Is There any Reason for Gratuitous Suffering?

One should only approach the problem of evil with great care. This is because evil and suffering in the world are real and prevalent. Theodicies (attempts to justify God in the face of evil and suffering) too often minimize or trivialize these realities. This will not do. In a world where children die of bone cancer and where predators rip infants from the wombs of their still living mothers evil cannot be shrugged off.

A few opening notes then are necessary. I would never claim to know why evil and suffering exist, or why God would choose (if that is even the right word) to create a world like the one we live in. I take it the versions of the problem of evil are the most significant challenges to belief in any conception of a loving God. And they are high among the reasons why I would not claim to know that any such God exists, even while I believe that one does. My thoughts here are not offered as speculative philosophy, not as therapy, and certainly not as an answer to someone currently suffering. The proper response to suffering is the alleviation of the cause of that suffering or solidarity in suffering, not theodicy.

This said, I don’t think that this is all that should be the only reaction to suffering from the theist. If theism is to be intellectually viable, it must have something to say about why evil and suffering might exist, even if it never claims to have THE answer to such questions.

In particular, here I am interested in gratuitous suffering. That is, suffering that does not have an immediate offsetting good. An immediate offsetting good would be something like the allowance of free will. It may be that allowing for free will requires allowing bad decisions. But bad decisions may cause evil and suffering. That evil and suffering would not, then, be gratuitous.

For this reason, in order to isolate gratuitous suffering, philosophers often point to the problem of animal suffering. Say, a doe that dies in agony in a naturally caused forest fire. No one else ever knows that this particular event happened. So, there is no cause or effect that can immediately justify the suffering. Nothing hangs on this particular example. But it does get us to a bit of clarity on this particularly horrible kind of problem of evil.

In responding to this problem of evil, I want to make a few claims about the kind of God I am trying to understand. First, it is not a God of meticulous providence. That is, this is not a God that controls or causes every particular event in the world. Rather, I assume that God is responsible for creating the and sustaining the world. But that the world exhibits a significant amount of freedom from God in its particular formation at any given time. This might be the case for multiple reasons. Perhaps God imbues the world with this kind of freedom in order to allow for the realization of particular kinds of goods. Perhaps God is not the kind of being that can exert meticulous providence. The first would be a more classical theistic claim, the later is more associated with modern process theology. For current purposes, I have no interest in sorting them out or selecting between them. I am only interested in the conclusion both reach, that God is not in the business of regularly determining particular events.

This makes the problem of evil I am interested in one that is not concerned with why some particular evil occurred, but why God would have created a world in which that kind of evil could or would occur. God may “allow” particular instances of evil in the sense that God sustains a world in which such evils occur. But that is quite different from deciding that, say, this particular evil should occur.

The question then is whether God would ever create a world in which genuine gratuitous evils occur. Or to put the issue rather differently, would God create a world with absurdity in it? Here, by absurdity I mean things—events, objects, realities—that lack reason for their existence. These absurdities would include absurd evils.

It is here that we run upon a kind of paradox. Because God might create such a world if there were goods that could be realized in such a world that could not be realized in a world without absurdity. Imagine, for instance, that there is significant good in standing against the absurdity of the world. This is the kind of good that is often trumpeted by existentialist leaning atheists. They appreciate a kind of heroism found in embracing meaning despite the fact that the world does not guarantee that meaning. It is exactly the absurdity of the world that allows for the possibility of the existence of such a good. If we lived in a world in which there were no absurdity, there would be no standing against it.

But what if this, or something like it, were quite important to the very kind of being that we exhibit, such that God could not create that kind of being without also creating the kind of world in which such absurdity existed. In such a world gratuitous evils, while lacking immediate offsetting goods, would be necessary features of the possibility for many of the kinds of goods that we find in this world.

This, of course, leaves several questions. I have not argued that any of this is account is true. It’s all a set of claims that “might be” or “could plausibly be.” But, as noted at the beginning, I am not aiming for anything so comprehensive as an account of why gratuitous evils DO occur. I don’t think that is a realistic bar for the discussion. More importantly, we leave untouched the broader question, to which I suspect all theodicy returns. Even if we accept that God had to accept such limitations in creating, should God have created at all. Perhaps one would wish to argue that existence of the kind that we enjoy just isn’t worth the suffering inherent in the kind of world in which we exist. It is clearly beyond my ability to engage such a topic here, and I doubt there is any one definitive conclusion to the dispute.

I rest here, having suggested that there is a way in which it is possible to make sense of why God might have allowed absurd evil in some world. That, I think, is about the best we can do in such a context.