goal and purpose… or one can see it as a welcome break from the ardour of the quest dive in, relish the river, enjoy a swim and then, with renewed and rejuvenated spirit, re-commit oneself to what lies ahead.

So it is with the mystery of evil. Of course, I am not trying to advocates as some theodicies do that “there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so“ (Shakespeare, II, 2). Try telling an Indian Dalit whose wide has been raped, stripped naked and paraded in the market place that what happened to that poor woman was not “evil in itself” or try to uphold such a view if you were a person wasting away with AIDS or cancer… and does one really agree that the only difference between a terrorist who sets of time-bomb in a crowded marketplace and social worker who takes the mangled victims of the blast and orphaned children of those who died there by is the perspective from which we view them? What I mean is saying that the agonies of a cancer person will summon forth different practical responses from one who views them as a punishment for the person’s sin, or those of his parents or those committed in a former life or by one who views them as not directly willed by God at all; similarly, evil looked at against a static understanding or reality will be made sense of- and responded to in a totally different way from evil considered within a dynamic world-view.

2.2 Augustine VS Irenaeus

I am indeed grateful to the British scholar, John Hick, who in his epochal work, Evil and the God of love, Glasgow, Collins, 1978, drew my attention to the fact that there have been basically two approaches to the odessy in the western tradition: one is better known, more generally followed and received more conscious thematic elaboration- that of St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430). The other dates from much earlier, is less known and did not receive any studied formulation and was not so extensively passed on developed by St. Irenaeus of Lyons (140-202). Whether one is Christian or not, whether one agrees with their interpretation of Genesis or not, what they have to say is worth listening to. Augustan’s approach was based on a more static, pessimistic view of the human person and of the world and came to be generally upheld by the Roman tradition in Christianity which for political and other reasons, became the dominant one. Irenaeus’ view implied a more optimistic perspective and was developed from a more dynamic vision of reality and became characteristic of the Greek school of Christianity. Irenaeus was not systematic thinker like Augustine and it was the Augustinian-Roman way of looking at things that won the day over the Greek alternative and in spite of the contribution of St. Clement of Alexandria (150-214), the Irenean- Greek theory never really got the chance to work itself out into the teachings of a well-established school. Nevertheless, from time to time, various thinkers- both Christian and non-christian came up with clumsy and more thought our ideas that could have gained more precision and depth had they known of, or drawn upon, the Irenean insight. I myself had been an uneasy Christian as far a Augustinian theodicy was concerned.  

2.2.1 Where their views differ

Perhaps we should let John Hick summarise for us the key elements whereby the dynamic understanding of the Adam and Eve story of Irenaeus differs from the traditional static conception of Augustine. After all, it was Hick that pioneered this breakthrough discovery in his research.

“Instead of the Augustinian doctrine that man was created finitely perfect and then incomprehensibly destroyed his own perfection created as an immature, imperfect creature who was to undergo motion intended for him by his maker. Instead of the fall of Adam being presented, as in the Augustinian tradition, as an utterly malignant and catastrophic event, completely disrupting God’s plan, Irenaeus pictures it as something that occurred in the childhood of the race, an understandable lapse due to weakness and immaturity rather than an adult crime full of malice and pregnant with perpetual guilt, and, instead of the Augustinian view of life’s trials as a divine punishment for Adam’s sin, Irenaeus sees our world of mingled good and evil as divinely appointed environment for man’s development towards the perfection that represents the fulfilment of God’s purpose for him.”

2.2.2 Implications of Augustine’s View

What concerns us here is the difference in implication of these two rival interpretations of the Genesis myth. It is the respective philosophy of the human person and our environment that is relevant for us in elaborating a new theodicy, one which is more in keeping with the present-day dynamic vision of reality that we share, rather than the out-dated static perspective of the traditional one.

In Augustine’s understanding, Adam and Eve were created by God as perfect as finite beings could be. They could not have been absolutely perfect, of course, because that would have required them to be uncreated and infinite (which is clearly impossible). But he saw them as endowed with “preternatural gifts” such as immortality and the fullness of knowledge. As a result of the “fall”, whereby Adam and Eve failed the “test” God had given them, the couple forfeited (fell from the grace) the high estate God had favoured them with, far above and beyond their natural deserts and exigencies. Their nature became corrupt, ‘wounded’ and prey to the various evil tendencies act. Catholics and protestants might differ as to precisely the degree of corruption that entered human life and how much of freewill survived the onslaught, but all seemed to agree that “concupiscence” (understood as the inner prompting to evil consequent upon the original sin of Adam and Eve) had begun to vitiate all our best efforts. This how, in the Augustinian perspective, we are to account for the tendency to evil we notice in ourselves.

