Debate in Kitimat: Reconciling God with Human Suffering

2009-01-01

So, yesterday I left work early and drove to Kitimat for the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community’s first religious symposium in the area, titled “Reconciling the Existence of God and Human Suffering”.  Typically these events have been in Terrace, but this time they decided to try the spokes instead of the hub, and do sessions in Kitimat and Smithers instead.

First off, I’d just like to say that Kitimat is a lot prettier than I remember it being, along with the drive there.  It was a nice day, and my first time actually behind the wheel on the drive, so that might have had something to do with it, but with everything that was on my mind you’d think I’d be distracted from it all, and instead I was thinking “that looks like a nice place for a picnic”.  Hopefully I can follow up on that thought some day…

The event was held at Mount Elizabeth Secondary School.  It’s funny that I worked for the school district for months and traveled all the way up to Stewart, but somehow never made it to Mount Elizabeth.  That school puzzles me.  Although now that I think about it, I’ve only seen the inside of one senior high school in my entire life, so I might just not know what to expect?  But what is up with that theatre?  Do they teach there?  Do they have lecture hall-sized classes?  Some things seemed fancier than I expected, but then there’s unpainted plywood walls everywhere too…

Anyways, when I arrived, the organizer of these events, Rizwan, recognized me immediately, and greeted me kindly, before directing me to the moderator to introduce myself.  I don’t know the organizational process for these events, but I only heard about it after Trish heard something on the radio, and then asked to join, so I was a late addition and things weren’t completely prepared for me.  No nametag, this time, or even a seat on the stage, and only 10 minutes instead of the 20 minutes speaking time everyone else was provided, and I was provided last time.  This all seemed fair to me, mind you, it just meant there was a bit of confusing figuring out how things would go.  I wrote a brief introduction on the back of a question card, acknowledged that I wouldn’t be arguing directly with other speakers on the stage, and said hello to a few of the other speakers before we began.

As with last time, they decided to lead with my presentation.  Compared with last year, I feel that my delivery wasn’t quite as smooth, although the material I discussed was certainly a little more difficult to deliver this time than last, since (unlike with God in general) I find it difficult to conclusively shut the door on the possibility that God would want at least a large part of the suffering in the world.  I basically said something like the following:If you assume a God who has the desire, the knowledge, and the power to make the best possible world exists, it follows that this is it – if he could have done better, he would have.There are obvious things that seem, on the surface, to be imperfect.  We just had the 10 year anniversary of September 11, there was the recent earthquake off the coast of Vancouver Island.  We might all want to remove disease and natural disasters at least.  My vision of the perfect world probably looks a lot like Christians envision heaven – at the very least take hell out!I agree to an extent with the personal growth argument – we need to feel lonely when someone is gone to be happy when they are here.  We need to feel guilt and regret when we do something wrong to guide our ethical choices.  And I don’t think the world isn’t just about maximizing pleasure, or we’d all just shoot up heroin.  But not all suffering is useful for self-improvement.  Some people suffer, and then die.  Entire communities are wiped out on occasion, probably not for our sake.The test of faith explanation, for example in the Book of Job, doesn’t get you anywhere.  Why is God testing things he already knows?  Why is he testing the faith of people who have already declared no faith in him, or faith in something else?Free will is the most popular argument, but a lot of suffering has nothing to do with free will.  In addition, if God has free will, it’s possible to have morally perfect beings with free will.  If God doesn’t have free will, perfect beings don’t have free will, and then one wonders why the perfect world requires it in human beings.  Lastly, we should factor in the suffering of all kinds of animals as well.  The evolutionary process necessitates their suffering.  (I didn’t touch directly on the original sin/fall of man argument, but evolution does completely negate the possibility that there wasn’t animal suffering before the arrival of human beings). Next up was the aboriginal representative, Herbert Morven.  I was a bit nervous about this, because he’s actually a political figure in the Nass Valley, and knows me, and I like to keep this kind of talk outside of work.  I enjoy talking religion with some people – but only some!  It turned out fine though, Herbert and I rarely interact at work, and he was respectful, even saying “Cool!” when he heard I was an atheist.  His talk was a hundred times better than Frank “Manyhorses” Austin’s talk in Terrace last year, which is quite a feat given that Frank travels around doing this for a living, and Herbert had some 24 hours notice since being invited to fill in for Frank at the last second.  Still, their stories were similar, although Herbert at least found a way to get to the point.  He suffered a great deal growing up, physically abused and sexually assaulted at residential schools, and wondered “Why me?”  But one night, while contemplating suicide, he heard the church bell ring, something they only do when someone in the community has died.  He decided this meant it wasn’t his turn yet, prayed, and “owned his pain”, which allowed him to grow past it.  A touching story, of course, but it was very personalized and said nothing about the kinds of suffering I talked about.  I think he was the nice, personal touch the organizers were looking for, but didn’t really bring a proper defense of suffering to the table.

