Hi M31
I’m assuming because of the username that you are a fellow astronomer (beautiful galaxy isn’t it?) If I’m wrong in this, sorry!
As a scientist (astronomy/astrophysics) I hope I can help you a little. I understand the need for “proof”. If you come from a scientific perspective, some of what’s been said isn’t much help. I’m also annoyed by the posting of that “Atheism” picture, it is stupid and arrogant and doesn’t make sense. Your beliefs should be treated with the same respect I would want mine to be.
On the “why suffering” topic, as others have said, much of our suffering is because of the actions of humans, not due to natural reasons. The poverty in Haiti, the famine in East Africa, etc. all of these would not be causing suffering if we shared what we have. Poverty in Haiti? Lets send money and materials for rebuilding. Famine in countries in East Africa? OK, lets send them money to buy what food exists and share it and then we’ll send more food. All of this could be done if we weren’t so selfish. The famine in East Africa is almost certainly caused by global warming disrupting weather patterns, so it has been caused by human greed and selfishness. People died of starvation after the Haiti earthquake but the US military felt it was more important to unload months of supplies for their people including pallets of laundry powder, while planes full of water, food and tents for the survivors circled endlessly. Many had to land at other airports in the Dominican Republic and then try to move supplies by land but that took days. God didn’t curse Haiti, it had great resources, it was politics that sent it into poverty.
Why doesn’t God overcome human greed and make food and water magically appear? Why does a God of love allow earthquakes to happen anyway? To answer the second question first, to be habitable, it seems that a planet needs plate tectonics, so therefore it “needs” earthquakes. As to the first, why doesn’t God perform miracles to stop suffering, can I answer that with an example from my own life? I hope that it will make sense to you.
I suffer from a rare disease, that I’ve had since I was seven years old. It gives me excruciating pain in my feet at night, like I’m being tortured by having them held in boiling oil and injected with acid in hundreds of places. When I was a kid, I would scream in agony, beg to die, beg to have my legs cut off to stop the pain. About once a month, I would get an infection in my legs because I would place my feet in iced water to stop the pain, causing the skin to crack, allowing infection to enter. When I got an infection the pain would get even worse. Even with my feet in ice, I would still be screaming in pain. when that happened, my dad would call one of his fellow doctors, who would come out to the house and give me an injection of the drug, similar to morphine, used for women in labour (but 2-4 times the dose, that’s how painful it was, and I was a small 7-year-old!). I would go to sleep within twenty minutes.
Now, imagine someone who’s been watching all this. They suddenly discover my dad is a doctor and has that very drug in his case downstairs. He has needles, syringes and the ability to give the injection. If it works when the pain is so terrible, it would work when the pain isn’t so bad. How can he sit there night after night watching a child suffer so terribly, when he can go downstairs and get the drug and stop my pain? What kind of loving father could do that?
The reason he didn’t give me the injection is because of what the drug would do to me. It is addictive, it made me woozy the next day, stopping me from attending school or playing in the few hours I was free from pain. That would have stopped me learning and growing. If he had given me the drug every night, I would become used to it and need higher and higher doses, until they couldn’t give me any more because it would kill me. Then what could they do for the pain? What would happen when I got an infection? It was love that stopped my dad giving me the drug, and it must have hurt him terribly to watch me suffer so much and know that relief was available. It would’ve been so easy to say “just this once…”
I think it is a similar reason that stops God from performing miracles all the time. He loves us and it must hurt Him to see us suffer. It is like that drug, we would become “addicted” to miracles, we would want them all the time, for smaller and smaller reasons. We would become dependant on them, with no responsibility and no learning. This isn’t our “permenant” home, we are actually meant for Heaven, to be close to God. If there were constant miracles, there would be no suffering, so how could we cope when a loved one died? Even if everyone died at a ripe old age and we knew they were in Heaven, it would still hurt. Without smaller sufferings to teach us to cope, we would be destroyed by the pain.
I hope that makes sense. Will continue in another post, this one’s long enough!
I hope you enjoy your stay.