Furthermore, not only has our very nature become “wounded” incurably by “original sin”, our whole life had to be lived out in punishment in this world which was meant to be a “vale of tears”. No longer had we access to the pleasant Garden of Eden which was God’s original plan for us, if only Adam and Eve had exercised a little more self-control.

It should be noticed, just for the record, that there is nothing in the Genesis story to corroborate the notion that our first parents enjoyed any “supernatural” qualities, as St. Augustine was so convinced about. In other words, the original myth doesn’t imply that there was “a fall”, since there was no previously elevated state to fall from. Nor is there any use of the universalisation of sin, as humankind freely and progressively turned its collective bak on God’s love and God’s call. Today, most theologians and biblical scholars would prefer to speak of “cosmic” or “universal” sin and nature of sin and its consequences (alienation from fellow humans and from nature): it is not interested in telling s how sin began, what was the first historical sin committed ans such like matters.

In his celebration City of God, as in other writings, Augustine presents us with detailed description of the ideal condition of Adam and Eve in paradise, prior to their fatal “fall”. They were endowed with immortality (they would never die, nor would they grow old), they had total control over their bodily passions and rejoiced in infallible moral judgements and other insights. They lived in close intimacy with God and their love for God was imperturbatus( undisturbed, unclouded, untroubled) . They experienced no “inner tendency to evil” in them originally, no hankering for the forbidden fruit. In Augustine’s own words:

In paradise, then man… lived in the enjoyment of God, and was good by God’s goodness; he lived without any want, and had it in his power ti live eternally. He had food that he might not hunger, drink that he might not thirst, the tree of life that old age might wither him. There was in his body no corruption, nor seed of corruption, which could produce in him any pleasant sensation. He blessed hi body, absolute tranquility his soul. As in paradise there was no excessive heat nor cold, so its inhabitants were exempt from the vicissitudes of fear and desire. No sadness of any flowed from the presence of God, who was loved ‘out of pure heart and a good conscience and faith unfeigned. ‘the honest love of husband and wife made sure harmony between them. Body and spirit worked harmoniously together. No languor made their leisure wearisome; no sleepiness interrupted their desire to labour.

In all this, Augustine was but following some ancient rabbinical traditions, which also idealised Adam’s state, envisioning him as endowed with extraordinary stature, dazzling physical beauty, all-surpassing wisdom and so on, as Hick has noted.

2.2.3 The difficulty with Augustine’s Approach

Now, the main reason why Augustine “pilled it on”, making Adam and Eve as perfect creatures as possible and situating them in an idyllic utopia, was because he was overeager to get God “of the hook” for having created anything that was evil-not even indirectly, remotely or even potentially. This zeal solve one problem, he created another, far more disastrous in its implications than the first one, as far as we humans are concerned. For, if Augustine succeeded to establish, in one deft description, the innocence of God and the abhorrent perversity to the human person in bringing sin (and its consequent punishments) into this world, he presents us, by the same count, with the absurdity of the finite creature creating evil ex nihilo, out of nothingness. As Hick asks, “How, then, we may well wonder, did sin enter into this paradisal state? How is it that Adam and Eve, with all their perfect maturity and intelligence, their lack of “inner concupiscence” and perfect self control, were enable to resist the blandishments of a talking snake? Augustine, not very logically, recognised that since “our first parents were able to succumb to the temptations of the devil there had to be some kind of “evil will” in them: “the wicket desire already existed in them and the open sin was but its consequence”. As for this evil desire it was nothing other than the will to be self-sufficient. Thus we have a “theodicy” which, in order to establish God’s innocence of all evil, depicts God as having created humans would load punishment after punishment, not only on them, but also on all their offspring ever after, for this were already “seminally present” in Adam’s to pass over those passages where the great “Doctor of the Church” finds himself hurled along, by the very force of his arguments, into saying that-in effect- God created some people with express purposes of damning them. Indeed, a strange theodicy, that ends up making God a petty, revengeful tyrant.   