Next up was the Christian.  I was looking forward to him.  He originally worked in telecommunications in Britain, before getting into teaching in Canada.  He’s the principle of the Catholic high school in Kitimat now.    He looked like he spent a fair bit of time preparing a lengthy PowerPoint presentation for us (although I think he mistakenly mistitled his presentation as Recognising the Existence of God, not reconciling…), and he had clearly read a few of the arguments against atheism.  Unfortunately, he got carried away with a lengthy introduction he hadn’t actually planned, and so he was 15 minutes into his 20 minute presentation before he actually started getting into the topic at hand.  He began with a defense of Christianity in general, tuned to target atheists rather than other religion, which I had mixed hopes for.  He brought up the most powerful argument for theism in my eyes, that the strengths of the fundamental forces of nature, for example gravity, nuclear forces, and magnetism, are extremely fine-tuned to produce a world where interesting chemistry can happen, but then began digging his own grave with a line that went something like “This clearly looks designed.  But some people ask ‘Who designed the designer?’ and that is what we Christians call a mystery!”  The moderator had to interrupt him at the time to remind him that his time was up, and so he quickly skipped past a good dozen slides with most of his argument on them, before closing in a hurry.  It was a bit of a shame, really.

The Muslim was next, and as with the Christian, he began by talking a lot about his religion in general.  He gave a brief history of Mohammed’s life, highlighting the fact that after eight years of persecution and warring with the Maccan tribes, when he and his followers eventually conquered Mecca, he declared amnesty for most of his Meccan enemies.  Getting into the issue of suffering, he pointed out (rightfully) that there are many kinds of suffering that some might call natural disasters, but are actually the result of human action, or human inaction, pointing out global warming and oil leaks as examples.  This was all true and worth saying, but (as I think they must do), he left some forms of suffering as a mystery, saying we can’t know the big picture.

Next up was an excellent Jewish speaker.  He came off as friendly, comfortable, educated and well-read, sincer, and interesting, and he was by far my favourite speaker at the event.  He also opened by telling us a little bit about his faith, highlighting some of the differences between the various Jewish sects, and discussing some of the problems and confusion that arises out of the fact that “Jew” is used to describe both the ethnicity and the religion.  In truth, he didn’t have a lot to say about solving the puzzle of God and suffering, although he did have interesting and somewhat related things to say about a great deal of suffering having to do with the management of resources and socio-economic issues.  He closed by saying that he preferred having religion as a foundation for ethics, and found it easier to live in a world guided by God than simply uncaring matter in motion.

Last to speak was the Sikh, Davinder, who some people may recognize from the Hot House in Terrace, or his speech in Terrace last year.  Davinder was forced to dwell a bit on the specifics of what his faith actually is, a problem I’m not sure he could have avoided given how few Sikhs there are in the area and how little most people know about Sikhism.  He pointed out that there was a doctrine about five evils or devils, lust, anger, greed, attachment, and pride, inherent in everyone and responsible for a great deal of suffering, and told a very engaging story about a hiss that long ago everyone heard on long distance telephone calls but no one could explain, which was eventually learned to be the result of cosmic background radiation left over from the big bang, which he insisted there was some theological support for in his faith (which of course is only true in the broadest sense).

At this point, we all took a break and had snacks and talked with each other in the hall.  The Jewish speaker immediately found me and began discussing all kinds of issues in a way only someone well-versed in the debate with atheists could, something I’ve never witnessed immediately from anyone I know in person.  Unfortunately his travel arrangements didn’t work out and he was late to the event, missing my speech, or I’m sure the two of us would have had a great deal more to talk about.  I was impressed during his speech that he dodged an obvious Jewish stereotype and didn’t remind us all of the suffering the Jewish people have gone through over the years, but me made up for that by telling me he was an accountant and offering me his business card before our 10 minute break was up.

After this was a brief thank you ceremony, where each of the speakers were given plaques thanking them for their contribution… except me, being a late and unplanned arrival, apparently.  This is fine, but I’m curious how they managed to get the aboriginal speaker’s plaque prepared with only 24 hours notice… and I would have really liked a plaque!  Oh well…

Next was the Q&A, the section I was really looking forward to.  I’m quite flattered, during this debate and the last, every question was either addressed to every speaker, or directly to me.  In this case they actually modified a question to apply to all speakers, instead of just me!  Unfortunately attendance at this event was fairly dismal, so at one point I remarked that if they invited me in advance next time, they could advertise an atheist speaking at the event and draw in a bigger crowd!  Anyways, there were six questions we were asked:

Can we ever achieve absolute peace in the world?  Can religion help?  No, I don’t think we can achieve absolute peace.  If human beings were removed, perhaps there would be peace in a sense, but is a world where animals hunt each other completely peaceful?  With human beings around, some of us are born psychopathic, sociopathic, etc., and this will always lead to problems.  (I didn’t say this part, but it occurs to me that medical science could hypothetically strip the free will out of people…).  I am prepared to believe that some forms of religion can help bring people together peacefully, although I think there are plenty of other ways for atheists to bond as communities as well. 

What is your moral authority?  I believe that evolution has guided a developmental process that has lead to us having moral instincts that basically work, most of the time, but that only gets us so far.  At this point we need to discuss things intelligently with each other, and come up with a more consistent ethical code that makes sense to our instincts and our intellects.  It might be that we never figure this out perfectly, unfortunately.  I recommend Sam Harris’ recent book, The Moral Landscape, which is an atheist’s attempt to build an objective moral framework, for anyone interested in learning more.

