They can flatten you any time, given our palpable lack of protection against harm, our evident exposure to any wind of misfortune that may chance to blow on our soft and vulnerable selves. From meteor strikes to car crashes, falling masonry to early-onset Alzheimer’s, anything can happen to us and to the people we love. At any moment you can have it sharply demonstrated to you that where we live, events are not governed by what people deserve. But maybe as a theme, as subject-matter for anxiety, the world’s cruelties are most likely to press on you fairly early on in your history as a believer, if you’re travelling on anything like my emotional path. In that case it was an awareness of the painful crappiness of things, including your own motives, that sent you seeking comfort in the first place. You were looking for help with the dismal amalgam of things you’d fucked up, in accordance with the HPtFtU, and things other people had bent or broken, and things that just seemed to arrive in a pre-spoiled state, oven-ready for disaster. And quite quickly, therefore, it probably occurs to you that there’s a slight contradiction (to say the least) in seeking that comfort from the party who is Himself finally responsible for the crappiness in question. You are a character calling out for pity from the author, because you don’t like the plot. But it’s His plot, supposedly. So what is this, masochism? A version of Stockholm Syndrome, where you identify with your kidnapper? A defensive idealisation of an abusive parent? Daddy is kind; he has to leave me here to fight with his dogs for scraps . . .
I meant when I got to this point to describe in detail two or three concrete instances in which the world is malignantly, unspeakably, indefensibly unpleasant. You know the kind of thing. Look at any medical encyclopedia. But I can’t face it, and in any case the cruelties that strike us most deeply tend to be individual to us, and to be obvious to us too. They don’t need researching, they don’t need working up.
Besides, there are so many of them. There are whole multiple categories of outrage, all coded deep into the structures of existence and experience, until it can feel as if the whole thing is like a stick of seaside rock with the words HA HA HA written through it. To start with there are all the outrages of human history, all the times when the weak are abused, all the moments when intervention by an omnipotent friend of the helpless would be desperately justified, and yet is never forthcoming. It seems only fair to quote another bit of Hebrew poetry, here – ‘A thousand shall fall to your left, and a thousand to your right, but the evil shall not come nigh thee . . . ’ – and to point out that this psalm’s picture of a God who pops a protective forcefield over those he cares about on the battlefield is not true, except in terms of the wishful thinking of survivorship bias, which ensures that all war stories are told by people who didn’t die. It is demonstrably not the case that anyone goes to war with a magic grant of immunity. (And even if someone did, what about the thousands to the left and to the right, eh? What are they, chopped liver? What about the life-stories of which they are the centre, and in which they are the ones speaking the psalm? The God of everything must be the God of all stories.) The score of interventions at history’s dark points is resoundingly low. Number of cattle-trucks halted on their way to the gas chamber by a fiery angel: zero. Number of smirking conquistadors, Khmer Rouge executioners, Hutu militiamen to be gently restrained by an unseen force: zero. We do our violence unimpeded. We suffer it unprotected.
Then there are the outrages of the biosphere. I don’t just mean all the specific cases where parasitism or predation entails immense, unanaesthetised everyday pain – starting the roll-call, perhaps, with the caterpillar Darwin watched being eaten alive by wasp larvae, causing his famous reflection on the ‘low and horridly cruel’ ways of nature. I also mean the outrages inherent in the entire operation of the domain of life. The intrinsic outrages. Natural selection, as Richard Dawkins has beautifully shown us, is a sculptor of astonishing reach, capable of adapting living things to the mould of almost any environment. And all its complex effects are achieved by the millionfold iteration of a simple process; simple and horrible. Species adapt and subdivide and flourish and are extinguished, the phenotype melts like wax and reappears again transformed, because individual organisms with minute variations are ‘selected’ by the test of survival. But most are not selected, otherwise selection could do nothing to produce adaptive change. Most are discarded. Most organisms, by the billion, by the trillion, die or are killed before they can reproduce, dumbly eliminated by some environment’s demand* for a quality they lack, whatever else they may happen to have going for them in terms of lovely feathers, iridescent wing casings, or interesting mathematical theories. The moral scandal of evolution is not that it contradicts some sweet old myth about God knitting the coats for the little lambkins: it’s that it works by, works through, would not work without, continuous suffering. Suffering is not incidental to evolution. Suffering is the method. The world wobbles onward, you might say, on a trackway paved with little bones. But that understates the issue. There is no trackway – there’s just the way the world happens to go, lurching one way, lurching the other. The whole landscape is little bones.
* All metaphor, of course: the environment is not a conscious actor. It’s just a situation that works out in a demand-like way. Talking intelligibly about evolutionary biology requires as many metaphors as it does to talk intelligible theology.
We, sapient species that we are, are inclined to take this personally, and to find a special outrage in the fact of our own mortality, especially if we’re of a metaphysical disposition, or Philip Larkin. We really don’t like the idea that our consciousness might just be an epiphenomenon of our DNA, generated for a few years for the sake of the tactical advantages it confers, but redundant once our children are viable alone, and thus quickly destined for oblivion. It spreads so wide, while it lasts, our consciousness; it encompasses so much. It’s such a lightshow, while the soft jellies of our seeing eyes are open. So many different dawns, such a blaze and a blur of particular ways the daylight falls that you’d have to be a Cézanne to begin to annotate them all. And yet it ends. And yet the violet and the slate-grey and the bright gold and the colour of the living blood under the skin of loved faces all go away. It can all be extinguished by a dodgy heart valve. By the thinned wall of one blood vessel in the brain. By a single transcription error in a cell nucleus. Then the lightshow – which we had grown used to, which we thought would last for ever – ceases. My grandmother died recently, four months short of her hundredth birthday, and I remember thinking as I cycled home that night how odd it was that this was the first evening she had missed since February 1911. The whole vast liner strung with coloured bulbs tilts, and goes down into the dark water for ever. It happens every time. Every one of our voyages ends in disaster. Every ship of ours is the Titanic.
Lots of atheists seem to be certain, recently, that this ought not to be a problem for believers, because – curl of lip – we all believe we’re going to be whisked away to a magic kingdom in the sky instead. Facing the prospect of annihilation squarely is the exclusive achievement of – preen – the brave unbeliever. But I don’t know many actual Christians (as opposed to the conjectural idiots of atheist fantasy) who feel this way, or anything like it. Death’s reality is a given of human experience, for anyone old enough to have shaken off adolescent delusions of immortality. There it is, the black water, not to be cancelled by declarations, by storytelling, of any kind. Whatever sense belief makes of death, it has to incorporate its self-evident reality, not deny it. And again, in my experience, belief makes the problem harder, not easier. Because there death is, real for us as it is for everyone else, and yet (as with every other outrage of the cruel world) we also have to fit it together somehow with the intermittently felt, constantly transmitted assurance that we are loved. I don’t mean to suggest that all believers are in a state of continual anguish about this, but it is a very rare believer who has not had to come to a reckoning with the contradiction involved. On the one hand, the cruel world – the world made
cruel by seeing it as created – and on the other one, the sensation of being cherished by its creator.
So what to do?
Well, there’s self-deception. Because there’s always self-deception, it’s a resource available in every human situation. If you’re lucky enough in where you live and when you live and how you live, the problem need not press too hard. (Until, suddenly, it does.) You can then take your benign and comfortable local environment as your picture of what the whole universe is like, for just as there are cosy atheists who mistake their own suburb for a whole dependably surburban cosmos, it must be admitted that there are comfy Christians too. When readily available vaccines mean that your children aren’t being blinded by measles* as part of evolution’s heartlessly efficient arms race between virus and antibodies, it gets easier to relegate suffering to a dim abstraction, and to suppose that your life is in the hands of a divine micromanager, who tweaks and prunes and coaxes every little event to work out for the best. Squinting, you turn your luck into evidence of favours received. I’ve seen a church newsletter in which the Almighty is thanked for fixing the minister’s car, via a miraculously cheap quote from a garage. But it only takes a little of the cold wind of adversity to blow this stuff away – and only a little thought. For if God was willing to exert Himself over the minister’s sparkplugs, but wouldn’t get out of bed to stop the Holocaust, what sort of picture would that draw? What sort of loving deity could have the priorities that the cruel world reveals, if the cruel world is an accurate record of His intentions, once you look beyond reality’s little gated communities of niceness?
* Which is a good thing, obviously.
Or, you can argue. You can stipulate for the real existence of suffering, and yet try to find ways in which it means something more bearable than it appears to; something more creditable to God. This brings you to the set of traditional theological answers to the problem, which go under the name of ‘theodicy’. Theodicies mostly continue to treat everything that happens as being deliberately intended by God, but acknowledge that a defence is required for some of the – how shall we put this? – less blatantly friendly aspects of our environment. Theodicies try to justify God by justifying the cruel world. They vary, but they have one thing in common. None of them quite work. None of them fare well enough against the challenge of experience for them to let us lay the issue to rest, to let us file it under ‘solved’. Each tends to find some useful elements of truth to grip on to, but to end up failing, like the miraculous sparkplugs, by drawing a picture of the God of everything which is incompatible with love as we know it to be. And the love of God does have to bear a secure resemblance to what it means for us to love somebody. The nineteenth-century philosopher John Stuart Mill put his finger on something important when he said that he refused to admire any quality in God that he wouldn’t admire in one of his friends. He meant it only semi-seriously. It was a way of cutting God down to size; a way of insisting that pious awe shouldn’t stop you from making straightforward judgements on anything claimed to be a piece of God’s behaviour, like Randolph Churchill stuck in a Yugoslav cave during the Second World War with only a bible to read, and saying, as he waded through Old Testament plagues and tribulations, ‘What a shit God is!’ In effect, Mill was asserting that the only definitions of goodness that can matter are everyday, familiar human ones. It’s a stance which fails to engage with what would be unique to the God of everything, His universal responsibility. It also rules out the significant possibility that there may be forms of goodness which cannot be fully manifested by hungry, squabbling, brief creatures like us. But it has the great advantage of putting recognition at the centre of the issue. We really do need to know that ‘love’, when God does it, does not mean some glacial alien quality, repellently bound up with the calculations of power, which only shares a terminology with our emotion. We really can check an account of the bits of God’s behaviour we can see against our own understanding – not looking for a match, but looking for an overlap. There has to be an overlap. The love of the God of everything need not be exhausted by the human definition of love, but it must not contradict it either, if He is to be worth worshipping.
Take a theodicy. For instance, We suffer because God is refining us. The element of truth that is being seized on here is that there are virtues which, quite genuinely, can only be developed by endurance. There truly are ways in which we need to experience bad things and things that aren’t pleasures in order to have selves which are strongly made, selves of which we can tell ourselves coherent stories. Observably true so far; but the idea that suffering might be being lovingly distributed by God as a form of education cracks open and collapses on the equally observable counter-truth that the bad stuff gets distributed with an utterly un-educational lack of proportion. The ills of the world are not all neatly sized so that we can cope with them. It is not true that we are never tested beyond our power to endure. And where we’re overwhelmed by suffering, where we’re humiliated and made into victims, it doesn’t make us stronger. The opposite effect comes into play – the lesson ‘all school-children learn’, according to W. H. Auden:
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
Suffering doesn’t on the whole ennoble us. Usually it debases and distorts us, turning us more than ever into creatures who want to pay harms back to someone. Checked against the knowledge of schoolchildren, the theodicy fails.
Or there’s We suffer because God has a plan in which our suffering is necessary, with its suggestion that a vast, wise, cosmic strategy is in play which we can’t see from our restricted standpoint. Here the helpful truth is that God, if He’s there at all, cannot be confined in time as we are. The God of everything, if you believe in Him, must be the God of all times at once. Accordingly, He cannot be limited to perceiving things in sequence as we do. He must know the whole pleated manifold of history from side to side and back to front and corner to corner, in every direction, including therefore every question about why things happen, and what is going to happen to us, and what it will cumulatively come to mean that it has happened. And it is also necessarily true, if you believe that the universe was created, that it must in a sense have been planned. It must have been inherently intended to be as it is, with a disposition towards complexity, and towards consciousness, and towards the production of beings like us in whom the God of everything seemingly delights. That must have been a possibility built in from the start.* So far, so planned. Yet the criterion of recognisable love then shows that our suffering can’t be planned in the justifying way that the theodicy requires. If love is love, it can’t manipulate. If love is love, it can’t treat those it loves as means to an end, even a beneficial one. Love is love because it sees its loved ones as ends in themselves, not tools or instruments to achieve some further goal. So suffering can’t be vindicated by a pay-off elsewhere. Again the quiz-show buzzer for a wrong answer sounds. Fail.
* Not the same thing as saying that there will be handy proof of God’s authorship tucked away in the details of astrophysics. I’m talking about what belief says must have been an intention behind the universe, not about something you can deduce from the value of the cosmological constant. The latest thinking I’ve seen suggests that the universe is not, in fact, precisely fine-tuned to support life. It isn’t a Goldilocks universe, neither too hot nor too cold but just right; it’s a good-enough universe, adequate for us to muddle into being in. As ever, you have to believe, or not, without science deciding the issue for you.
Next? We suffer as part of a package deal that gives us free will. Well, this one actually passes the love test, and therefore gives us some purchase on the question of why God might permit human history to take its savage course, but fails at once as a general justification because it offers no help at all with the other kinds of suffering, the kinds that are not caused by human action. Yes, an intervened-in history, a history pestered with angels, would not be fully our history; a pruned version of human autonomy, wi
th the scope for evil lessened or removed, would be a falsified autonomy. Yes, a God of everything who loved us would have to behave as love requires, and allow us to belong fully to ourselves, and therefore to be free to do unlimited harm. He would have to stand back helplessly as a parent of an adult child does, thwartedly tender, twisting His hands in anguish as He refuses to pay our drug debts. But what about the rest? What about earthquakes, gangrene, supernovas? You can pull your adult child out of quicksand without threatening their autonomy. Fail. Next? We suffer, but it doesn’t matter, because it’s only a momentary prelude to heaven. Dear oh dear; give me strength. A comprehensive and instant fail, this time, because whether or not you believe that heaven is real, this life certainly is, and so is the suffering it contains. You can’t deal with the problem by ignoring it. The only useful element here is a hope you can hang on to, that love will outlast trouble; otherwise, it makes the loving God into a practitioner of dodgy cost–benefit analysis, indifferent to the way our lives feel as we live them. It turns Him into a doctor who thinks it’s OK to chat and dawdle on the way to the emergency room, because He does have the morphine, and He will get there eventually, when He gets round to it, after an hour or two of our screaming. No; really not. Really not a plausible characterisation of any kind of lover.
Unapologetic Page 8