2.2.4 Augustine’s Understanding of Evil/ Sin

The traditional Augustinian understanding of evil, which Aquinas and the entire Western Christian tradition as a whole (with rare exceptions) follows sees evil as privation boni, a privation of good, that is, lack of some positive equality that was supposed to be there Evil, as such, doesn’t really exist. It is not metaphysically speaking, evil is not a positive entity but, as Aquinas would put it, a relative non-being. Evil is not so much a being as the absence of a being, to be more precise, it is the absence of something positive in some reality. The inability to see in a human being is an evil, because humans are supposed to see. But the inability of, say, a table or a stone, to see is not an evil for neither of these beings are meant to live in water like a salmon an evil, for humans are not supposed to have the qualities that would enable them to do these things. Were an eagle or Solomon to lack these abilities, respectively there would be “evils’ for them, however. Yet, for Leibnitz (the German rationalist of the eighteenth century) any lack, whether due or not, is an evil, a “metaphysical evil”, as he would say. Thus, the fact that we lack some of God’s qualities-infiniteness, omniscience (all-knowingness), omnipotence (all-powerfulness), etc.-would be examples of “metaphysical evil” for him. So would the dog’s inability to plunge under water! I don’t see it very meaningful to refer to the lack of something which wasn’t supposed to be there in the first place, as an evil by any name whatsoever.

Following upon his general definition of evil (which I have outed above), Augustine proceeds to sub-divide it into two broad categories, physical evil and moral evil. Physical evil is the absence of some due physical quality in a material being. All the examples given above, of blindness in humans or an eagle’s inability to fly could be cited here. Moral evil is defined as the absence of a due orientation in a free personal act. thus, a lie is a moral evil, because it implies the absence of a due orientation in an act of speech. The natural purpose of speech (its due orientation) is to communicate, to share ones knowledge and a lie does just the opposite.

Now Augustine’s definition is very convenient-for God! It requires no “maker”. so, God can’t be blamed for its existence-since it has no existence, strictly speaking: it is the mere absence of existence in something. This is very ingenuous, but it hardly holds water in the light of modern developments in the medical sciences. For the physical evil of sickness is much more than the mere absence of health. We know that cancer, leprosy, diabetes etc are caused by the actual presence of something in the devastated body that is causing these deadly diseases. Besides if each and every malady-from a tooth-ache to kidney failure-were mere absence of health how would we distinguish one illness from another? Assuredly it’s the presence of some awfully real in one person that gives him a head-ache as opposed to someone else’s measles!  

2.2.5 Irenaeus’ Understanding of Evil

Let us, once again, recall that Irenaeus, unlike Augustine, was not a systematic thinker and didn’t put down his ideas in an orderly manner in well thought out treatises (which is one of the reasons why his views were not so well known as Augustine’s). We have to seek for and cull his views from  scatter asides here and there in various writings and notes which he jotted down as occasion and polemic demanded. Especially relevant in this regard is a text which was entitled (probably by someone other than Irenaeus himself), rather unecumenically, Against the Heretics. His understanding of evil must be extracted from the context of his dynamic (we might prefer to say, evolutionary) understanding of creation, especially the human person. Evil is a kind of unfinishedness , a stage of as yet unrealised development in the evolutionary process. It sometimes results from the clash of different processes of development colliding with each other. The need of the lion to grow the clashes with the need of the deer to grow and the natural development of the former results in the physical evil of the hurt and death of the latter. So, too, the natural development of the virus or microbe to grow ends up in its entering a living organism and bringing about sickness and perhaps death, in a plant, an animal or a human. Adam and Eve’s sin was seen by Irenaeus as moral evil all right, but as a kind of inevitable possibility in the context of their immaturity as they struggled within their environment to attain the goal of responsible and matured freedom as adults. Moral evil is an inevitable option to humans in their finiteness as they make their stumbling way to becoming fully human, fully alive (another catch-phrase from Irenaeus). This doesn’t mean that humans can’t be blamed for their wrong choices: of course we are guilty of all the rapes and murders or even petty lies and unfaithfulnesses- of which we are responsible. How blameworthy we are depends on how knowledgable and free we were at the time of doing these acts, but  they must be all put in their proper context. If no one is perfectly mature and fully in command of his/her situation, no one who’s not mentally deficient or an addict can be let off his or her peccadilloes and well-planned crimes! As for physical evils, these are not seen (as Augustine did) as divine punishments let loose upon hapless humans. Rather, they are the unavoidable necessary consequences attendant on that evolutionary world which alone would give us finite persons the required environment for growing in to mature and responsible adults. As for human error, accidents and mistakes that sometimes lead to suffering, pain and death, these are the natural result of our inherent frailty as embodied beings. This in a nutshell is the Ireanean based theodicy which we shall uphold. Now let us go into it in more details.

