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From: paul@phs.UUCP (Paul C. Dolber)
Newsgroups: net.religion
Subject: Omnipotence, justice and suffering: a very long question.
Message-ID: <1034@phs.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 5-Jul-85 12:17:41 EDT
Article-I.D.: phs.1034
Posted: Fri Jul  5 12:17:41 1985
Date-Received: Sun, 7-Jul-85 05:40:09 EDT
Organization: Dept. Physiol., DUMC
Lines: 152

I apologize for the length of this question, but I feel that laying
the groundwork more or less carefully may prevent many more transmitted
lines than contained in this question.  The question appears at the
end, and I welcome answers from any one from whatever religion or
non-religion.  I am not interested in paeans to Kaufmann's arguments;
rather, I am interested in reasonable attempts at refutations of his
arguments, from any perspective.

And please!  If you decide to reply, feel free to paraphrase me or
Kaufmann, or to refer to "Kaufmann solution X" or "Kaufmann
pseudo-solution Y," rather than dumping all or part of this transmission
into your replies over and over again.

In Chapter VI of "The Faith of a Heretic" (Anchor [Doubleday], Garden
City, New York, 1963 [1961]), Walter Kaufmann takes up the question of
"Suffering and the Bible."  In answer to the question, "Why is there
the suffering we know?" Kaufmann proposes three solutions:

    1. "Everything in the universe, or at least a great deal, is due
       to chance."  [WK says Confucianism and Taoism approximately
       follow this.]
    2. "...the universe... is subject to iron laws but not to any
       purpose"  [WK says Hinduism and Buddhism approximately follow
       this.]
    3. "...the world is governed by purpose[s]... not especially intent
       on preventing suffering, whether it is indifferent to suffering
       or actually rejoices in it."  [WK says polytheistic religions
       and Zoroastrianism (? my spelling) approximately follow this.]

He then goes on: "In all three cases... the problem of suffering poses
no difficult problem at all:  one has a world picture in which suffering
has its place, a world picture that takes suffering into account.  To
make the problem of suffering a perplexing problem, one requires very
specific presuppositions, and once those are accepted the problem
becomes not only puzzling but insoluble... The problem arises when
monotheism is enriched with -- or impoverished by -- two assumptions:
that God is omnipotent and that God is just."  [WK then goes on to note
that "just" is usually embellished with "good," "morally perfect,"
"hating suffering," "loving man," and being "infinitely merciful."  He
also notes that "The use of `God' as a synonym for being-itself, or for
the `pure act of being,' or for nature... cannot be disproved but only
questioned as pettifoggery."]

Kaufmann, raised a Christian, later becoming a Jew (as his family had
originally been) and, I think, an atheist (though I've never heard him
say so) notes that "In most of the Hebrew Scriptures it is simply
axiomatic that suffering comes from God.  [This began to change with
the exilic prophets, and] [t]he New Testament assures us, climaxing
a development that began in exilic Judaism:  God is perfect.  He is
not unjust...  It is at this point that the perplexing problem of
suffering is created and at the same time rendered insoluble -- unless
either the traditional belief in God's boundless power or the belief in
his perfect justice and mercy is abandoned.  Short of that, only
pseudo-solutions are possible."  Kaufmann considers four of what he
calls "pseudo-solutions:"

    1. Inspired by Zarathustra (Zoroastrianism), the exilic Jews came
       up with Satan, who is invoked to solve the problem of suffering.
       "That this is no solution appears as soon as we ask why God
       allowed Satan to do such a thing.  The problem has merely been
       pushed back, not solved."
    2. The immortality of the soul or the eventual resurrection of the
       dead is invoked.  "We are assured that although there is patently
       little or no justice in this life and the wicked flourish more
       often than the just, the day of reward and retribution will come...
       By the time of Jesus, most, but not all, of the Jews took it for
       granted... the Pharisees accepted it, while the Sadducees did not."
       Kaufmann calls this a pseudo-solution since "...no doctrine of
       immortality or resurrection can solve the problem of suffering.
       Suppose that Anne Frank enjoys eternal bliss in heaven:  should
       an omnipotent god have found it impossible to let her have eternal
       bliss without first making her a victim of the Nazis and without
       having her die in a concentration camp?...  Faith in immortality,
       like belief in Satan, leaves unanswered the ancient questions:  is
       God unable to prevent suffering and thus not omnipotent?  or is he
       able but not willing to prevent it and thus not merciful?  And is
       he just?"
    3. "...a third pseudo-solution remains.  It consists in asserting, in
       flat defiance of experience, that everybody gets precisely what
       he deserves -- no better and no worse:  if Anne Frank suffered
       more than Heinrich Himmler, that proves that she was much more
       wicked."

