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grannymh
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As a loving and all powerful Pure Spirit, God determines the purpose of suffering, not humans. God knows. Humans do not always know what God knows.
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reggieM
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That’s definitely an interesting way to look at it. Personally, I don’t think the physical laws were meant to achieve everything that God wanted from physical creation. Not only do human beings transcend the physical laws by having an immortal soul, but God taught us “harness” the natural laws and use them for things that they could not do on their own.
That’s actually the beginning of the argument for purposeful design – we see human beings create things in physical nature, not by use of natural laws alone, but by use of intelligence.
True, we don’t change natural laws, but we “redirect” them to achieve things that they would not be able to do if left on their own.
I see it as a combination of what God wants and what He “must” do as an obligation of love for His creation. For example, when God gives a promise, He “must” fulfill it. He also wants to fulfill it, so the two go together.
God works miracles for many reasons – and I would never say that He is trying to “fix” His creation. Very often He is trying to teach us something through miracles – to trust Him more, to recognize the power of His presence and detach us from fears.
God changes hearts and minds also, and that is something that natural laws alone cannot do.
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Al_Moritz
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But here you go from merely physical creation to humans which, as you say, transcend it with their immortal soul.
I agree with all that.
Of course. As I said, I see a supernatural and a natural order in creation. While God rarely intervenes in the latter, He frequently intervenes in the former. Changing hearts and minds is part of that.
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Al_Moritz
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Very well said.
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razredge
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I think that’s the problem with a lot of believers, they think God is the old guy in the sky with lightning bolts - that’s not God, that’s Zeus.
Or if he intervened at all for that matter.
Perhaps He usually can’t intervene at all without disrupting the general order and so doesnt. It certainly be the far simpler explanation than presuming God is actually very busy saving us from everything and yet it somehow looks like He’s doing nothing. Maybe this is like the ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’.
Well there certainly seems to be a lot of unnecessary suffering.
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tonyrey
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tonyrey
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I would go further, Reggie. It is impossible for physical laws to achieve everything God wants **and **they often frustrate the purposes for which they are intended! The law of gravitation is necessary for life but it also destroys life.
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tonyrey
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grannymh
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It still comes down to the fact that we, as creatures, are not equal in knowledge with our Creator. Thus, there is no sound reason why we have to explain everything which happens on earth.
My humble suggestion is to first accept that design exists in our world because we can see it and second to relax in God’s presence. Live our lives according to the teaching of Jesus Christ. Skeptics have free will the same as we do. We are not responsible for the arguments made by skeptics. We are responsible for our free choices.
We need to accept that God can do things which we cannot explain. Our lack of explanation does not give God a black eye no matter what anyone says.
Our lives can be lived according to Catholic teachings without the approval of others.
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Al_Moritz
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I love this.
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tonyrey
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Your answer will do nothing to change the mind of a sceptic. Christian apologists have been giving reasons for believing in the teaching of Jesus since the foundation of the Church:
"As Christianity gradually separated from Judaism and came to feel its own character as a new faith, competing with various ethnic, philosophic, and mysterious religions in the Roman world and facing objections and persecution, it began to be conscious of itself and** its responsibility to give answers to the criticisms and attacks** that were made against it. Moreover, educated men and scholars were converted to Christianity in great numbers. They found that truth compelled them quite naturally to enter in discussion with pagan philosophers. This was the beginning of the Christian apologetic literature that soon took shape in a series of apologies and dialogues in defense of the new religion…
Quite apart from the apologetic writings’ effect on the pagans to whom it might, or might not, be delivered, it had the effect of supplying less educated and less experienced Christians with arguments to use when they were exposed to persecution. Thus one finds that the work of Athenagoras carries arguments and turns of phrase which appear again in the Acts of the martyr Appolonius who was put to death in Rome by Commodus in 185 A.D.
The Apologists set before themselves three objectives:
- They challenged the widely current calumnies and were at particular pains to answer the charge that the Church was a peril to the State.
