Eugene I wrote: ↑Sat Feb 27, 2021 9:56 pm
AshvinP wrote: ↑Sat Feb 27, 2021 9:22 pm
Voluntary incarnation certainly makes the 'problem of evil' much easier to deal with, but I am still not sure it is necessary. If what we think of as "suffering" in this world is but a distorted shadow of a shadow etc. cast by much 'higher-dimensional' realities, then perhaps those elevated perspectives will allow us to completely reimagine those seemingly negative qualities, while right now we are like flatlanders trying to imagine a three-dimensional sphere of being.
I can't agree with that. The fact that there is a "bigger picture" of things where every suffering fits and leads to eventual harmony can not justify the suffering of a child dying from cancer in extreme pain, terror and fear of death and who is unable to understand this "bigger picture", unless this child deliberately pre-agreed to experience such suffering.
Let's flip it around - a parent comes to you and says "my daughter has terminal cancer and is in extreme constant agony, how could this be in a Good and Just universe?" Would your response be, "well... according to X, Y, Z presuppositions, your child actually chose to be incarnated into this life, even though I know it does not appear that way in the slightest..."? I doubt it.
My inclination would be to work in Victor Frankl's story in the concentration camp and his 'will-to-meaning', which is of course related to Nietzsche's will-to-power. I believe he quotes Nietzsche's maxim, "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" approvingly. And from a metaphysical idealist perspective, nothing in this incarnation actually kills you in a final sense.
Dostoevsky expressed this very acutely in his "tear of a child" chapter of Brothers Karamazov. And Dostoevsky did not express it only from Ivan's rebellious perspective. Ivan asks Alyosha to answer if he would consent to such global scheme where the eventual harmony is build on a tear of a single child, and Alyosha, who represents the voice of the Christian faith and Christian goodness, answers "no". His conscience could not allow him to say "yes".
Tell me yourself, I challenge your answer. Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last, but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature- that baby beating its breast with its fist, for instance- and to found that edifice on its unavenged tears, would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me, and tell the truth."
"No, I wouldn't consent," said Alyosha softly."
And can you admit the idea that men for whom you are building it would agree to accept their happiness on the foundation of the unexpiated blood of a little victim? And accepting it would remain happy for ever?"
"No, I can't admit it."
Dostoevsky, "Brothers Karamazov".
Dostoevsky is too deep of a thinker to identify him with any particular character in his writings. We know that he often 'steel-mans' the characters expressing philosophical positions which he ultimately disagrees with. That being said, Ivan's hypothetical of an omnibenevolent Creator justifying the suffering is not the same as the evolutionary will-to-meaning argument. In fact, it's basically the opposite. It is not pointing to a grand Architect to justify the suffering, but rather to a non-directed process. And it is not even claiming there is pure harmony and bliss at the 'end' of the process, just that it is clearly beyond our current understanding and therefore something we must submit to and attempt to understand from that position of humility.