A View from Nowhere

Yesterday I had the wonderful opportunity of teaching in several 10th grade English classes.  I was invited as a guest lecturer to help facilitate some conversation about the problem of evil.  This was a topic that had come up in response to two poems by William Blake that were part of the class curriculum.  

    Although I think I made some of their brains hurt with all the thinking we did, I was generally impressed by their interest and their ability to do some pretty decent intuitive thinking about good and evil in relationship to some sort of ‘Divine’ principle or being (this was the question that Blake was raising in the poems). 

    In theological circles this issue is called theodicy and is often framed by the question: how can an infinitely good God allow for, or even create, evil?  In my own experience this is by far the most common question posed both by people of faith and by people who renounce faith.  It seems self evident to many that any sort of good or powerful God cannot exist given all the bad that happens in the world.  Is this brilliant divine being not capable of somehow creatively intervening to prevent the deaths of innocents or the numerous other tragedies that occur?

    There are many, many responses to this question and I’m not going to review them here.  But there was one that intuitively made the most sense to teenagers on the verge of adulthood.  Without the space to exercise our free will, we aren’t able to be fully human, and thus God must withdraw any measure of coercive power from our realm of existence and give us the space to do both good and evil. 

    It’s fitting that teenagers resonate with this answer.  They are chaffing at the bit of parental and school control and they long to be their own person.  They understand that even if someone were to give them all the ‘right’ answers for their lives, they wouldn’t want to mindlessly follow those but rather would feel compelled to find their own way.  This is how we become engaged, enlivened, citizens of the world.

    But where does that leave space for God to act, for any sense of immanence?  For this we must look to an understanding of non-coercive power.  We all understand the power of persuasion, the power of a caring mentor or loving parent.  We can be moved by good example and even, sometimes, an excellent reasoned argument or a feeling or a flash of insight.

    There are thousands and thousands of thoughts floating though our minds (by which I mean both our thinking brain and our feeling heart) every day.  We are presented with thousands more though other people and the information we allow in each day.  Maybe God acts by being the best thought - in the widest sense of that word - in any situation.  And perhaps we become better and better people as we seek to listen and follow the way provided by the best consciousness in the universe.