Martha, Epicurus, and Jack

Occasionally my postings come with forewarnings to the willing reader; today is one of those times. Here are your warnings, three of them:

1.) I might offend you.

You might be Baptist, Catholic, Christian, Bahá'í, Atheist, or just a free-thinking-free-spirit. That’s fine, but I’m not promising to make any of you happy, as often happens when God becomes the conversation centerpiece. What’s more, I’m not even sure I’ll be happy when I’m done. But let’s just see, shall we?

2.) I might come out sounding radical, fanatical, or just downright heretical. My intent is not blasphemy but rather a desire to look at what I’ve always believed about God in a new way, without taking those beliefs for granted.

3.) If you stick with me, you’re going to be reading a lot of quotes.

We’ll begin.

I have one good friend who is an Atheist and another good friend who is a Christian and pretty fanatical about C.S. Lewis. So, I’ve started a project, you see, looking at my faith from these bipolar angles: I’m watching a BBC documentary series by Jonathan Miller called “A Rough History of Disbelief: Atheism” and concurrently reading Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis.

I’m taking notes.

I know, if you’re still reading you’re thinking that this all sounds rather heady and is getting a good running start towards boring. Maybe. I would probably think the same, but then, somewhere in the midst of my BBC series and my 30 cent copy of Mere Christianity, my life smacked right into this ponderous philosophy.

Let me tell you how, not so that you can feel pity, but so that you can connect with me with the common chords we all share as human beings, those of pain, sadness, and suffering.

You might remember a while back when I worked at a hospital here in Kampala for a month? The week I worked in the pediatric ward I became friends with a mother and her 2 ½ month old baby, Martha Patience. In the middle of ward busy with sick and crying babies Martha caught my attention precisely because she was a beautiful and healthy-looking baby with a caring and attentive mother who never left her side – the sadly rare exception to most of the children there. Martha had been having breathing problems since her birth and had just been diagnosed with a heart defect. Without surgery (a procedure which would be “simple” in the US) her prognosis would be poor. But, cardiac surgery isn’t done here in Uganda, especially for small babies.

I told her mother I wanted to help. I researched organizations that fly children to the US for advanced surgeries. I emailed cardiologists. And then, about 2 ½ weeks after I met her, Martha died.

It felt like getting punched in the stomach. Having the wind knocked out of you. Not that I was the savior for the situation, but the fact that help was out there for Martha, if only God had given her more time.

I was back at that age-old question of “why would a good and all-powerful God (if he really exists) allow suffering?” I searched the Bible, prayed, and journaled.

This is what I came up with:

God is all-powerful (“The Lord…he is mighty to save” Zeph 3:17)

God is willing to save (“The Lord is…not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance” 2 Pet. 3:9)

I’ll share what I wrote in my journal:

“Lord, if it is not your lack of power to save or your willingness to save, them I am back to where I began…that it must be your PURPOSE that I do not understand…”

What does my experience have to do with philosophy, atheism and C.S. Lewis?

Let me take you back to the 4^th century to meet Epicurus - materialist, empiricist, hedonist, and one of the major philosophers of the Hellenistic period.

Epicurus asked this question about God and Evil:

“Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?

Then he is not omnipotent.

Is he able, but not willing?

Then he is malevolent.

Is he both able and willing?

Then whence cometh evil?

Is he neither able nor willing?

Then why call him God?”

I guess I was rather shocked I had been asking the same questions as Epicurus…only because he assumes he must be on the same moral, intellectual, and spiritual level as God he stops short of a third possibility – that God (as GOD!) may have a purpose even higher than his ability or willingness that we as HUMANS cannot grasp.

Here’s what C.S. Lewis has to say in his book Mere Christianity:

“Is this state of affairs in accordance with God’s will or not? If it is, He is a strange God, you will say; and if it is not, how can anything happen contrary to the will of a being with absolute power?” (M.C. p.52)

So far, it seems the philosophers agree. More from Lewis:

“God created things which had free will. That means creatures which can go either wrong or right…Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having. A world of automata – of creatures that worked like machines would hardly be worth creating. The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water. And for that they must be free.

Of course God knew what would happen if they used their freedom the wrong way: apparently He thought it worth the risk…

…If God thinks this state of war in the universe a price worth paying for free will – that is, for making a live world in which creatures can do real good and real harm and something of real importance can happen, instead of a toy world which only moves when He pulls strings – then we may take it, it is worth paying.” (M.C. p.52-53)

Worth paying. Cancer. Genocide. Child trafficking. Poverty. Worth paying??? Just how can you say that the destruction of lives, peoples, cultures, nations are ever worth it?

You cannot….unless…you are able to think outside the world and ourselves as we understand it…as humans.

What if, just what if …it was worth it?

Could it be that goodness, joy, love, and freedom possible because of free will is just that precious?

Could it be that God’s love allows cancer, genocide, child trafficking, and poverty as the required price for free will?

…and all this because only He could possibly know the reality of a world without free will? Could it be that the culmination of human suffering breaks God’s heart, but that He knows a life without free will would mean either the absence of, or counterfeit goodness, joy, love, and freedom?

I am only asking questions…I don’t pretend to have figured out the answers.

Seen collectively, this costly price might be understandable for the whole of humanity…on an individual level, I struggle because what if I am that person with the caner, or that one child sold into slavery, that one woman condemned to a life of poverty, that baby named Martha? What does this say of God’s love for me, as ME?

But the truth is, the human race has in fact, “set up on their own as if they had created themselves – (to) be their own masters – invent some sort of happiness for themselves outside God, apart from God. And out of that hopeless attempt has come nearly all that we call human history – money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery – the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.” (M.C. p 53 – 54)

At some level, to dis-allow or intervene in the pain and suffering of one individual would at the same moment be taking away the free will of another person…right?

And that's all I have. No happy ending stories or great answers, just lots of questions and a big want to understand more.

References:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzlB7lJZH-g

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxJwSIIqQrU