Suffering is the Point of Existence, According to Some

My attention has just been drawn to an article by Gerard Baker in the Times. It considers the problem of suffering, a.k.a., the problem of evil, that has been highlighted by the Indian Ocean tsunami disaster which hit Indonesia in particular, as well as Thailand, India and Sri Lanka. The approach is very different from that of the Archbishop of Canterbury (discussed by me earlier), and is rather angry in tone. It builds a flawed argument though, and the points it raises deserve critical comment. First of all, there's the remark concerning the disaster that:

In logic, the poor suffering Muslims in Indonesia who think it was a sign of God’s wrath are less evidently wrong than those who insist that it disproves God’s existence.

That's quite wrong. There's no logic to the idea of an almighty God who causes tsunami's as an expression of anger. If you're almighty, you get your will done all the time. Therefore, surely, nothing can upset you. What's more, if you ever did get upset, you wouldn't need to start a tsunami to punish the people who'd annoyed you, hitting lots of innocent people at the same time. You could send thunderbolts precisely aimed at each and every one of them, avoiding all collateral damage. If the US airforce can do smart bombs, it has to be admitted that an almighty God can do even smarter ones. Or are we meant to suppose that everyone who suffered in this incident, from little primary school children in their classrooms, to old women in their kitchens, is a direct target of God's wrath? Even the pious worshippers caught while praying? No, the notion of a wrathful God doesn't make sense in logic, and is considerably harder to believe than a merely callous one.

Later, the article points out correctly that the existence of a single child suffering from cancer is as much of a challenge to belief in a benign God as is a big disaster such as the Indian Ocean tsunami. It notes also that people are more apt to think about the problem of suffering when something huge like the Tsunami event happens than at other times. For some reason, though, the author seems to think this is a problem for atheists. Atheists know already that any suffering demolishes the notion of an almighty, benign God. They don't need big disasters to remind them. It is believers who are surprised, either by big disasters, or by events that bring tragedy close to them. Then they wonder why they are supposed to look to God for comfort, when God could have prevented the tragedy in the first place, but presumably chose not to.

Baker makes the following interesting remark:

...there is a tendency to take a little too literally the insurance company terminology that describes earthquakes and hurricanes as “acts of God”.

That's slightly topsy-turvy, since the insurance terminology comes from a pre-existing custom of attributing natural disasters to God or other supernatural forces. Such attributions of course were quite literal, and they made sense when there was no science of geology or metreology, not because of an innate tendency to believe in God, specifically, but an innate tendency to look for purpose when big events occur. That's a detour, though. The main thrust of Gerard Baker's argument is becomes apparent when he asks us to imagine a world in which

there were not only no earthquakes, floods and storms, but that there was no innocent suffering and never had been in the history of the earth.

That is naturally the kind of world that we would expect a
benign, all-powerful God to create. Baker continues,

Such a fair, challengeless world might be a wonderful place to live. But I don’t think that it would be recognisably human.

Perhaps it would be unrecognisable, but why does that make it a bad thing? Apparently, because life without misery is pointless:

If we have reason to doubt the point of our existence in this world, surely we would understand it even less in that one.

That makes no sense to me at all. The point of existence is pleasure. Even for a religious believer who excercises self-denial for the sake of salvation, this is true, since their aim is to get to Heaven, which by all accounts is a pleasant abode. The only person who would disagree with this for a reason is someone who says, such as some Buddhists and Hindus do, that existence is an aberration, and pleasure a distraction that keeps us caught up in it. But such people are insisting that existence in this world is pointless, and they say so precisely because of the suffering it involves. Since suffering does not enhance pleasure, it does not serve the point of of existence.