Evil that God should not allow? Why should we not expect divine aid?

[ethereality]

Recently I read a survey of the Donner Party, a disturbing history which suggested God was in no way involved.

Before that I read Joni Tada’s A Place of Healing, which presented a Protestant woman suffering decades of paralysis and other pain making bad arguments trying to rationalize and justify her situation, again implying an absence of God.

Before that I read The Hiding Place by John and Elizabeth Sherrill, attributed to Corrie ten Boom. Intended to strengthen faith, instead it depicted Nazi atrocity again unchecked by God; every good thing was explainable by natural coincidence, and every suggestion of divine intervention was undermined by the unreliability of the narrative, as the Sherrills clarify in an appendix that they pieced the story together from conversations with ten Boom and wrote dramatically to vivify her account, so that embellishment is likely. Even the divine interventions are themselves remarkably poor: ten Boom’s life is spared a week before everyone else in her demographic is murdered (dozens of women her age), for example.

I’ve posted about child abuse here before, but I feel compelled to do so again after this story of a 12-year-old boy locked in a pitch-black bathroom for over a year, and this may not be as bad as other cases of sexual slavery women have undergone. (I found this story via Reddit; you can read others’ comments about it; some mention other cases of suffering; be warned there is vulgarity and hostility there, as Reddit is largely not censored and filled with secularists.)

In short, it appears to me that there is no kind or degree of evil that God won’t allow, and I can’t recall ever seeing God intervene. (All healings, recoveries, or survivals that I’ve seen are explainable without reference to God, a point St. Thomas Aquinas even mentions in the Summa, that the universe is apparently explainable without God.) Consequently the divine interventions in the Bible appear as fiction, an interpretation which the USCCB’s NABRE secular-agnostic commentary supports. Even St. Augustine is quoted by Frank Sheed as saying, “Pray as if everything depended on God; work as if everything depended on you.”

At this point, suffering has made me agnostic, and I haven’t see any reason to suppose that the Catholic Church is correct. I think a central problem is that this suffering appears unreasonable, directly contradicting the Gospel, and therefore God’s nature as being infinitely wise and good and the Catholic Church as having divine authority are both contradicted. My questions, then:

1. 
   *]Why should we not expect God to console, help, or intervene when we pray and have repented of all the sin we know of?
   *]Why should we not expect some clear communication from God as our adoptive Father?
   *]Why should we not expect God to right wrongs here on earth (e.g. heal amputees or paralysis) after the effects of free will have been clearly suffered, once those in need have repented of sin?
   
   I have expected these things after studying the Bible and the Catechism, and consequently I have been bitterly disappointed and am now agnostic.

 

[phil_at_dayboro]

If God was to intervene in some or all that is wrong with the world,
Would that make us less human ?
John 8:23 Says God is not of this world , You are of this world , I am of above.
Which in my mind says that you won’t see much intervention in a big way

 

[ethereality]

phil, who is to say how we should define human nature? What is human nature? To answer your question, I think no, human nature is independent of God superseding natural law, so we would not be less human in consequence of more divine assistance.

You seem to argue that we should expect God to be inactive on earth because He is in heaven, but I am often told that God is omnipresent, “close to us in our suffering”, and indwelling those who are Baptized, i.e. their bodies are actually Temples of the Holy Spirit. So God is not only in heaven, but also in every Baptized person.

Reading NABRE John 8, do you mean to accuse me of being sinfully closed to God’s will? Your response is not clear to me. Perhaps you are committing eisegesis, because here Jesus is speaking to Jews who disbelieve that He is acting on behalf of God: What connection is there to my original post?

 

[adamhovey1988]

Some constructive criticism; you write too, much please keep it a little bit shorter otherwise I can’t answer it because I’m not going to read all of it

 

[Catherinabird]

I disagree that you write too much.

I don’t have anything to offer in response, however I am following because these are the exact questions my relatives pose to me and I am terrible at responding.

