What happens when suffering comes?
What role does tragedy play? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.
In this chapter, Graffin introduces us to the role that tragedy plays in a life. I found myself moved by reading accounts of people he had lost in his life due to drugs and alcohol. I definitely resonated when he talked about how when you go through a divorce or lose a child to death, it is as if the laws of the universe have been broken. Divorce is easily the greatest tragedy I have gone through. Nothing comes close.
In contrasting to the theistic view, he writes that if there were no death, the world would not be able to contain the biological exuberance. This is certainly true. Yet he goes on from here to say that death requires and receives no justification. It’s simply a part of life.
If this is true, why do we all act like it is not that at all? Are we all just deluded? Why are we all sad? Why do we all try to make sense of death? Why is it that we are scared to see a corpse or to touch a corpse? We can say death is natural in a sense, but natural does not always equal good.
He also says it is hard to be a theist after looking at the fossil record and trying to explain all the death that came before us. No reason is given why this is so. Theism doesn’t require a perfect world at all. Why should it? From a metaphysical standpoint, I find that hard to conceive. Even with Heaven, it is a good world in every sense, but could we not add one more soul and say it is a better world? Only God is perfect in Christian theism.
He also says the central problem of theism is all the suffering in nature, but how can this be the central problem when it is a necessity of Christianity that that problem be there to be dealt with? Christianity has evil right at the center of the world in the cross. Also, if theism has to explain all the evil that comes about in a world made by a good God, can we not ask like Chesterton did that in a world of total chaos, why do we get so much good?
He says also that none of the explanations given for suffering is comforting or satisfactory. The problem is, he doesn’t interact with any of these theodicies. There are plenty of them. Is Graffin throwing all of them out? This is someone who has talked about being skeptical and about the joy of learning, but when it comes to his position, he is not skeptical of if naturalism can explain good and evil and he seems to show no interest in learning about theodicies from theism.
I do agree with him when he speaks out against at funerals saying that God thought it was that person’s time to go. We don’t know that. I always get cautious when I hear someone claim what God is or isn’t doing. How do they know? Do they have access to the divine throne room?
In the end, Graffin unfortunately does not really engage. I wish he had said more. We both agree that there is a lot of tragedy in this life, but Graffin doesn’t give me any hope or meaning to it. At least my worldview can do that.
In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)
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