2.2.6 Epistemic Distance 

Epistemic comes from episteme (Greek word) and means “having to do with knowledge. It is John Hick that i’am indebted for this key term in my theodicy. When God create a finite person, God must do so in such a way that he/she be given a certain “distance” to traverse in order to grow to the fullness of maturity. Obviously this can’t be a physical distance to cross over and “epistemic” would seem to be the best term.

An adult person worthy of the name is one who is able to make free and responsible decisions and, thereby, be able to love in as selfless and unconditional way as is humanly possible. None of us is ever “perfectly human”, capable of absolutely mature, responsible and unconditional decision-making and loving: that is a kind of goal that we’re forever approaching and falling away from. Thus authentic personhood is not something we can be given on a plate, as it were; rather, is it something that we must strive towards, fighting against our passions, our immaturities and our self love. We must struggle towards, self-awareness, gradually getting to distinguish our real true selves, from the false consciousness that psychologist have spoken of those layers of wrong ideas and false notions of superiority (base on gender, ethnic origin, colour of skin and so on that questionable social conditioning has foisted upon us). All too many of us are so uncritical of ourselves and our social roots  that we tend to “blindly follow the crowd” and consequently, our free actions are more the brain-washed responses of a thoroughly conditioned individual who is reacting, rather than acting, in response to the situations around us. If God wants finite persons to exists, God has no other choice than to bring us into existence in such a way that we have to attain personhood as the fruit of our efforts, trials and failures, relentlessly pursuing that as an elusive goal. In a very real sense, persons aren’t born, but made- and it is the persons themselves who have to do the making! We see this happening all around us and we are not through the process as far as each of us is concerned. Infants frow through babyhood, gradually learning to become aware of others and their needs and slowly, as they stumble through the awkwardness of adolescence, learning to be more other centred as they form their first full-blooded friendships and “boy-girl relationships”. What helps us most in this long process is having parents for us, for each other and for our brothers and sisters and vice versa. When these are glaringly absent, it becomes more difficult - but not impossible to grow in mature love and freedom. Many people help us, our teachers, companions, friends, religious personages… but these can also figure as hindrances to us in the great adventure of “growing up”, which is what “epistemic distance” is all about. This is very evidently an insight which is rooted in a dynamic, evolutionary understanding of reality in general, and of the human person in particular.   

2.2.7 Embodiedness, a pre-condition for epistemic distance

A finite, created person must be embodied. Embodiedness provides us the ideal (and the only) context wherein we can struggle and persevere in relentless effort towards authentic personhood. Knowledge doesn’t come easy to an embodied being, as we know-neither knowledge of external world, nor knowledge of ourselves. We all know how true it is that “genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration”. We study, we research, we inch our way to finding remedies for “incurable” diseases, for “insoluble” problems. We build upon the mistakes and breakthroughs of others. Pioneers dare to dream and ask, “why not”, braving the scorn, the rejection and neglect of academically mediocre people in power who want to retain their strangle-hold of how people thing about human limitations, they starve lonely in their garrets and make shift workplace. Sometimes their sacrifices are eventually crowned with success. Often they are not. But they persevere. They remain true to their convictions. If they do not reach their goals themselves, they make it a little easier for the next dreamer, the next adventurer, the next intrepid explorer who comes after… and thus, not only do they grow in humanness through their motivating others to aim for such higher, nobler goals.   