 

[Irishmom2]

People have free will. We are free to choose good or evil.

Why is it up to God to come in and fix evil and not **us? **

Using Nazi Germany as an example. Where were the good people? Not enough good people chose to stop the Nazis. Too many people followed the evil or turned a blind eye toward what they were doing. Why do you think God should swoop down and fix everything that people choose to do wrong?

 

[ethereality]

People have free will. We are free to choose good or evil.

Why is it up to God to come in and fix evil and not **us? **

Using Nazi Germany as an example. Where were the good people? Not enough good people chose to stop the Nazis. Too many people followed the evil or turned a blind eye toward what they were doing. Why do you think God should swoop down and fix everything that people choose to do wrong?

You have misunderstood me: I am thinking God should comfort people who have repented of sin while they are suffering what people choose to do (this does not mean stopping the evildoers), and that God should likewise heal e.g. someone who’s been amputated after the consequences of the action have been seen, felt, and the person has ceased doing the activity. This would not violate free will because the assailant was free to do the evil, and it would not make God’s presence overly apparent as disbelievers would be free to say the body has more natural-regenerative power than thought, that medicine still has more to learn about the body, etc.

Taking your Nazi Germany example: Instead of apparently many in concentration/death camps losing faith in God by being met with absolute silence to their prayers, they could have had “their guardian angel” give them a consoling message even while the Nazis continued their operations. In the case of Corrie ten Boom’s months of solitary confinement, instead of any consolation from God, she had only scraps of a Bible and insects to watch. By the end of her ordeal, her intellect was broken, as she herself reports. (She was no longer able to read social cues or think critically about surrounding circumstances.)

Rathen than victims of cruel experimentation spending the rest of their lives missing limbs and whatnot decades after the end of the war, God could heal them after the war had ended and after people returned to their usual lives. I am of course speaking of those cases where we are not able to heal them through our own medical practice.

Do you see now how your response did not address my arguments and questions?

Again, my questions:

1. 
   *]Why should we not expect God to console, help, or intervene when we pray and have repented of all the sin we know of?
   *]Why should we not expect some clear communication from God as our adoptive Father?
   *]Why should we not expect God to right wrongs here on earth (e.g. heal amputees or paralysis) after the effects of free will have been clearly suffered, once those in need have repented of sin?

1. 
   Perhaps it may help you to think about what ‘Father’ actually means. What does it mean if God does not act in any way like our human fathers? For example, a human father will comfort a child going through a painful operation, or intervene between a fight if one child is seriously about to hurt the other, or provide medical care (heal the child) if he has been seriously injured, and this does not require controlling everything they do, doing everything for them, or preventing them from experiencing suffering. In short, my questions are about the distinction between freedom and neglect. Fathers give us freedom to climb and fall out of trees, but it is neglect to not take us to a hospital after we fall and break our leg. “Oh, your leg’s broken now! Deal with it yourself!” appears to be God’s answer, which contradicts the notion of fatherhood. “Someone cut off one of your body parts? I guess you’re living the rest of your life without that body part now! I could heal you, but … I won’t, and I won’t explain why.” Hence the Gospels are contradicted, as Jesus’ central revelation is God as Father.
   
   Hence my questions, “Why should we not expect…?” because it would be much better for my expectations to be wrong than for the Gospels to be wrong.

 

[ethereality]

I don’t have anything to offer in response, however I am following because these are the exact questions my relatives pose to me and I am terrible at responding.

I don’t think there will be any satisfactory answers to these questions, in part because Catholic Answers caters to elementary theology, not deep questions, and secondly because if there were satisfactory answers, everyone more interested in truth than sin would be Christian. That people are able to rationally, consistently deny Christianity demonstrates that something is missing from it.

I suppose I will give my best answers in defense of the faith to the questions I’ve posed, so that we may both have some closure – and so this thread will be bumped back to the first page for “one last pass”, if you will, so that hopefully someone new might see it and provide greater insight.

