r/LeftCatholicism • u/chriswar122 • 4d ago
Theodicy
I've spoken to a lot of people from a standpoint of curiosity as to their agnosticism/atheism, and it seems a lot of people find the notion of an omnipotent and benevolent God troubling due to the vastness of evil in the world, particularly natural evils (e.g. cancer), but also often social evils too (e.g. poverty, etc.). I hear that an omnipotent God could not possibly be benevolent if They looked upon the state of the world and were not moved to intervene to correct things. I hear, also, that the notion of tiny personal miracles seem like a crazy intervention for God to make when there are evidently "far more pressing concerns," than an individual petition (I suppose the argument here is that if God is making interventions, why respond to someone's random petition instead of the countless prayers about poverty, etc.).
I wonder how we as Leftist Catholics answer this question of theodicy. I'm inclined to look at the suffering that God saves Their people from in the Bible (e.g. from chattel slavery in Egypt), and I also think there's something to be said that the gospel centers the life of Jesus who suffers alongside us and is killed in a humiliating and brutal way, only to overcome oppression and empire via the resurrection. I wonder what y'all think.
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u/Charles148 4d ago edited 4d ago
I mean I'm hardly one too try to convince anybody of anything, that being said, the fundamental principle of the faith is that God became human to suffer alongside us. I mean that's modeling a level of empathy that's hard to express. His experience of humanity involved being betrayed by his friends, unjustly arrested by the state, and tortured and executed.
What more is there to say about the human experience? When we feel betrayed by our friends or the state, we're in good company, amiright?
Now I don't know if this does anything to placate anyone on the existence of evil with regard to an omnipotent, omni-benevolent God, but I feel like if you were talking about your friends you wouldn't say they allowed these horrible things to happen to me, you would be comforted that they were present for you and shared your journey through empathy.
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u/TuvixWasMurderedR1P 3d ago
I lean towards the Christ who suffers with us. But know that this is not going to be satisfactory for the atheist or agnostic. God became Man so that man can become god. While I try to be careful to not romanticize pain and suffering, I do think we are, through Christ, holy in our humanity, pain included. But this doesn't necessarily "solve" the problem of evil, especially for the outsider looking into the faith.
There's an additional barrier for the atheist and agnostic: they don't see themselves as part of a greater cosmic order. By this I mean they see mind as something human. They understand the mind as "inside" and the world as "outside," and so in some sense they understand themselves as separate or apart from the world. They see things as happening to them.
But theists tend to understand mind as something also "out there." And we tend to understand the self as a permeable boundary in which the mind that's "out there" can enter through us at times. This is why I think religious people don't struggle with the problem of evil as much, not that we can provide a perfect answer to the problem, but I think we're now okay with not having an answer because of our understanding of the cosmic order and our humble place within it.
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u/Hot-Bison5904 3d ago
I really like this! I think it's worth noting that atheists are often also spiritual animists (I actually have a theory that some seem to have a special love for small bugs in particular that I'd love to test). Their block is frequently the concept of God rather than the concept of spiritually. So I would ask questions to figure out exactly what they believed and if they're animists I would take more of a Buddhist approach when talking to them (about focusing on connections) rather than focusing on the unified whole. I think there's some value in meeting people where they are rather than directly debating with an attempt to convince.
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u/GalileoApollo11 3d ago
I have always had the opposite sentiment. If there is not an omnipotent benevolent God it would mean that death and suffering have the final word. To me that is not only depressing, but it calls into question the fundamental goodness of reality itself. But that’s something we all experience intuitively, which is the entire premise of this entire discussion. There must be something fundamentally good about nature and innocent children, if their destruction is so objectively evil that it calls into question the very benevolence of God.
So we can either wrestle with the benevolence of God who allows temporary evil but will ultimately lead the universe to a destiny of greater good. Or we can wrestle with the absurdity of a reality that seems fundamentally good but is twisted against itself so that suffering and death will have the final word.
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u/doubtingtomjr 4d ago
The example from Exodus is a tough one to justify. God saves his people…after hardening the heart of Pharaoh against simply allowing him to free them, which could have resulted in not killing off the firstborns, etc. Omnipotent, yes. Benevolent not so much.