 So too, does each of us battle on as we seek to understand our deeper truer selves. We seek enlightenment, self-realisation, self-awareness. We ask our companions how we “come across” to them. “who am I, really? We ask ourselves why am I here? What can I do to make of mu life something meaningful and worthwhile? we, every once in a while, become complacent. We think we “have arrived”, have finally “come of age”, have got “everything under control”. Then along comes an unexpected encounter, we are swept of our lives, our feet and end up saying and doing things that make us blush. Our “shadow side” suddenly emerges and throw into disarray all our well-disciplined loves, our finest friendship and loves. Sometimes we are helped along the way by the understanding smile or encouraging word from a person who cares. Sometimes we have to manage by ourselves as best we can. We resume the demanding, challenging journey to personhood, to mature loving, to responsible freedom! 

Embodiedness with its consequent context of struggling to self-awareness, self-mastery and self-realisation, its renewed commitment to know, to understand ourselves, all around us, God-embodiedness provides us with that unique, irreplaceable situation through which we can make this journey to maturity, to authenticity. Our enfleshment, far from being something to regret, is the necessary condition for us to attain full personhood. We are not discarnate spirits; we are incarnate, enfleshment spirits and this is the only way created spirits can ever attain personhood. Our ups and down, our hurts and failures, our sorrows and joys aren’t just “punishments” or “rewards” allotted us by God in response to our sinful or virtuous acts, or as part of the punishment left over for the fault of our “first parents”! They are the very means whereby we become those truly free and loving persons we are called to be and which, by every fibre of our being, we yearn to be. What else could provide us with this “epistemic distance” if it were not our embodiedness?

2.2.8 An evolving world, another pre-condition for epistemic distance

The evolve should make it abundantly clear that this epistemic distance has to be traversed by free beings and no other. For how could we lean to love through making sacrifices, taking risks and persevering in the face of failure and setback if we were not capable of free choice and personal resolve? Nor am I requiring us to have a kind of sovereign, inviolate and inhuman, freedom, in solitary isolation from our situation, as Jean Paul Sartre, the French existentialist envisages. Ours is an incarnate human freedom rooted in and in response to our world. This its grandeur, as Paul Ricoeur would recognise. It’s a freedom that cannot be given us “on a plate” it is a freedom that has to be fought for, struggling against enslaving passions and societal brainwashing, overcoming complex lurking pressures, internal world. It cannot be attained in a nice “finished product world” as David Hume wants God to have provided us with. In such a set-up, ideal for pampered pets, not for “persons in the making”, everything would be ordered around our convenience. The temperature would be just right, meals would would arrive at the right time and properly cooked, we’d have opt opportunity for struggle, research and quest, as I have described just above. Such a world would be a non-finished-product world, a dynamic one that is yet “in the making”. Hence arises the possibility of earthquakes, cyclones and suddenly active volcanoes- all parts of the evolutionary packaged deal. Only in such a demanding and challenging set-up will we find occasion to exercise our resourcefulness, initiative and daring. Were parents to surround their beloved children with kind of cordon sanitaire of protective servants, eager to prevent them from every mishap or hurt and catering to their each and every whim as soon as it was manifest… their offspring would remain perpetually stunted children. Such a world would soon become boring: there would be no scope for adventure and excitement, no opportunity for courage and daring, little challenge to mature love and friendship. Not has God abandoned us with typical deistic unconcern, to a hostile world. We have intelligence, freedom and talents which must be developed, built up through the shared successes and failure of our fellows. God’s grace and inspiration is there, available to us in and through personal exchanges in the depths of each individual, but also through the events of everyday life and even if we lose and our lives are out short by some tragic event or the goals we dreamt off are not realised by us, still all is not lost. The grave is not the end.       

