Presenter Mark Dowd is speaking when not otherwise indicated.
The final stage of my quest to reconcile belief in God with the existence of pain and suffering in the world has brought me to Italy.
Fr Chris Corbally
Vatican Observatory
God is the best explanation that I have for why there should be a universe in the first place… and why we should exist. There’s a fascinating way one finds the universe is put together. I find that, yes, creation reflects the creator.
Surprisingly, when the tsunami came up for reflection, it wasn’t in totally negative terms.
Nancey Murphy
Fuller Theological Seminary
There’s this excellent two page article on why there couldn’t be any complex life at all on the surface of the Earth if we didn’t have a movable crust, and if we have a movable crust you’re going to have earth quakes, and if we have earth quakes under water we’re gonna have tsunamis.
If we didn’t have a crust that moved, ultimately with erosion the whole surface of the planet would be basically smooth. Given the amount of water on it, it would probably be marsh land all over, so you could have some simple forms of life but you certainly couldn’t have complex animals like us. And then also it replenishes the sort of elements on the surface that we need. If there were no recycling of the crust then basically the whole planet would become infertile after a certain period of time.
So what works well for the equilibrium of the system isn’t always kind to individuals at the cutting edge. But this made a lot more sense to me.
Fr George Coyne
Vatican Observatory
You see that physical evil is absolutely necessary for physical good. The hurricane that happened in New Orleans was absolutely necessary in order to have heat exchange from one part of the continent to the other, otherwise the Earth would not be habitable.
Scripture is full of, and Catholic tradition is full of, unless the grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, next year you will not have wheat.
Matter of its very nature is subject to death and decay, and God, it’s argued, can no more create a material world without rough edges than make 2+2=5. But couldn’t a supreme intelligence have fashioned things according to entirely different laws of nature which would still allow for the evolution of complex human creatures with free will like ourselves?
Robert Russell
Centre for Theology and Natural Sciences
Even Dawkins, who is no friend of Christianity, would say there’s probably no other way by natural processes to have evolved creatures which have these capabilities we have… than through variation of selection. If that’s the case then that means that rather than being a consequence of the fall in the Christian tradition, death, suffering, disease and extinction are constitutive to the very processes which build life and community.
Okay, I thought, so if the rough and the smooth are just part of the inevitable structure of existence, fair enough. But if God knew that Tsunamis and their like were about to create havoc, couldn’t God just step in once in a while before people get hurt?
Nancey Murphy
Fuller Theological Seminary
Well if God did it all the time we couldn’t have science at all. If the world weren’t predictable, then we couldn’t be held responsible for our actions. Suppose it were the case that sometimes when people fell off walls God sent His angels and lifted them up and other times didn’t, and you came and gave me a push presuming that God would send His angels – clearly God would send an angel for someone like me, right? - but suppose God didn’t: Nancy is dead. We just can’t act morally in a universe where God might or might not come along and undo the nasty consequences of our nasty actions.
These religious scientists had given me plenty to chew on, but one nagging question persisted, the one raised by the Russian author Feodor Dostoevsky… If you can’t create without some degree of suffering, then why bother in the first place?
Is it really worth the suffering of one innocent creature, Dostoevsky says. If you had to press the button on creation and produce that, is it justifiable?
Philip Clayton
Author: God and Contemporary Science
That’s a tremendous question, and if I don’t stop in silence before your question, then I’d say I don’t get it. Anyone who sees the depth of the suffering that happens in our world and answers that question simply “Oh, of course it was all worth it” doesn’t get it. I would love to imagine a divine who stood before that button and wept, and somehow at the last minute felt it was better to have us than to have only the divine in eternal emptiness. You and I would probably not push the button as Ivan argued against Alyosha in the Brothers Karamazov. We shouldn’t push the button, and that God pushed that button and made creation hints at a mystery that we don’t understand. It hints at a resolution that we can only hope for. God will only be God if the outcome is something so far better than what we see around us that it would make it all right. But I can only say that as a wish and a hope, and not as an item of knowledge.