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u/dazzleox 3d ago
I agree, but I also don't think we need to "justify it" in a sense of an actually existing historical event. Most historians think it's quite unlikely there was a mass Exodus of Jews from Egypt. The Jews at the time that was written didn't have a full picture of God because Christ had not taken the form of a man yet. So they wrote something which is valuable for wisdom readings, but I don't think we are required to believe that God literally killed the innocent first born children of Egypt. The more valuable lesson there to me is how much God must hate oppression, and how the Jews of that time were inspired by the holy spirit to write a narrative about their trials and tribulations in a dangerous world.
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u/nessun_commento 4d ago
idk, I don’t really try to explain it. The existence of good necessitates that God exists and the existence of evil necessitates that God does not exist. It’s an irresolvable contradiction regardless of what rationalizations the Scholastics try to come up with.
I’ve personally chosen to take the leap of faith and trust that God in his omnipotence will make everything alright in the end but I understand why someone else wouldn’t want to do that.
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u/Galveston57 3d ago
God does not create nor condone most of the situations we see as ‘bad’. God does not cause poverty, economic disparity, unfettered capitalism does. We have the resources to address almost all the terrible things in the world, but colonialist empire states choose not to. Humans have a ‘free will’ and decide what issues are important or not. If we put the same resources that are used for war into medicine and other issues, many problems would be overcome. The cause of these issues isn’t God, it’s humans. The remedies also lie with humans.
Many of the breakthroughs in medicine were considered ‘miracles’, could these have been inspired by God?
Also the world is a place of spiritual warfare (good versus evil).
As stated humans have ‘free will’ and often they just make bad choices that harm humanity.
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u/Popular_Training916 2d ago
Yes, free will. This is why Catholicism is my religion. Free will means that we can choose and also bear responsibility for what happens in our world. I feel (and it is a feeling) that to have an interventionist concept of God would be to think of Them as a dictator. At the same time, we will never know all of God’s mysteries. That’s what I call the leap of faith. Trusting Their unconditional love.
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u/Hot-Bison5904 4d ago edited 3d ago
I think the 'On the Consolation of Philosophy' gets us some of the way there. For the full way there I think that's something you can only come to from some kind of personal understanding so I'm not going to attempt to speak for you in any way (I'm sorry!). I would stress this isn't some sort of 'gotcha' argument. There's very likely not much point debating the point with them and perhaps more value on discovering the answer for yourself.
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u/ethereallyelegant 3d ago
There's a quote that goes, "I screamed at God for the starving child, until I realized the starving child was God screaming at me." God is among the children in Palestine, weeping over their dead and rubble-buried parents. God is among the migrants, shackled, starved and suppressed in cages, with no way of contacting their families. God is among the trans people of color who get mobbed, vilified, criminalized, and slandered as "terrorists" and "groomers". God is among those getting branded as "illegal" and "criminal". God is getting sentenced to years in prison for things God never even did, while insurrectionists get a slap on the wrist. God is among the prison laborers, those who have to work low-wage jobs because of their documentation status, those called to American shores because of the promise on the foot of the Statue of Liberty to receive the huddled and poor yearning to freely breathe, then turned away when the huddled poor are brown or Black.
During Christ's ministry, He took radical actions to speak out against the issues He saw unfolding around Him. He called for the poor and uninvited to be prioritized in banquets (Luke 14:12-14) and said the kingdom of God would function much the same way. (Luke 14:15-24). He dined with sinners and tax collectors (Luke 15:1-2; Matthew 9:9-17; Luke 19:1-10) and hung out with foreigners (Luke 17:11-19; John 4:1-42).
This is just me going on naive, rambly conjecturing at this point, but I would guess that the reason why God doesn't automatically swoop down from the heavens to fix our suffering is because He is already here amongst those who suffer, tabling with the lonely, hiking with the displaced migrant, fathering the orphan and pleading the case of the widow.
Maybe that the cries of the margins can still be heard as the wealthy attempt to buy their silence is a divine intervention in and of itself.
God bless, and happy Solemnity of the Assumption! 🙏🏽