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From: ln63fac@sdcc7.UUCP (Rick Frey)
Newsgroups: net.religion,net.religion.christian
Subject: Re: God and suffering
Message-ID: <111@sdcc7.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 5-Oct-85 03:29:43 EDT
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Posted: Sat Oct  5 03:29:43 1985
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Summary: More on God and suffering

In article <781@cybvax0.UUCP>, mrh@cybvax0.UUCP (Mike Huybensz) writes:

> How appropriate that you select an authority on comedy to support your
> beliefs.  :-)
> 
True, but who's going to end up doing the laughing?  And I don't mean that 
the people in heaven will sit up there laughing at those in hell, but God
says that in heaven there will be no more tears; only joy.  So I'm counting
on a lot of laughter too.

> Even assuming that the line wasn't intended as tongue-in-cheek, it still
> doesn't answer the quantitative question of why there is so much evil in
> the world.  Why couldn't a hypothetical good god have left out smallpox
> and a few of the others?  Or even most of them?

I have an interesting idea of an answer so let me try it and see what you      
think.  I read net.origins also and I've seen your postings over there so
I'll be referring to a series of discussions taking place there about the
missing links.  Somone asked why there were no close links between men and
apes (closer than chimps et al) and the response was not that the question
could be answered, but that it was wrong in the nature of its queary.  One
could ask about the links between man and lemmings and there are lots of
evolutionary steps bewteen those two species (are they both species?, I'm
not a biologist or a taxonomist).

One last discussion I want to use as an analogy concerns some of the questions
about the probabitities of life developing.  One responder asked about the
probability of getting dealt a specific bridge hand and made the link that
asking for the odds for a specific life form developing is again a mistaken
question.

So after that lengthy prelude, my basic idea is that maybe there's all sorts
of things that could happen to people that don't.  Women could die after child
birth (like some animal mothers).  Teeth could rot out by age twenty instead
of later in life.  Many detrimental processes could happen faster, the list
(if you're a good pessimist) is endless for the things that could be worse
as well as those that could be better.  So using that as a moral premise to
hold against God, at least to me, doesn't seem to stand up.

> For example, I can choose to fornicate whether or not earthquakes kill
> thousands in Mexico.  

This is always going to be the best question (again in my eyes at least).  I
struggle with this one, trying to decide if these are the result of man's
original sin and that the whole nature of God's creation became flawed or
if God willfully causes them (rather than letting them occur).  It's a good
qustion.  The only real thing I go back to that gives me any frame of reference
not to call God a pig because of this is that in the garden of Eden, it wasn't
like this.  nature was perfect and in perfect subjection to both God's will
and man's will.  I still believe that nature must obey God's laws, but it
seems to have gotten off the track that God creaed it on.

				Rick Frey