2.2.9 Whence come our self-seeking urge?

We all recognise within us a selfish, domineering and grasping urge which, ever so often, contradicts and even overturns our most idealistic and altruistic ideals. Something within us sees to respond to “the call of the wild” from outside and we end up bullying the weak, exploiting the poor and taking advantage of the helpless. Whence comes this ingrained “law of the jungle”? In us, this might is right and survival of the fittest drive within us? Is it nothing but the wounding we have done to ourselves and our freedom by participating in original sin through having somehow been “in the loins of Adam when he committed his terrible crime, as Augustine would have distant eons ago of pre-historic times, this were the very laws that helped us to overcome gigantic rivals who outclassed us in size and strength. Our courageous ape-like ancestors, with the passages of time, interiorised as instinctive and relfex strategies, these principles in the daily confrontation of hulking carnivorous monsters with our derisory size and puny strength. As mentioned earlier, it was our having learnt to stand upright and develop our mental powers that won us our hard earned victory. These defence mechanisms and “guidelines for the fray” have lingered on and that is how we find them suddenly merge to channel our careless reactions, from time to time. Now  the horrendous jungle world of the Cromagnon and the Neanderthal is no longer with us, we must set about controlling these urges and drives which once had their positive and necessary role to play in our development and evolutionary ascent. Some of us have acquired through conscious effort, more control of our id and libido than others. On the whole, considerable progress had been made. All in all, our world has become more civilised more refined: human life is no longer nasty, brutish and short, with “man behaving unto man as beast” as Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) once described those remote and awful times. We don’t meet roving bands of “robber barons” and bandit chiefs rating and pillaging the countryside all about us. Governments are rejecting torture and inhuman penalties for minor and major crimes. Even capital punishment is coming under fire, there is mushrooming of protest-groups against cruelty to animals, police brutality, the customer society. People are coming together to protect endangered species, women, gays and oppressed people all over the earth. And it is not just young people who are doing all this. Many of us want to go deeper into self-awareness, self-mastery and self-control. Men, women and even children are singing up for course of yoga, transcendental meditation etc. we are also beginning to realise that, rather than seeking to suppress or deny our shadow side, we’d do better to find more constructive ways to let it express or deny our shadow itself. overcoming, or rather traversing epistemic distance. God helps us in this area too.  

2.2.10 What about the handicapped babies?

From what we have said above, it should be clear that we cannot countenance those who try to explain away the plight of newborn babies who are physically or mentally impaired by saying that this is either due to some punishment being visited on the parents (usually ascribed to pre marital sex) or on a somewhat more charitable note, saying that God was teaching the couple, thereby, to grow in unconditional love or some other human quality. All these deplorable explanations imply that God is treating the innocent little one as merely a means. Such act goes against all fundamental human rights and dignity and is totally abhorrent to all that God is!

May such children are born in slums, favelas and in conditions of misery and acute deprivation. In such cases, the suffering of the affected little ones is due to the malnourished mother not having had access to proper food and medical guidance. Very often, even in advanced stages of her pregnancy, she has to perform protracted hours of demanding work, including fetch water from rather long distances. Is it any wonder that she giver birth to an infant with severe vitamin deficiencies, from which result all kinds of debilities and deficiencies? Of course, occasionally, such infants are born of mother in fairly well-to-do families, who has the best of medicare and a proper diet. In some cases the plight of the child can be put down to sheer negligence or carelessness on the part of the mother: her consumption of alarming amounts of alcohol, indulging in narcotic substances or chain-smoking. At some genetic defect or there is some “incompatibility problem” between the parent’s blood. On rare occasions, some of the drugs and other medicaments given to the nursing mother can have harmful side-effects on the child. The development of medical science and research has made great strides in remedying, if not avoiding, may of these malfunctioning. 

Conclusion

Every aspect of the sorry spectacle of human suffering and evil takes on a wholly new nuance when viewed against eh backdrop of a more dynamic, evolutionary world, such as the one worked out, however sketchily by Irenaeus. Fleshing out the skeleton in the light of modern development and research, while introducing the key insightful notion of John Hick, “epistemic distance”have stood us in good stead as we wrestled with the angel, as it were, trying to make sense of the enigmatic mystery as to why bad things happen to good people-or vice versa! Such disturbing phenomena clamour for an answer. well, we have ventured a response. I do not claim that it is a perfect one, dispelling all possible, further scope for doubt and completely explaining away the mystery (as if one could ever hope to do that). But I do claim that his is a more meaningful theodicy than the traditional alternative provided us by Augustine.

Taking a more dynamic (rather than the old static) conception of the world as our base is not just to be more trendy or mod; it is also something that strikes a responsive chord in many heart. It’s more challenging to see evil, not so much of a mere lack of something somewhere, but unrealised stage of fulfilment in growth process. An evolutionary world, the necessary context of person making motivates us to action for justice; seeing the world as a place of punishment, a “vale of tears” where, from time to time, we must be put to torture, only teaches us to be passive, resigned and submissive. It is more wholesome to see our bodies freedom, rather than despicable wounded aspects of our talented human nature. There still remain areas of darkness, bits and pieces of unanswered questions but I have derived enough vision and insight from this dynamic approach to be able to carry these peacefully to my grave.