1. Does there exist evil that God should not allow?

Probably not. God created the world, and so presumably has enough wisdom to regulate it in such a way that we are able to obtain our final end, which is union with Him in heaven.

2. Why should we not expect divine aid?

We should not expect such assistance, because God is both a free agent and responsible for our existence each moment. We cannot issue any claim for aid when we suffer, because it is not our place: We can only expect something from those inferior to us, and those superior who have made some contract in a way that puts them “in our power” in regard to that contractual obligation. For example, we can go to court if our governor contractually promises to give us something; we can do nothing if he merely says he will but then later refuses to do it.

God has not entered into any contract promising anything in particular to us, and so we cannot expect anything from Him. When we suffer, we must choose to be grateful for what we do have to distract us from our misery, or else simply be miserable.

3. Why should we not expect God to console, help, or intervene when we pray and have repented of all the sin we know of?

Again, we should not expect any help, because God is a free agent and can do whatever He pleases, and because we have no claim that God must honor.

4. Why should we not expect some clear communication from God as our adoptive Father?

It appears ‘Father’ is the relationship our Creator has with Jesus, not with us now. Jesus reveals God as ‘Father’ to give us hope that if we live well, God will enter into this fatherly relationship with us at death, bringing us to union with Him (i.e. heaven).

(This answer appears to partially contradict the Catechism which claims God is our Father “here and now” by virtue of Baptism, but I don’t have a better explanation. I don’t see how the Catechism is correct.)

5. Why should we not expect God to right wrongs here on earth (e.g. heal amputees or paralysis) after the effects of free will have been clearly suffered, once those in need have repented of sin?

God apparently doesn’t care that much about our lives here on earth. It appears this life is intended for character formation, not for us to be happy or experience pleasure. However, I don’t know how to reconcile this idea with mental illness and aging, in which people appear unable to form their characters, or else appear to forget their lives, or else experience personality changes that are the result of brain chemicals not choices.

I’ll close with an excerpt from a Coming Home Network email which I received 13 hours ago:

You know, for me when I’m going through a difficult and discouraging time what helps give me hope is that Jesus also went through so much suffering and pain also and understands (suffering and pain freely chosen because He loves me, this reflection ewtn.com/faith/teachings/rdmpc1.htm is a beautiful piece on the meaning of suffering.). Just because we suffer doesn’t mean that God doesn’t exist, or that He doesn’t love us. It is through the cross though that Jesus gave suffering meaning, and showed just how much the depths of God’s love goes. If God doesn’t exist, then what? Does that make life somehow more worth living? No, I don’t think so. It’s only in having hope in God’s promises that this earthly valley of tears can be bearable sometimes. There is something beyond the pain and struggle of this life. Have you thought about laying out your frustrations and concerns with a priest and asking for his advice? For me, only within a Catholic Christian worldview does suffering make sense. Only in the Catholic Church can I receive the Eucharist, which might not provide bodily healing (that’s not the most important thing after all) but it gives nourishment and grace to my soul. Have you been to confession recently? I think it might be tremendously beneficial to you in unburdening your heart of so much of what troubles it.

God is Father in a way that completely supersedes any earthy fatherhood. If you read the Scriptures you can see His fatherly care over the Chosen People and revealing the plan of redemption culminating in Him sending His only Son to earth for our salvation. A “Creator” doesn’t do that. I’d really encourage you to watch/listen to this talk by Scott Hahn that I found really helpful personally as a reflection of God as Father: youtube.com/watch?v=16d50ytKm48. The Catechism also has some beautiful things about God’s Fatherhood: vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p1s2c1p1.htm.

We also have an online forum, chnetwork.org/forum, where CHNetwork members gather. I would encourage you to go online and see what the forum has to offer. It’s a wonderful place to go to get continuing support and encouragement for your faith journey, ask questions, and connect with others who have had similar experiences.