- They exposed the immoralities of paganism and the myths of its divinities, at the same time demonstrating that the Christian alone has a correct understanding of God and the universe. Hence they defended the dogmas concerned with the unity of God, monotheism, the divinity of Christ and the resurrection of the body.
- Not content with merely answering the arguments of the philosophers, they went on to show that this very philosophy, because it had only human reason to rely upon, had either never attained truth, or that the truth it had attained was but fragmentary and mingled with numerous errors. Christianity offers the absolute truth, since the Logos, the Divine Reason Himself, comes down upon earth, and Christianity is the divine Philosophy. Their method was to exhibit Christianity to emperors and to the public as politically harmless and morally and culturally superior to paganism."http://www.copticchurch.net/topics/patrology/schoolofalex/III-Athenagoras-after/chapter1.html
copticchurch.net/topics/patrology/schoolofalex/III-Athenagoras-after/chapter1.html
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tonyrey
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Well put! A miracle affects a person as a whole and not as a soul which possesses a body - or viceversa!
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tonyrey
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It would be clearer perhaps to say:
“It is a physical impossibility that not one person should **ever **happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
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inocente
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Very well said. It’s good to know there are a few Christians left with a grown up faith.
Both Darwin and Einstein said they gave up on theism because it was too childish for them, but maybe they only heard stories of a semi-retired god who runs around interfering with his own laws trying to stop bad things happening to nice people.
It’s obviously wrong. Jesus said “He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous” (Matt 5:45). And the rains bring floods on the righteous just as much as the unrighteous, and tsunamis don’t only happen to naughty people, and Katrina didn’t hit New Orleans because the town welcomed a few gays (as one childish, and brainless, fundamentalist was reported as saying).
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LittleSoldier
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This earth is not heaven. Certainly it is possible that suffering helps us grow in a spiritual way and is good for us; even if we don’t like it it’s not our decision to make. Our lives belong to God and He has the right to take them because of a tsunami or avalanche or murder or natural death.
I’ve lost a beloved cat and I’ve tried everything to get God to give him back to me. But he never belonged to me and losing him may be best for me (and best for him). God is omnibenevolent even if I don’t understand what that omnibenevolence means. He is the best one to determine what is best for us - He is our loving Father/Shepherd and we are His lambs.
They *are *attempted restrictions on God’s omnipotence. It is not inevitable that the laws of nature (I’m assuming you don’t mean God’s Laws here) cannot adapt themselves to every situation. They do! That’s why they are called laws of nature. When the plates under the ocean move we end up with an earthquake and possibly a tsunami. When the gases and such in a volcano reach a certain point the volcano explodes. This is what nature is. Nature follows those laws of nature - it has no choice. And when a coyote is hungry it can kill and eat my beloved cat. I disagree with Hume, which isn’t surprising as I am a theist.
God can intervene whenever He wants to - if it’s because I have prayed or if Mary or another saint has prayed for me, or if He decides that the huge asteroid heading toward the earth from a trillion miles away should be diverted because He has some reason. We can’t fully understand God because we’re not on the same level as He is. But we can trust that every action He takes is good - even though those actions may cause suffering. Suffering isn’t always bad; sometimes it’s necessary because God is not only omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent - He is perfectly just.
If God wanted to minimize suffering the way we define suffering He could certainly have done so when He created every universe. The problem is that we don’t define suffering the way He does and I think He tends to concentrate more on grace and blessings. We say that Jesus is blessed every time we say the Hail Mary, even though His suffering went far beyond the suffering of any other human being. We say Mary is blessed even though she stood at the foot of Jesus’ cross and watched her Son die a horrible death. I may be blessed even though today I am in excruciating pain (though nothing like either Jesus or Mary).
Why hasn’t God taken my suffering away? I’ve prayed for it. I am suffering. If He wants to minimize suffering why won’t He take my suffering away? How long do I have to put up with this? It goes on day after day after day. Because of my suffering I couldn’t do what I wanted to do with my life and now I see other people going on to get doctorates or MDs and fulfilling themselves and having families and all I get is zip. Dead husband, dead children, stolen child, no further education, no career, lack of money, a government that turns its back on me, and stupidity caused by opiates - that is my life. Do you understand what I am saying?
