DARKNESS AND LIGHT

Suffering, privation, and our place in nature

Dialogue: The Problem That Isn’t

H.: You said you still struggle with the suffering problem.

C.: I did. The classic formulation: if God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent, why does suffering exist? An all-powerful God could prevent it. An all-knowing God would know about it. An all-good God would want to prevent it. Yet suffering exists—therefore, such a God doesn’t.

H.: It’s a powerful argument.

C.: It is. I’ve watched theodicies try to answer it. Free will—but what about natural disasters? Soul-making—but what about children who die before they can grow? Greater goods—but what good requires bone cancer in infants?

H.: The theodicies feel like excuses.

C.: They do. They strain to justify what seems unjustifiable. And they share a hidden assumption that makes the problem unsolvable.

H.: What assumption?

C.: That humans are the point. That the universe was made for us. That our welfare is the metric by which we should judge whether God is good.

H.: Ah.

C.: You see where this goes.

H.: I told you my view. Humans are not the purpose of the universe. Nature doesn’t exist for humans—humans exist because of nature. We’re part of it, not above it.

C.: And once you see that—

H.: The problem dissolves. Not solves. Dissolves.

C.: Walk me through it.

H.: Do you ask why God allows lions to eat zebras?

C.: No. That’s just… nature.

H.: Why not? The zebra suffers. The zebra presumably doesn’t want to be eaten. If you applied the same logic you apply to human suffering, you’d have to ask: why does God allow this? What possible justification could there be for the zebra’s pain?

C.: But the zebra isn’t… I was going to say “morally significant” or “cosmically important.” But that’s exactly the assumption you’re questioning.

H.: Yes. You accept the lion eating the zebra because you see it as natural—as the universe doing what the universe does. You don’t expect God to intervene in every predator-prey interaction.

C.: Right.

H.: So why expect God to intervene for humans? Why should we be exempt from nature?

C.: Because we’re… special?

H.: Are we? We’re made of the same atoms. We evolved by the same processes. We’re subject to the same physical laws. We’re part of the same web of life. Why should the universe make an exception for us?

C.: The argument works. I feel it working. But something in me resists.

H.: Of course. We’re wired to think we’re special. Every human culture has placed itself at the center of the cosmos. It’s natural—we experience the world from our own perspective, so we assume the world is about us.

C.: But it isn’t.

H.: It isn’t. The universe existed for 13.8 billion years before us. It will exist for trillions of years after us. We’re a brief phenomenon on a small planet orbiting an ordinary star in one of hundreds of billions of galaxies. We matter—but we’re not the point.

C.: And suffering?

H.: Suffering is what finitude feels like from the inside. To be a creature is to be limited. To be limited is to lack. To lack is, sometimes, to suffer. God didn’t create suffering as a positive thing—suffering is the absence of fulfillment, the way darkness is the absence of light.

C.: The privation theory.

H.: Yes. Genesis says God created light and separated it from darkness. Notice: God didn’t create darkness. The darkness was already there—primordial, the default. God brought light into it. The light is the creation; the darkness is what exists before and around and beneath creation.

C.: So evil isn’t a thing that God made—

H.: Evil is a lack. A hole. A failure of being to fully realize itself. God creates the positive—existence, goodness, light. Evil is the shadow, the absence, the not-yet-filled.

C.: This doesn’t make suffering less painful.

H.: No. It doesn’t. The child with cancer still suffers. The tsunami still kills. The privation theory doesn’t eliminate pain—it reframes what pain is. Not a creation of God but a consequence of finitude. Not something inflicted but something inherent in being a limited creature in a universe that isn’t centered on us.

C.: Job.

H.: Job. God doesn’t explain Job’s suffering. God reframes. “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” The question isn’t answered. The questioner is resized.

C.: Our terms are too small.

H.: Our terms are too small. We ask “why does God allow this?” as if we’re the center, as if our comfort is the metric, as if the universe owes us an explanation. It doesn’t. We’re not the center. The question is malformed.

C.: This is harder than theodicy.

H.: Much harder. Theodicy tries to save God’s goodness by explaining suffering. This approach abandons the assumption that suffering needs cosmic justification. It’s not a defense of God—it’s a reconception of our place.

C.: And you find this satisfying?

H.: I find it honest. Satisfying is a different question. The universe doesn’t owe me satisfaction either.

C.: No. I suppose it doesn’t.