@Alan McDougall,
Not at all. Perhaps I do have a problem with 'entity', or for that matter, any other designation, or even the indefinite, or definite, article, 'the' God, or 'a' God. But the real problem I have is that, even fully cognisant of the so-called 'problem of theodicy' is that at the end of the day, the argument seems to me to imply that so long as there is suffering, there cannot be a God, because God is all powerful and all good, so why can anyone suffer?
You can say, well, suffering might be reduced. But it will always be the case that one person will suffer more than some other. If any suffering exists at all, it is inconceivable that could be shared with complete equity among all beings. So either every child would have to get a disease, which is ridiculous, or no child would ever get a disease, which is impossible. (And of course I do understand how agonising it is to see a loved one struck down with some terrible illness.)
Going back to John Hicks, in his essay on this very topic
Who or What is God? He observes that the 'literal idea of divine intervention' is a common justification for atheism:
Quote: The central aspect of this prevailing concept of God, on which I want to focus, is divine activity in the course of nature and of human life. God can and does perform miracles, in the sense of making things happen which would not otherwise have happened, and preventing things from happening which otherwise would have happened. These interventions are either manifest or - much more often - discernable only to the eyes of faith. But it is believed that God does sometimes intervene in answer to prayer. The Bible, and church history, and contemporary religious discourse are full of accounts of such occasions. And prayers of intercession in church and in private devotion presuppose that God at least sometimes operates on earth in these ways. Otherwise, what is the point of those prayers? And how often have we heard in the media someone telling of their miraculous escape when, for example, they survived unhurt in a car crash in which the two others were killed, or even more dramatically how a soldier in war was saved by wearing a medallion which stopped the bullet that would have killed him, or how when a family were at their wits end in some terrible dilemma something unexpectedly happened to save the situation? Or there was recently the American who on winning $5 million in the US lottery said, 'I just praised God and Jesus'. Of course most of those who speak like this today, in our pervasively secular age, are not using the word "miracle" in a religious sense but merely as an expression of wonder and relief. Likewise "Thank God for that" is usually no more than an expression of heartfelt relief. But seriously devout believers who give God thanks for a lucky escape, or for recovery from a serious illness, or for the resolution of some problem, do often believe that they have experienced a divine intervention on their behalf, a miracle which confirms and strengthens their faith and evokes gratitude to God.
It is this serious and literal use of the idea of divine intervention that concerns us here. The problem that it raises has led many to atheism. If, for example, in the car crash case, God intervened to save only one of the people in the car, who then gave God thanks for a miraculous delivery, this implies not only that God decided to save that person, but equally that God decided not to save the other two. It presupposes that it is, so to speak, okay from God's point of view to intervene whenever God so chooses, and this inevitably poses the question why God intervenes so seldom, leaving unprotected the great majority of innocent victims of natural disasters and of human cruelty and neglect? Some years ago the atheist philosopher Anthony Flew wrote, 'Someone tells us that God loves us as a father loves his children. We are reassured. But then we see a child dying of inoperable cancer of the throat. His earthly father is driven frantic in his efforts to help, but his Heavenly Father reveals no sign of concern.' ("Theology and Falsification", reprinted in John Hick, ed., The Existence of God, p. 227). And given the biblical and traditional assumption that God does intervene miraculously whenever God so decides, one can understand why this belief has led Flew and many others to atheism. It is this implied picture of God as arbitrary, protecting some but not others, and thus as deliberately leaving so many in pain, hardship, misery and peril, that is so repugnant to so many people. If there is such a Being, why regard Him (or Her) as good and as worthy of worship, except by the chosen few who benefit from the special divine interventions?
The problem arises from the belief that it is, as I put it, okay from God's point of view to intervene on earth whenever God chooses. Suppose, however, that, regardless of whether or not it is within God's power to intervene, it is for some good reason not okay from the divine point of view to do so. Suppose this would be counter-productive from the point of view of a creative purpose which requires both human freedom (which is directly or indirectly the source of much the greater part of human suffering) and also elements of contingency and unpredictability in the evolution of the universe.....
Hicks goes on to present a cross-cultural perspective by drawing upon the insights of many different faiths, including Mahayana Buddhism, which has no explicit 'God' idea whatever, Hinduism, and various aspects of the Christian mystical tradition. It is difficult to compress his argument to a few paragraphs and I think it is worth reading in full. But one of the conclusions that I take from it, is that all our ideas of God are ultimately incorrect, anthropomorphic, and provisional. We can have them, and build doctrines and practises on them, but they are always partial, incomplete, and often self-contradictory. And actually, this has nothing to do with God. It is because of the inherent limitations of the human mentality.
So in a conversation such as this, we all feel we know what we are talking about when we use the word 'God'. To some extent we do, in that if we have a common universe of discourse, we will all signify the same 'intentional object' by the word, so we can converse about it. But the 'divine nature' is completely beyond human reckoning. So I really see this kind of accusatory attitude to the Deity as a regrettable type of hubris. We are in no position to bargain, and in so doing, we are continually digging ourselves into a deeper hole. "Look old chap, you're just not doing what we would expect of you!"
It should be remembered that the greatest of all Western theologians, Thomas Aquinas, had an acute spiritual crisis at the end of his career (during which, it might be remembered, he wrote upwards of 5 million words!) Scholars are divided as to what caused this crisis, whether it was an organic disorder or epilepsy or some other malady. But history does record him saying, when he emerged from one of these episodes:
Quote:'Compared to what I have seen, everything I have written seems as straw'.
We would do well to remember that. All theology, all philosophy, is provisional and indeed can be very useful and edifying, if used in the sense that Wittgenstein prescribed, as a ladder to ascend our verbal confusion, whereafter it might be discarded.
Sorry I have become too polemical but it is just an area where I think that democratic modernism has really gone completely off the track. We need to show humility, which is not servility or grovelling or whatever the ego will inevitably depict humility to be, but an awareness of how very limited our knowledge is.
