A couple from the archive
A reader asked me earlier today why religions so adamantly resist assisted suicide legislation, is it just the idea that God is supposed to decide when we die or what. I said that as far as I knew it was all rather ad hoc (not to say lame) and that what justifications were offered tended to be quite disgusting. I offered the example of Richard Swinburne saying suffering is good because it gives people the opportunity to show compassion, and Jonathan Sacks saying he was glad his father hadn’t had the ability to escape the final stages of his death because that mean he, Jonathan, had the chance to take care of his father. Having brought them up, I wanted to read the exact quotes again, so I spent considerable time and ingenuity tracking them down.
Sacks said his piece on ‘Thought for the Day’ in October 2005.
Nine years ago my brothers, my mother and I saw my father go through five major operations in his eighties. It was almost unbearably painful to see one who was once so strong and upright, fight a long, slow, losing battle with death. Yet I can’t begin to imagine what it would have been like if he, or we on his behalf, had been given the choice to bring that last day closer. He was a proud man who hated being a burden to others. How easy it would have been for him to spare us those final tormenting days. I can see him doing it. Yet he would have been so wrong – because, more than anything else, we wanted to be there with him in his suffering giving back some of the care he’d given us when we were young.
Notice that this horrible, arrogant, domineering man doesn’t even ask himself if what his father wanted might be more important than what he Jonathan Sacks wanted. Notice his conviction that what he wanted was more important than what his father may have wanted. Notice that he doesn’t even consider moving from the awareness that his father hated being a burden to the thought that perhaps he should not force him to continue doing what he hated.
I said a few mild words at the time.
Richard Swinburne said his piece around June 2006 [pdf].
Theodicy provides good explanations of why God sometimes — for some or all of the short period of our earthly lives — allows us to suffer pain and disability. Although intrinsically bad states, these difficult times often serve good purposes for the sufferers and for others. My suffering provides me with the opportunity to show courage and patience. It provides you with the opportunity to show sympathy and to help alleviate my suffering. And it provides society with the opportunity to choose whether or not to invest a lot of money in trying to find a cure for this or that particular kind of suffering.
As I said at the time –
Well why stop there? It also provides pharmaceutical companies with the opportunity to develop pain medications, and nurses with the opportunity to apologize for the fact that the pain can’t be alleviated, and vicars and priests with the opportunity to pray that it will be alleviated, and God with the opportunity to refuse to alleviate it, and the funeral people with the opportunity to dispose of the corpse after the victim has committed suicide. Lots and lots of opportunities. Good. So – we should all act accordingly? We should all rush outside with our carving knives and soldering irons and distribute injuries generously around the neighborhood so that there will be further abundance of such opportunities? Suffering is a good thing because it creates these good opportunities so there should be lots more of it so we should all bend every nerve to create more of it?
Swinburne goes on.
Although a good God regrets our suffering, his greatest concern is surely that each of us shall show patience, sympathy and generosity and, thereby, form a holy character. Some people badly need to be ill for their own sake, and some people badly need to be ill to provide important choices for others. Only in that way can some people be encouraged to make serious choices about the sort of person they are to be. For other people, illness is not so valuable.
Pretty? Yes?
Some people badly need to be ill. . .
That is the most twisted thing I have read today. And I read some of the swill that’s coming out of some parents’ mouths about the horrors of having to watch the president on television.
Holy character? Right.
I’m familiar with Swinburne sort of argument – it’s not new to him. I thought it was sick when I was 20, and I still think it’s sick.
Yeah, my little sister needed to be born with the left side of her heart too small so that she died at four days old and left my mother a wreck for years, so that, um, well, so that . . . yeah.
What cold-hearted pomposity, yet he claims to be espousing compassion? I would prefer that his conception of compassion was unnecessary, in the same way I wish atheism or feminism were unnecessary. In their attempts to solve the problem of evil in this way, Swinburne et al. only make god into more of a monster.
God created Swinburne to give the rest of us a chance to learn patience.
I’m having problems.
So here’s a god who’s less concerned with alleviating suffering and more with our character-building. He’s a typical abusive father who beats you with a belt until you bleed, enjoys it (together with the fact that he scares the shit out of your every living minute), and then tells you it’s for your own good.
