*** Why do Bad things happen to Nice People ? by Jug Suraiya *** This has long been a central problem facing many religions and schools of philosophy. According to Judeo-Christian belief, God the Creator is both all-powerful and all-good. This being the case, why would such a Supreme Being create a universe which is less than perfect, which allows for the existence of evil -- for bad things to happen to good people ? It is like saying that a great artist would deliberately create an ugly work of art. It’s a contradiction in terms. Western philosophers and theologians have made various attempts to provide a satisfactory answer to this seeming conundrum: Why does an all-good and all-benign God allow evil and bad things to happen to good and God-believing people? Isn’t this a cruel betrayal of the love and faith of devotees ? German philosopher Leibniz, who claimed that our God-created universe was the best of all possible worlds, came up with a doctrine called ‘theodicy’, which means an attempt to vindicate the existence of evil and bad things in the perfect creation of a perfect Creator. Subsequent Christian thinkers like C S Lewis elaborated on the concept of theodicy: the principle by which an all-merciful God allows bad things to happen to good people. Someone you love very much dies an untimely death and your world is shattered. Couldn’t the God that you are devoted to have prevented this tragedy? What use is an all-powerful Being if He can’t prevent such pain and suffering ? Theodicy argues that God could certainly intervene and prevent tragic events from taking place. But if God were to intervene in our day-to-day lives we would no longer have the God-given gift of free will: we would no longer be autonomous human beings, but robot-like automatons. We would no longer be free agents capable of making our own choices – which includes the choice of having faith or not having faith; of believing in God or not believing in God. Having to bear pain and suffering, having to endure bad things is the price we pay for our free will, for our freedom of choice and action. An atheist existentialist like Sartre has no need for the concept of theodicy to explain pain and suffering. In the existentialist’s Godless world, through our own free actions and choices we create the world we occupy. Someone you love suddenly dies and your world is shattered. Whom do you blame for this? Not God, because for you there is no God. Not malign fate or blind chance, because you and only you are responsible for the world you have created for yourself. A world in which you freely chose to love someone so much that the person’s death would shatter the world you had created. You, and only you, are responsible for the world you create. You, and only you, are responsible for the bad things that happen to you in it, the pain and suffering that you undergo. Indic philosophy neatly sidesteps the issue of bad things happening to good people. Concepts like ‘bad’ and ‘good’ are illusions, the products of maya. Strip away the veil of maya, of the illusions to which we attach ourselves, and ‘bad’ and ‘good’ disappear like the phantoms that they always were, together with the phantom called God.
Posted on: Sun, 13 Jul 2014 13:30:16 +0000
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