Q&A: Even Better and Even Better
Even Better and Even Better
Question
Regarding the question of suffering in the world, specifically suffering that does not result from human choices:
1. You argue that God does not intervene and perform miracles because He wants a deterministic world, and no clear boundary can be drawn that would require intervention. To me this is weak, because He has the ability to prevent cases of suffering without anyone even knowing that He intervened (so that from an “educational” standpoint human beings would still live with an awareness of determinism). I am not talking about preventing all cases, but even a single isolated case of minor suffering caused by scraping one’s elbow on a table. In addition, even if there is no clear criterion for when it is worthwhile to intervene, there are obvious cases that justify it (for example, nudging a tectonic plate a bit so it will not cause a tsunami that destroys a quarter of a million people).
2. You argue that on the assumption that God decided not to intervene (starting from some date in the last several thousand years for some reason) and everything has to be deterministic, the burden of proof that there could be some other set of laws of physics that would cause less suffering is on the questioner (no less!), because one would have to arrive at a final outcome identical to our universe’s (to the point that you got into discussions about a continuity point of non-clearing), and your proof for the puzzling assumption that the final outcome has to be identical is the fact that this is the final outcome. What would be so terrible if there were some other set of laws that would produce less suffering (it would be enough if one creature suffered a little less over the course of history) and there were a few fewer grains of sand on the beach in Florida, or the life expectancy of an ordinary cactus were one year longer? What is so sacred about the exact state of our universe that it could not have been given up in order to spare unnecessary suffering?
Answer
The starting point is that there is a difficulty here, and I am looking for a resolution. Assuming there is a God and that He is good, why is there evil in the world? My answer is that He wants a world as it exists, that is, with that same set of laws that leads to His purposes (which are unknown to me). Removing the points of suffering while leaving a world with rigid laws of nature is an implausible thesis, and therefore the burden of proof is on the questioner. You can of course claim that the world just happens to be this way, without it really reflecting what the Holy One, blessed be He, wants (completely implausible, even apart from the difficulty and its resolution), or claim that there is no Holy One, blessed be He (completely implausible for other reasons). But in any case, there is no difficulty here. In order to raise a difficulty, you have to bear the burden of proof.
If I understood His purposes, I could answer you what value there is in the life of an ordinary cactus. If you understand those purposes, I would be happy for you to share them with me. By the way, perhaps the life of the cactus has no value, but the laws that lead to that lifespan do have value, and that is the upshot.
Therefore it is also not relevant to argue that He could intervene without anyone knowing. He wants a world with rigid laws, regardless of whether anyone knows or not. All the more so since such interventions would probably in the end be discovered.