The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World Read Free Page B

for me to know. . . .
    In the past I knew only what others had told me,
    but now I have seen you with my own eyes.
    So I am ashamed of all I have said
    and repent in dust and ashes. (Job 42:2ff.)

    The Lord finally accepts Job’s confession, truer than the words of his friends. And blesses Job with a greater prosperity than he had ever known before—fourteen thousand sheep, six thousand camels, two thousand head of cattle, and a thousand donkeys. Now he has seven sons and three daughters, and no other women in the world are as beautiful as Job’s daughters. He lived a hundred and forty years, enjoying his grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
    Why is Job not punished for questioning God’s ways? Nor is he ever told why he had suffered. Was God now rewarding his faith—or only his independent spirit? Could God have admired Job’s courage in challenging his maker? Or was God only reminding Job that God’s ways were beyond his understanding? Did God enjoy wrestling with his creatures?
    This problem that haunted Western thought—Why would a good God allow evil in the world He had created?—was one that Judeo-Christian man had made for himself. It was plainly a by-product of ethical monotheism: a “trilemma” created by the three indisputable qualities of an all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-benevolent God. “If God were good,” observed C. S. Lewis, “He would wish to make His creatures perfectly happy, and if God were almighty He would be able to do what He wished. But the creatures are not happy. Therefore God lacks either goodness, or power, or both.” Some have chosen a more radical solution. “The only excuse for God,” said Stendhal, “is that he does not exist.”
    Reluctant to abandon belief in their God, Western Seekers have exercised ingenuity and imagination. Not until the seventeenth century did the philosopher Leibniz give a name to this troublesome problem. “Theodicy” (from Greek
theos,
God, and
dike,
justice), he called the study aimed to justify God’s ways to man. And ever since Job, thoughtful men and women have been tantalized by the meaning of evil. They would deny neither their God nor the facts of their suffering lives. Where would they turn?

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    A World Self-Explained: Evil in the East

    But this problem of justifying God’s ways to man did not haunt all the world equally. Other world religions were not especially troubled by how to account for the suffering of the innocent or the existence of evil. The Muslims (from
islam,
surrender to divine will) believed that God owed no explanations to His insignificant creature, and it was blasphemy for man Job-like to demand one. Still, Muslim thinkers volunteered explanations of their own. One was that everything was predestined by God for His own inscrutable reasons.

    Whomsoever God desires to guide,
He expands his breast to Islam;

    Whomsoever he desires to lead astray,
He makes his breast narrow, tight. (Koran, Sura 6:125)

    So God’s ways need no further gloss, for “He leads none astray save the ungodly.” And “Whatever good visits thee, it is of God; whatever evil visits thee is of thyself.” For the Muslim, wrong-worship, failure to surrender to the one God, was the sum of all evil, for which man alone must bear responsibility.
    This was the paradox of Islam. For every man must bear the consequences of failure to surrender to “the Lord of the Lord of the worlds.” Yet only an inscrutable God could guide man to the true worship. In the Koran, “the Book in which there is no doubt,” Muslims dissolved the “problem of suffering” in the unchallengeable sovereignty of God. Who was man to make suffering a “problem” when it was simply a fact of Allah’s creation?
    Hindus and Buddhists, who had not committed themselves to a single Creator God, and so had not the burden of ethical monotheism, found their own ways of explaining evil and suffering. “For Hindu thought,” Alan Watts observes, “there is no Problem of Evil.