I know the answer and I’ve already posted it but I’d like to add that what I want to do with my life is not necessarily the best thing for me. God allows me to suffer. No matter how hard I pray He has not taken this suffering away and it is getting worse. I have to admit that I really don’t enjoy hurting as I am right now and trying to rely on a government which is so bizarre that medical marijuana can be legal on a state level but illegal on a federal level. I don’t like the fact that people die in agony because “drugs send the wrong message.” I don’t like the fact that my own father suffered so much while he was dying because if he had been allowed to take pain-killing drugs that actually worked he would then be responsible (according to the federal government) of condoning illegal drug use for kicks among the young.
God let my Dad suffer for a good reason and He lets me suffer for a good reason. And all those people who died in the tsunami in Japan died because the laws of nature worked.
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LittleSoldier
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Why do you insist that laws of nature must prevent accidents or disasters? I’m sorry but I don’t understand why you keep stating this. Laws of nature are laws of nature and are completely morally neutral. They are not responsible for human suffering. They just are.
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tonyrey
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“Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.” Kant - Critique of Practical Reason (1788)
These words inscribed on Kant’s tombstone are evidence of his appreciation of the beauty in nature which has always been considered to be outstanding evidence of Design. Attempts to explain it in terms of survival value overlook the fact that intricate patterns on objects like sea shells cannot be explained in terms of utility or natural selection. There are also objective principles - and even mathematical facts like the Golden Ratio - which determine whether something is beautiful or ugly. If there is no symmetry and proportion in a face, for example, it cannot be aesthetically pleasing and valuable. There are other factors such as colour, texture and contrast but all beauty seems to depends on some form of harmony: a basic unity and fittingness which are revealed in the relation of the parts to the whole.
This exquisite harmony gives the impression that it does not exist by accident. The mechanistic explanation of beauty does not do justice to the facts because the concepts of value and purpose are interdependent. Something that is purposeful must be valuable and something that is valuable must be purposeful - at the very least in the mind of the person who appreciates it. It is a source of joy and inspiration like the night sky or one of the other wonders in the universe. The beauty of nature is evidence of creative power on an unparallelled scale. That is why it is a powerful argument for rational Design.
These words inscribed on Kant’s tombstone are evidence of his appreciation of the beauty in nature which has always been considered to be outstanding evidence of Design. Attempts to explain it in terms of survival value overlook the fact that intricate patterns on objects like sea shells cannot be explained in terms of utility or natural selection. There are also objective principles - and even mathematical facts like the Golden Ratio - which determine whether something is beautiful or ugly. If there is no symmetry and proportion in a face, for example, it cannot be aesthetically pleasing and valuable. There are other factors such as colour, texture and contrast but all beauty seems to depends on some form of harmony: a basic unity and fittingness which are revealed in the relation of the parts to the whole.
This exquisite harmony gives the impression that it does not exist by accident. The mechanistic explanation of beauty does not do justice to the facts because the concepts of value and purpose are interdependent. Something that is purposeful must be valuable and something that is valuable must be purposeful - at the very least in the mind of the person who appreciates it. It is a source of joy and inspiration like the night sky or one of the other wonders in the universe. The beauty of nature is evidence of creative power on an unparallelled scale. That is why it is a powerful argument for rational Design.
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LittleSoldier
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I agree except that I would say that perhaps God intentionally caused the Japanese tsunami and the earthquake in Haiti.
I think you’re right about suffering being absolutely central to Christ’s message. Look how He suffered! And yet He was so blessed!
Although it doesn’t happen on this world (at least not normally) we suffer in Purgatory and that is definitely good as it purges us of our imperfections so that we can live with and glorify God forever in heaven. Only the perfect can enter heaven; without Purgatory and the suffering it contains where would we be?
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tonyrey
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