A Problem of Perspective

About The "Injustice" of God

They write songs and poems about it on the Goodread poetry group to which I belong. There are few professionals in the group. Mostly angst-ridden amateurs pouring out their pain and confusion into the digital ether hoping someone will feel sorry for them. Lots of poetical words. April's a favorite month, dawn or sunset the favorite time, misery a favorite subject, and God the favorite whipping boy.

One that was recently posted claimed that the Earth was so miserable a place to live that God must surely cease to exist if He ever existed at all. I was struck by how narrow is our perspective in all of this and how confused. I understand the pain so many of these would-be Lord Byrons. They look around them and see so much unhappiness, tragedy and woe that they can hardly stand it. They turn around looking for someone to blame because they have been taught that if there is unhappiness, there must surely be someone besides themselves to blame. And since God is supposed to be the Creator and Ruler of the Universe, who better to blame for the fact that you're miserable?

To do that, however, you need a completely myopic perspective for it to hold water. It's as if a tadpole looks round his puddle and cries out in anger against the rain that filled the puddle with water and provided him a place to live and breathe. There is much the tadpole doesn't know and if he doesn't think outside the puddle, he will become a most unhappy little frog.

1. The tadpole does not understand that there actually is a world beyond his puddle. This might give him hope if he did, for if there is a universe beyond the edges of his puddle, then perhaps his destiny lies beyond the puddle. If he cannot comprehend that, then the puddle is all there is to life for him.
2. The tadpole does not know purpose of the puddle. He does not understand that the purpose of the puddle is to provide him a place to grow. Without the puddle the most he would ever have been is a dried up egg lying dead and desiccated on the ground. 
3. The tadpole does not realize that one day he will either grow into something greater than he is now or die a tadpole, his future unrealized. One day he will add legs and hands to his body and lungs that can breathe air. All of this growth will one day allow him to leave the pond and go out into the broader universe. He believes instead that the puddle is all there is.

Unlike tadpoles, humans have been given a gift essential to seeing beyond our puddle. We are given free will. There are reputable scientists who believe there is no such thing as free will. They don't believe there is a God either. Like the tadpoles, they are too narrowly focused on the puddle they live in. They look at the mechanisms of their own brains and discover how things work and how things can go wrong with the mind. They do not allow for anything to exist that is beyond their own comprehension. Like the frogs we dissect in high school biology, we seek the universe with a scalpel while dizzied by formaldehyde fumes.

God is in the details. I know the old maxim goes "The devil is in the details," but that only applies to contracts written by lawyers. You can see God in the minutiae if you allow yourself to connect with the infinite as you examine what is in your tiny puddle. The intricacies that give us life point to something greater than what we can see in our world. Is there pain and misery. Of course, and like children we want someone to make it stop right now..

The trouble is that at the same time we want the freedom to cause some of that pain and misery ourselves. If we think of children as our tadpoles and ourselves as children, it's not hard to see how we might have difficulty understanding how God can allow us to hurt ourselves the way we do. Because most of the pain and misery we experience in this puddle of a world is caused by us tadpoles ourselves. War, famine, pestilence, murder, poverty, all of these plagues upon our world are caused directly by us. We pick fights. We hoard food and do not share it. We choose to live in filth. We harbor anger and kill each other. We hoard wealth and do not deal fairly with our neighbors. We refuse to work and expect others to take care of us.

We even demand that there be no reference to God in our schools and our public life. We even forbid that private prayers  be offered where others can see them. Then we are shocked when God doesn't show up to prevent disasters, mass shootings and other tragedies? Really? Like spoiled children, we throw a fit when God gives us a pop quiz designed to teach us things we need if we are to become frogs instead of tadpoles.

My poetic friends only see that God is not giving us what we want and protecting us from our own foolishness. They demand that He prevent us from feeling any pain while at the same time demanding that He not interfere with how we behave. God tells us not to be faithful to one companion and we sleep around and then complain about the diseases that strike us when we do. We lie, cheat, and steal from our neighbors and wonder why others do the same to us and why God allows others to do it. We throw a tantrum when an accident caused by the carelessness of another human causes us hurt.

As it turns out, our anger at God seems to be more about why God doesn't meddle in our lives to make us comfortable and happy without actually meddling in our lives to prevent us from doing the very things that make us uncomfortable and unhappy. We want what is not possible. CS Lewis once pointed out that it is impossible for man to be perfectly happy without God because we are not made that way. In the same way a child cannot be happy without some sort of parent to keep him fed, watered, sheltered and disciplined. Feral children do not survive for long in the wild, no matter what the stories say. As it appear from the state of our world, things go badly everywhere we've gone feral, distancing ourselves from a God we cannot see because our vision does not extend beyond the edges of our puddle.

Grow up tadpoles. There is more beyond this Earthly puddle than is contained within the philosophies of those who cannot see beyond the puddles edges.

© 20018 by Tom King