The Emotional Factor
“Oh my friends, my friends don't ask me
What your sacrifice was for
Empty chairs at empty tables
Where my friend will sing no more.”
~ “Empty Chairs at Empty Tables” from Les Miserables [Michael Ball’s version]
Human beings, along with countless other life forms, through no fault of their own, are afflicted by natural evil. If there were a Creator God, then God created natural evil. A Pandeist God would also be natural evil. Are you feeling warm and fuzzy about God yet? Would it help if you thought that this same God who created and perhaps is natural evil is just playing a game with you and all whom you love to test your faith? Do you take comfort in the God-as-an-emotional-abuser model? Somehow, some mothers who lose their babies to disease or disaster think this is part of a magnificent plan and love God all the more. This makes no sense to me other than as the most desperate of justifications that should have a very short half-life: God created the disease, God created the disaster, and perhaps God failed to intervene if you believe in an intervening type of God, and now your baby is dead and the best that you can hope for is that the same sinister God that created the disease or disaster that killed your baby will turn out to be a gem after all in an afterlife. This was the best plan that a good God could devise?
Perhaps I am more like these mothers than I care to think. As the acrobatic mind behind the convergence theodicy, I, too, tried desperately to justify a good God’s creating natural evil. The only difference between those mothers and me is that I did not love God all the more or all the same: “While my position on natural evil's inviting convergent spiritual growth could be defended logically in my head, my heart was not at all satisfied: ‘Really, God, how could You?’” (GOD-centric, Ch. 5) I was willing to selflessly throw myself under God’s disaster-and-disease bus: I would live in and out God’s love, fairness, and goodness just so I could share mystical moments of convergence with God with nary a care about God’s treatment of me. I was okay with God’s not caring about me individually. What I was not readily okay with was applying this principle of self-sacrifice to the brotherhood of man. What I was not at all okay with was applying this principle of self-sacrifice to my brother ~ or mother or niece or nephew or extended family or friends. I was not okay with God’s not caring about each of them individually. Emotionally, in the end, I could not reconcile, despite my near desperate motivation, natural evil with a good God. My emotional revolt stemmed not from our dying;1 but, our suffering diseases and disasters attributable to a Creator God. Unfortunately, not believing in a good God may afford me intellectual integrity; but, it is not emotionally satisfying either: Natural disasters and disease still kill indiscriminately, non-good Pandeist God or no God.