(Kaufmann then takes an excursion into the Book of Job, in which he
seeks to demonstrate that the first of these pseudo-solutions is
rejected, the second is denied consideration, and the third is
repudiated emphatically.  "[Job] never questions either God's
existence or his omnipotence; but God's justice, mercy and goodness
he not only questions but denies outright... it does not occur to
anybody that God might simply be unable to prevent Job's suffering."
When God finally speaks from the whirlwind, "He says in effect:
the problem of suffering is no isolated problem; it fits a pattern;
the world is not so rational as Job's comforters suppose;  it is
uncanny.  God does not claim to be good and Job in his final reply
does not change his mind on this point:  he reaffirms that God can
do all things."  Finally, he notes that "In an age in which the
ancient sense of solidarity was crumbling and the individual
experienced his sufferings in that utter solitude which is now once
again the mark of modernity, the author of Job refused all the
comforts that go with the assurance that God is perfectly merciful
and just -- the promises that being moral pays either in this life
or the next -- and... claimed that God was neither just nor the
embodiment of mercy or perfection.")

    4. "The fourth spurious solution, which is one of the prime glories
       of Christian theology, claims in effect that suffering is a
       necessary adjunct of free will.... The following questions must
       be pressed.  First, if God knew that man would abuse his free
       will and that this would entail cancer and Auschwitz, why then
       did he give man free will?  Second... is there really any
       connection at all between ever so much suffering and free will?"
       (Kaufmann then considers the case of a girl in West's "Miss
       Lonelyhearts" who was born without a nose;  one presumes that
       he could have obtained a similar example from the realms of
       fact.)  "If such suffering... is the inevitable consequence of
       Adam's sin -- or if this is the price God had to pay for endowing
       man with free will -- then it makes no sense to call him
       omnipotent.  And if he was willing to pay this price for his own
       greater glory... or for the greater beauty of the cosmos, because
       shadows are needed to set off highlights... what sense does it
       make to attribute moral perfection to him?"

Kaufmann then goes on to consider various philosophers and theologians
who considered the problem;  all of them, in his eyes, apparently
"have implicitly, but not admittedly, denied God's omnipotence."
Leibniz, for example, asserted that "our world... is the best of all
possible worlds," which denies God's omnipotence "for if God is
unable to prevent [various instances of suffering] without every time
incurring a still greater evil, then he is clearly not omnipotent."
If "suffering is somehow logically necessary," then how could God
create a heaven with no suffering, but not an earth with no suffering;
why not create just heaven and no earth at all?  "Would the blessed in
heaven be unable to appreciate their bliss if they could not observe the
torments of the damned?"  Royce argued that "`Your sufferings are God's
sufferings.'  That is the real meaning of incarnation and crucifixion:
God did not remain a being apart from the world... God really suffers,
too; ...this suffering is necessary because the good which consists in
the overcoming of evil is greater than that which consists in the absence
of evil."  In which case, Royce has effectively denied God's omnipotence.
"He also claims that the suffering of the girl born without a nose is
justified because the discovery by some future doctors of some way to
avert such mishaps makes for a better world than we should have had if
there never had been any such mishaps in the first place.  That is what
the girl should have been told;  also, that it hurt God as much as her."

So, finally, the question:  Does anyone out there know of a genuine
solution to the question posed by Kaufmann:  Can God or a god be both
omnipotent and just (including good, morally perfect, and so on) and
permit the suffering we know to exist?

Regards, Paul Dolber (...{decvax!mcnc or !decvax}!duke!phs!paul).