The practical one is what can we do about it, and we have come up with a number of answers, all of which are inadequate. For example, in Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud raises the wonderful question “Why, now that we have become gods, aren’t we happy?” He says we don’t need gods or God anymore, because we’ve got technology. Technology has attained the wishful thinking that produced religion. We would like to be above the thunder and lightning, knowing it and controlling it like Zeus. Instead, we cower in superstitious fear in caves, thinking that the thunderstorm is the wrath of an angry God. We’ve become God; so, we need not fear. We are Mercury sending messages through space at will. Since we’ve become gods, since these natural human desires have been attained, we certainly should be happier, because happiness is the fundamental desire, but we’re not. The more civilized we are, the more happy we are? Oh, no, not at all.
Freud even toys for a while with Rousseau’s notion that the more civilized we are, the more unhappy we are, and that we would be happier to go back to being a noble savage, which, of course, is impossible. It’s a great question, and Freud confesses honestly, as a good scientist, that he doesn’t know the answer to it.
So, practically speaking, we have not come up with an answer to the problem of suffering. The only thing we can do about suffering is to live through it. To live is to suffer.
So, let’s look at the theoretical problem, the logic of the problem: Why must we suffer? Explain it. Maybe you can’t solve it, but at least let’s explain it. It makes a difference whether God is thrown into the equation. Suppose you’re a Marxist. What’s the cause of suffering? Inadequate social structures, class conflict. What can be done about it? They can be modified. Something like a heaven on earth can be attained by a bloody revolution, but you still have to die and you still have pain nerves all over your body.
Theoretically, the problem comes in much greater if you believe in God. If suffering just happens, then it just happens; but if the whole of our selves and our lives and our universe is a design— a deliberate design, not an accident— a novel written by God, then why does he write such a lousy novel? Thus, Job, the classic sufferer, the classic philosopher in suffering, would not have nearly the passion, including the intellectual passion, if he didn’t have God to get angry at. Perhaps one of the things God wants us to do is to get angry with him, because that makes us similar to Socrates. It makes us ask questions. I don’t think God likes pop psychologists that tell you, “Accept yourself as you are”; in other words, “Be a vegetable.”
I have never found an atheist who can state the problem of evil with the logical cogency and force and personal passion of a theist. The most sympathetic case for atheism in the history of the world, it seems to me, has been made by one of the great theistic writers, Fyodor Dostoevsky. Ivan
I often teach philosophy of religion, and I play Socrates. I try to get the class to dialogue. I divide them into two groups— believers and unbelievers, or believers and skeptics, or strong believers and weak believers. Once I get the two groups, I say, “Now, we’re going to dialogue about whether there’s a God, but those of you who classify yourselves as believers, you’re going to have to argue for atheism. And you who classify yourselves as unbelievers, you’re going to have to argue for theism.” They say, “That’s ridiculous,” and I say, “No, it isn’t. If you don’t understand the other position, you can’t really argue against it.”
I’ve done this three or four times. It’s always turned out exactly the same way. There’s no discernible difference in the intelligence level between the atheists and the theists, but the atheists always make a ridiculously weak case for theism and the theists always make a knock-’em-down, drag-’em-out case for atheism. And it’s always based on the problem of evil— by far, the strongest argument for atheism.
So, after that happens, and the students are kind of surprised, I ask, “Why did that happen?” And then the real argument begins. The atheists, who were pretending to be theists, said, “Well, you had us argue for Santa Claus; it was a ridiculous position that you gave us.” The theists, who are pretending to be atheists, said, “No, we see both sides; you don’t. We see your best arguments; you saw our weakest ones,” and then they argue about that.
Let me give you the strongest argument for atheism that I know, based on the problem of suffering. Emotionally, it’s something like Ivan Karamazov, but intellectually— since being almost a New Yorker, I am impatient, and I like philosophers who can say much in few words— I love Thomas Aquinas, who in a single paragraph can write as much as modern theologians would take a lifetime to write.
Here is his incredibly succinct formulation of the problem of evil: “If one or two contraries is infinite, the other is completely destroyed, but God means infinite goodness. Therefore, if God existed, there would be no evil discoverable anywhere, but there is evil. Therefore, God does not exist.” It’s a very powerful argument. How do you answer it?
Atheists and agnostics also want an answer to suffering, although God is not in their equation. So, the question of suffering is universal, but it’s worse for a theist.
I will try to give you six answers, none of which is original. Three of them come from natural reason— philosophical reasoning without any reliance on religion or divine revelation— and three of them do come from religion or divine revelation. The first answer, which is basically the answer of ancient Stoicism, is that we are finite creatures. We have desires that are not going to be satisfied; so, we have a choice of either adding to our inevitable frustration or not.
Here you are in the dentist’s chair and the Novocain hasn’t taken effect and the dentist says, “We’re doing root canal work; so, you have to tell me where the pain is. There’s no alternative.” What choice do you have? You have a choice between enduring the physical pain and rebelling against it. If you rebel against it, you add psychological pain and terror and fear and make the pain worse. So, why not be a Stoic and just accept it? Red Sox fans understand that. So, one possible explanation for suffering is “We’re animals; we are finite creatures.”
A second answer that comes from an older source, namely all the myths, just about all the myths of all the cultures of the world, is that something happened way back when before history. Things aren’t supposed to be like this. Once upon a time, Adam and Eve ate an apple. Once upon a time, Pandora opened a box. Once upon a time, the magic bird that was supposed to drop the magic berry of heavenly happiness into the mouth of primal man fell in love with himself and swallowed the berry.
There are various versions of the story, but it is astonishing how almost every culture has some myth of paradise lost. Now, that doesn’t mean it’s true, but it does mean that it’s in the collective unconscious, and to say that there’s no truth in it at all is to be a snob. This is my fundamental argument against atheism, by the way. If atheism is true, then the incredibly small minority of human beings— most of which are concentrated in our uprooted society— are the only ones who are wise, and everyone else is living their lives with a fundamental illusion at the center, exactly like Jimmy Stewart in Harvey. He believes in this thirteen-foot-high, invisible rabbit, even though he’s in his forties. That’s a pretty grim view of humanity. It doesn’t prove anything, but at least it ought to give you a bit of pause.
This universal myth that our present situation is unnatural seems to correspond to our present psychological data, that is, we all have a lover’s quarrel with the world. We can’t obey the advice of our pop psychologists to accept ourselves as we are and to accept the world as it is. We just can’t do it, if we’re human. Animals can. There is a perfect ecological relationship between the animals’ instinctive desires and their environment. What they want they can get, but there is one thing we want that nobody in the world has ever gotten: complete happiness. It’s our glory that we can rise to the dignity of despair. Thus, a nihilistic existentialist like Nietzsche is nobler than a nice pop psychologist. He rises to this dignity of despair.
A third and very traditional answer to why we