Do you think this Swinburne monster is the kind of guy people have in mind when they tell us that the god Dawkins et al. criticize is some strawman caricature, and that we should go read some learned academics on the subject of god’s true nature instead?
Lovely.
But surely, if the value of suffering is to do with the individual character weaknesses of us and those around us, then god either definitely does allow a lot of utterly pointless suffering of no higher-order benefit, or else he specifically targets all suffering at those impatient/unsympathetic/etc people who might be improved by it?
It would be hard to find a better example of self-absorption. According to the description, it is he, not his father, who is suffering– going through the “unbearably painful” act of watching those “tormenting days”. And it would have been wrong for his father to deprive him of the right to feel good about caring for his father. He doesn’t even mention what his father might have been feeling or thinking. He’s describing his own father like he’s a prop in Sacks’ own personal morality saga.
On top of that, most suffering in most lives comes right before the end, when the sufferer is about to shuffle off this mortal coil anyway, and presumably could have waited for any wisdom thereby gained for the next world, and the kids are all grown up and ought not to need lessons in suffering to grow to maturity; I’m not too sure what lessons anyone gets from other people’s suffering in any case. My wife has suffered from severe pain for years, and I don’t think I’ve learned anything meaningful from it; maybe I need to be religious to learn something profound.
Much as Swinburne’s ‘argument’ is obnoxious in its own right, does anyone else see a parallel between it and Aristotle’s one in the Politics for slavery being good both for the master and the slave. That’s also about character building.
Also if a god is so concerned with holy character, why not just build it into the basic human design? Or, if free will is taken into account, present holy character in such a way as to be appealling without causing suffering?
And yet both of these guys are Names, to say the least. Interesting, isn’t it?
What stupid, objectionable men, both of these are – Sacks and Swinburne. Instead of defending religion, they have put a millstone around its neck and thrown it in the deepest parts of the sea. Good.
If anyone wants to know why atheism is prickly nowadays, rather than accommodating, it is to be found in things like this. No intelligent person would accept this kind of thing as appropriate to govern one’s outlook on life. Religion has nothing else.
If they really believe that pain and suffering are good for the soul of the sufferer, the carer, and any old bystanders, these chaps must love war. What better way of creating instant godly loveliness on a grand scale than to hit a small Afghan village with a few dozen cluster bombs? If there’s a tribal wedding going on at the time, even better! Imagine the appreciation you’d have for god’s love if your entire family were blown to bits in front of your eyes just as you lost your leg to red-hot shrapnel.
Praise the Lord and pass the ammo!
Exactly – that’s what I was saying with the bit about rushing outside with soldering irons to create more such opportunities all over the neighborhood.
Dawkins quotes Swinburne (TGD p 64 n) saying in his book The Existence of God p 264: “Suppose that one less person had been burnt by the Hiroshima atomic bomb. Then there would have been less opportunity for courage and sympathy…”
There’s no room for satire, because he has already said it.
The disturbing part here is that neither Swinburne nor Sacks seems to be in the slightest aware of how silly their conception of the purposes of suffering must strike the unbiased reader. They are prepared, on this basis, to defend the existence of a good god, and, more than that, in Sacks’ case, to justify forcing people to undergo sufferings that that they might, by hastening the process of dying, bring to an end.
I just received an email from a friend, yesterday, asking why it is that atheists are so prickly. I think she finds me prickly! She suggests there is inexplicable anger on the atheist side, and fear, on the believers’ side, that their way of experiencing life, precious to them, is under attack. And then she says this: “What has been a tacit, dormant, even kindly accomodation and respectful acceptance between atheists and believers as individuals or as groups, as the differences become more public, gets more strained.” And then she says that religious people are afraid that their religious freedoms might be taken away in a Stalinist manner.
I don’t think people understand what is happening. Why is the entente cordiale at an end? Well, I think I know the answer, and you can find it here. What Sacks and Swinburne say is just silly, self-regarding nonsense. But it has an edge. It claims two things. It claims to explain the truth about reality, the reality of God and the reality of suffering. And it also claims to account accurately for what God – the will larger than ourselves that Sacks speaks about – prescribes.