Do you blame sin or knowledge for suffering?  This is a very strangely phrased question, and perhaps our moderator read it with the wrong emphasis as well, it’s difficult to say.  This question probably didn’t apply specifically to me, but it gave me a beautiful opportunity to point out the paradox that the original sin was eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, a necessarily evil in itself for human beings to know which choices are moral in the first place.

Why don’t we have only one religion?  As someone else once pointed out, we used to have many more religions featuring many gods, now we have moved towards religions with only one god (I should have taken a shot at the trinity here, in hindsight…), and we’re getting nearer the true number all the time (this got a laugh from the audience and the other speakers!)  I pointed out that the scientific method works by forming hypotheses in our ignorance, testing them, and narrowing it down from there.  Religion was our first attempt at understanding the world, and maybe it’s still in its infancy, and we can all still zero in on the truth, but as an atheist I don’t know what the truth is either, and I just think there’s a lot of problems with the hypotheses we’re testing so far. 

Why do we have religious wars?  We will have wars over ethnicity, political/economic ideologies, etc. with or without religion, so I wouldn’t suggest that removing religion will fix all our problems.  Religious texts are very large books, hundreds of thousands of words, thousands of pages.  Even if they were written in completely straightforward, well organized prose it would still be difficult to comprehend everything they say.  And of course it isn’t straightforward prose, it’s poetry and metaphor and written by dozens of authors over hundreds of years in many cases.  If you ask ten people at the very same church what they think about the hard questions, how to reconcile Genesis and evolution, or a merciful God with the God-commanded complete extermination of tribes in the Old Testament, say, you’re bound to have multiple answers.  Compound this with the fact that religions demand complete faith and trust in these interpretations, and disagreements about the most important topic in the world unfold that are irreconcilable.  Scientists can devote their entire lives to a theory that has yet to be proven conclusively, and yet they won’t war over the theory because they don’t demand absolute trust and faith. 

Can your faith bring everlasting life?  Everything psychologists and neuroscientists have learned about consciousness links it very directly with the brain.  There’s still things we don’t understand about the brain, since it’s very difficult to pick it apart and study it without damaging it in the process, but 1) we can see which areas of your brain are active under an MRI, 2) we can see experimentally that if you’re struck on various parts of the head, you can lose short or long term memory, lose consciousness, suffer blurred vision, etc., 3) drugs and alcohol, truth serums, etc. can influence our personalities.  All this implies very powerfully that consciousness is a product of the brain, and when it ceases to function, our consciousness ceases to function.  That being said, Mark Twain, whose name somehow escaped my mind until the last second (although Samuel Clemens re-entered my mind after being missing for years, instead!) once pointed out that he had been dead for millions of years before he was born without it being the slightest inconvenience to him.  I pointed out that although I certainly don’t look forward to death, I try to take this attitude to it.  It is also true that our actions will impact the world in ways impossible to fully predict for longer than we can imagine, and our actions will make changes very easy for us to understand, imagine, and appreciate for generations into the future, and so we still have something larger than ourselves to devote ourselves to.

After the debate, we were encouraged to talk a bit with the audience before taking off, which I was happy to do, but the speakers all seemed keen to speak to each other more, and so I didn’t get a chance to say much more than hello.  There was one somewhat regrettable exception to this though. As I walked up the aisle (what a stupid word, aisle… damn French spelling…) I saw a man awkwardly standing, staring at me.  He was quite a bit older, probably in his sixties, was quite poorly dressed, his hair was quite unkept… just the kind of person I immediately assume I want to avoid talking to, but he was staring right at me, so I said hello, to which he paused for a second before immediately saying “I sort of think that science is your God”.  It’s a line I’ve certainly heard before, but I wanted to back out of it as smoothly as possible so I just said something like “Well, science is very important to me, and I think almost everyone, but we have pretty good reasons for that.  I don’t think I’d call it God.”  Turns out he was on a bit of a different line of reasoning than I was, because he then explained that his big concern with science was the medical industry.  He then began the predictable tangent about pharmaceutical companies caring more about money than people, to which I only said that while it’s true that some people and business are too influenced by money, I think there’s a lot of scientists that really do care about saving lives, and we’ve doubled our lifespan in the last hundred years or so so we must basically be on the right track.  I make the conversation sound smoother than it actually was though – there were many awkward pauses, accidental interruptions of each other’s sentences, etc., and to be frank, I was certainly under the impression that this person was a bit of a kook, well-meaning as he was.

What really struck me though, was as I was leaving the building and heading to my car at the end of the night.  It was down to three of us, just me, this eccentric old man, and the moderator for the debate walking out into the parking lot… but there were only two cars.  And as I walked to my car, this old man and the moderator got into the same car together.  Even more amusing than this, the moderator was the passenger, not the driver… how strange.

Updated Apr 27, 2023 2:03:46pm

Sep 14, 2011 10:03:59pm