To be(gin) or not to be(gin), or, Chewing on the problem of evil

The problem of evil—how could an omnipotent-omniscient-omnipresent-all-good god create or allow to exist a universe containing evil and arbitrary suffering—has always been a, if not the, major barrier for me to believing in any approximation of God. The following represents a way of tackling the question in non-didactic terms. The question at the end is not merely rhetorical—I’d really like to know what people think.
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Imagine you are God. Nothing is but you. You are contemplating whether or not to begin the Universe.

You imagine it first. In your imagination, you reach out and touch the button, or say the words, or simply make the decision, and BANG!, it all begins.

For awhile, for a long time, it’s all fun. Pretty lights. Spectacular explosions, with more pretty lights. You have the best seat in the house. You can wander around, sit and watch this star or galaxy begin, that star collapse into a supernova, gas clouds form into fantastical shapes, then begin to coalesce into more stars and galaxies. Black holes make it interesting, with some pretty cool effects happening around them. It’s all good, all fun and games. A star is born, a star dies—both are beautiful, both can just be enjoyed, fireworks and the Fourth of July. You whoop it up.

You have some quiet moments, too. In this tiny corner of your Universe, delicate crystals form. They are beautiful, and you pause to watch them grow, like hoarfrost on a window. Then ping!, they collapse, and savoring the moment, you move on.

But eventually, in various galaxies, things cool off enough that planets form around millions of stars. Chemistry on many of those planets begins to get more and more complex. Carbon in particular begins to do interesting things, combining with itself and with certain other atoms in ever more elaborate ways. Some of the systems thus forming on some of the planets enable some of those complex carbon forms to self-replicate. Life is beginning.

Hm-m. This is interesting. Where is it heading? You decide to watch. You pick a few planets, set a spell, and just pay attention.

As with the galaxies, stars, and crystals, life develops beautiful forms. But the dynamics of the interactions of living entities are almost more interesting and intricate than the forms themselves. Some kinds of life survive by eating others. Some forms of life promote their survival by joining up with others. Pleasure, pain, and consciousness develop. You yourself have experienced pleasure—you’ve thoroughly enjoyed watching the Universe up to this point—but not pain. Because for a very long time you’ve been watching things begin and end, crash into each other, rub up against each other in ways that destroy or transform one or the other object, you don’t realize at first that there’s anything different about the crashing, the consuming, the endings of the living bits. You don’t get suffering. You feel no pain.

But since you are paying attention, after awhile you get curious about some of the things you are observing. You find a way to eavesdrop on consciousness, to share in the experience of some of these living bits of the universe. Maybe you even decide to try it out for yourself awhile, and enter into, “become” in some sense, various types of life you’ve observed. Pain surprises you; when you enter into a social being with more sophisticated consciousness, suffering astonishes you—it brings you to your metaphoric knees. You zap on outa there, and settle back to consider things. You consider the sheer scale of pain and suffering implied by multiplying the experiences you had by all the billions of individual life forms that have developed. You consider that “develop” inevitably implies change, and that for the living bits, change—some change, not all, but enough—implies pain, suffering, death.

Because life evolves, because of the logic of evolution, there’s no way to stop life feeding on itself, or to prevent the emergence of consciousness and suffering, other than stopping the whole shebang. You aren’t in fact omnipotent or omniscient, can’t in fact intervene each and every one of the trillions of times you’d need to in order to prevent life, once started, from evolving, from developing consciousness, from suffering.

The Universe you’re imagining has grown even beyond your imagination by now. You can’t intervene on all the planets to prevent life from starting—it keeps slipping through your fingers, here, then there. Still, you are fascinated by all the new forms life keeps coming up with, the new ways this matter/energy you put into play finds to organize itself, the sheer diversity, the layers upon layers of interrelated, intricate arrangements and dances it is showing you. It reminds you of the crystals you watched, but it’s even more interesting.

Besides, you realize that with other consciousnesses in the Universe, you would have someone who can watch it all with you, at least in their little corner, and someone perhaps to talk to. You hadn’t imagined you were lonely, but now you realize how much your own is-ness would be enhanced by the is-ness of other centers of consciousness.

But the price of this is suffering. All living consciousness comes with suffering, every single bit of it, there’s no escaping it. And now that you are aware of it, in your imagination you are suffering right along with it—you feel all the suffering of all the living bits, not only on the planets you’ve been paying attention to, but all across the Universe.

And yet there is also joy, pleasure, love. You realize that life will take forms and consciousness will go places that you can’t even imagine, can’t anticipate, and that this will enhance your own being.

You pause. This is as far as your imagination stretches. Beyond this, you can’t see what will happen with your Universe. The only way to find out is to actually start everything off, and see what happens. However, as a result of your deliberations, you realize that if you choose to start your Universe, things are going to get away from you a bit. What should you do?

So here’s the choice. Begin it all: start the Universe, and life, unanticipated beauty, suffering, joy, and love will inevitably emerge. The suffering is huge. You will feel every nuance of it. But then there’s pleasure, beauty, joy, and love. No Universe means no joy, no beauty, and no love. And you will feel them, along with the living entities, as acutely as you will feel the suffering.

You don’t know the exactly how it will evolve, or how it will end. But you do know that if you put it into motion, life in some form will evolve, and with life will come consciousnesses other than your own, and that these consciousnesses will suffer, will experience pain—and pleasure and even joy, and some will love. It’s not only your own pleasure, your own interests you must consult, but those consequences of developing life and other consciousnesses.

Do you push the button, say the words? And either way, why?

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Writing this, working it through, has done a couple of things for me. One, it has made me realize that suffering is in the logic of the universe, it’s not a wholly-avoidable phenomenon. Two, I clearly can’t even imagine an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent god, let alone one that is also omnibenevolent, but can imagine a creator-god that is still benevolent and worth pursuing/knowing. Three (yes, I know that three is more than a couple, but “couple” sounds better in that sentence than “few”)—three, I’ve realized that the burden of proof regarding evolution is on those who think it doesn’t happen. The logic of life—self-replication with some variation—means evolution is inevitable unless some force intervenes and prevents it. Only if self-replication were absolutely perfect every single time would evolution not occur—and look around, folks, self-replication is definitely not absolutely perfect every single time. And sex speeds up the “with minor variation” thing a LOT, and hence accelerates the rate of evolution tremendously. So even if a creator-god started life off in some already-complex form, it wouldn’t stay as-created for long (cosmically speaking). It would evolve—unless the creator-god intervened continuously to prevent it.

In any case, that’s as close as I can come to putting to rest the problem of evil for myself. We’ll see if it allows me to “move on” spiritually in some way.

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