Two things. First. This simply cannot be allowed to stand within a framework of knowledge as science understands it. It just can’t stand there as the appropriate expression of something known. By allowing it to stand there, Francis Collins, for example, debases scientific knowledge. Second. Reasonable people will no longer be bound by religious strictures about what we may or may not do. There is no basis for the claim that there is a will larger than our own. It follows that there is no evidence for what this putative will prescribes.
As a consequence, atheism simply must be prickly. There is no room for accommodation here. If religious people want to believe daft things then they must do so by themselves. They have no right to import this nonsense into public space and expect people to listen to them without demur.
What an atrocious lack of compassion and respect for his father!
I suspect that religious apologists are all but doomed to sound silly on the subject of pain and suffering, because it’s such a difficult one to explain away in the context of an all-powerful all-benevolent deity. You could always blame it on the devil, but even the existence of the devil is a bit of a conundrum if there’s an all powerful, benevolent deity. Why tolerate his existence, if he causes so much pain?
It rather reminds me of a conversation I once had with a deeply religious friend. She had just gone through a very messy divorce from a rather unpleasant man, I had not long ago been diagnosed with MS. She took great comfort from the thought what had happened to her was all part of some greater plan, had some purpose. By contrast, I told her, I found it tremendously reassuring that I honestly believed there was nobody responsible for my illness, no higher power which could have intervened and chose not to do. Far and away the most comforting explanation of pain and suffering that I can think of is that it has no purpose, that it’s not ‘for’ anything, it’s just an accident. As a species, we should do what we can to alleviate it and minimise it.
Why does suffering exist in the world?
Christian: God, who is all-knowing and all-powerful, allowed one of His angels to become an agent for evil, then allowed His creation, Adam and Eve, the free will to disobey Him, which allowed for suffering in ways that were totally unforeseen to this all-knowing, all-powerful God, who eventually became His own son to forgive everyone for the suffering they caused, even though no suffering has been alleviated by His actions, although things get better after you die. No, really.
Atheist: Shit happens.
“And then she says that religious people are afraid that their religious freedoms might be taken away in a Stalinist manner.”
Freedoms, no. Powers? Let’s hope so.
Yes, that’s the ever-frustrating perversity: such people genuinely cannot tell the difference between their right to hold a belief or practice a religion, and their alleged right to enforce it in public discourse or in law. A shocking number of Americans actually define their religious freedom as the right to ensure that others are not free to do and think as they please .
Not like I need to tell anyone here this. It’s just hard not to be continually shocked by the depravity of the idea that one person’s set of freedoms is defined by the right to deny these same to another. It’s wicked, and it’s not nearly called out as such, and publicly, as it ought to be.
That’s more or less what I told her. It took me more words!
Yes, it’s important to re-iterate that what Sacks and Swinburne are claiming is that this is *true*. That suffering is *necessary*. Not avoidable, or regrettable, or contemptible, but necessary, *for their god’s plan*.
It surely follows that the incentive to avoid suffering must be reduced, if one holds such a belief.
Except that Swinburne also says that suffering creates opportunities to create ways to alleviate it – so, in short, he’s incoherent.
Ah, well, so does Sacks. What a blessing it was that his father suffered so much so that they could repay him for all the care that he had shown them in their early years. The whole thing makes one want to throw up!
This reminds me of something said by William Lane Craig in a debate:
” The chief purpose of life is not happiness per se, but the knowledge of God. One reason the problem of evil seems so puzzling is that we tend to think that the goal of human life is happiness in this world. But on the Christian view this is false. Man’s end is not happiness as such, but the knowledge of God – which in the end will bring true and everlasting human fulfillment. Many evils occur in life which seem utterly pointless with respect to producing human happiness, but they may not be unjustified with respect to producing the knowledge of God. Innocent human suffering provides an occasion for deeper dependency and trust in God, either on the part of the sufferer or perhaps those around him. Whether God’s purpose is achieved through our suffering all depends on how we freely respond.”
Which translates into something like my god is mean so you will need him more? It is like having a friend who sabotages things so you will need him or her to get along in life.
“but they may not be unjustified”
Well that’s good enough for me.