The Problem of Pain

Rev dear Rev, surely it is time for christian prelates and bishops to desist from trying to explain the suffering of children with cancer and admit that it is an absurd world under an absurd creator, correct? Only recently an archbishop was trying to explain all of this problem to a young girl who asked the salient question and he failed to make an impression. Time to admit defeat for the christians and their bishops?

Aha here we touch on something that philosophers in the Anglo-saxon tradition used to call the Problem of Evil, until one of their chief exponents converted to Judaeo-christianity as the only viable explanation of it all with its spirituality of the cross, but here the Problem of Evil is considered not as a metaphysical encounter with dark demonic forces below this planet surface, but as an expression of the problem as to why good people and especially children do suffer simple, ordinary, unexplained pain in the world. Anthony Flew being the greatest exponent of the philosophy around it all. The French existentialists being the great novelists but sentimental ones on the subject. But C S Lewis being the most empathetic philosopher on the matter in his able book, The Problem of Pain, and his other book, Surprised by Joy, and then A Grief Observed. All philosophy. So philosophy is required. Cold hard reason requires us to intervene in this soppy debate becoming ever more soppy as the years roll by and as pollution mounts up - no wonder Greta is pulling her hair out at all of this sentiment - while children suffer, the portly businessmen of the west and their fracking practices deem it okay to continue, simply and adroitly. But let us assume a response is possible - One of the great problems with consumer materialism over the last few decades is the way that when transposed into the spiritual sphere, as the Dalai Lama says it, it reduces God to a Kalms pill and asks God not to be God in a savage universe. Sentiment then rules the minds of the christians, especially in those recent 500 year old churches that abandoned hard core philosophy under the direction of Luther following a doctrinnaire interpretation of I Corinthians, and the rest is history - it made them totally ill-equipped to deal fairly and squarely with such problems abouts the problem of evil in the world, as the able and more sanguine Anglo-saxon philosophers like Anthony Flew put it all out there. Western consumers thence became between 1960 and 2013 very soppy, sentimental, and sonorous about something that requires a cool detached look at cold hard reason. The fact is that the human race is sitting on a 3rd rock from the sun, on a planet that is hurting into space at an alarming speed, and which could connect with anything out there in deep space. Trying to play footsie with calculus and then adopt the emotionalism of the French soppy, selfish, and sweet existentialists of Camus and Sartre is tantamount to using and reducing in our own potty minds the creator of a large and savage universe as nothing more than a teddy bear. He is busy in other parts of the universe causing amoebas to grow and fostering life on other planets - that much is evident. Why we should feel that that creator is always at our beck and call like some spoiled child in a cot that we have become in a consumer led west, is patently absurd - God is not a baby rattle to be jigged and played and shaken when we have become stirred. So don't pin your blame game on the hems of God's gowns in deep space. There are many reasons for cancer, most of which lie with the parlous state of the climate and the atmosphere which we have polluted beyond all wild imagining in the short time we have been here belching out our smoke and our steam and our bilge since the Industrial Revolution of the 1840s as Greta the Great has the temerity to say it out loud, so it is not surprising that children develop various cancers, only let it be known among us that it is not some distant God in the universe that positively and individually causes those cancers to grow, but the simple fact of human iniquity, man's inhumanity to man, as the great philosopher of the problem of evil, John Paul II once called it all out so ably and adroitly. Like Sir Isaace Newton under his tree with the apples falling upon his head in the folds of Lincolnshire at Woolsthorpe Manor, am sorry to be so cool, cold, and calm, but that is the state of play in the savage universe - anything else is a soppy commercial for the Scott MacKenzies of the world who all wish to go to San Francisco with flowers in their hair. Nice copy, nice sentiment, nice pop art, but definitely only that. But maybe some flowers in the hair might not be a bad thing, if it gets people to appreciate that the world is not enough, some cool philosophy is required, and maybe a little naturalism of the new naturalist left. So come back Scott, all is forgiven.