[Buddha-l] Natural Evil

[SJZiobro at cs.com]

Bob Zeuschner <rbzeuschner at adelphia.net> wrote:

>It seems to me that you have totally trivialized the amount of 
>undeserved pain, suffering, and death in this world.

Bob, actually, I was trivializing the sorts of theodacies people devise in vain attempts to, generally, rail against reality when events -- even some people -- conspire to bring about evil, harm, and suffering.  I was also obliquely poking fun at Freud's reductionist explanations for religion.  Your remarks concerning the real suffering people bear are well taken, and I do not trivialize this brutal facticity.

>You want to excuse God for doing things that, if a human being did them, 
>we'd consider that person a monster and either execute them or put them 
>in jail for life.

One area in which we apparently disagree is that I don't know that God needs any excusing.  I locate moral evil squarely with ourselves.  So, if there are any who need forgiving, not excusing, it is we ourselves and the monsters we wish we could put in jail for life.  That said, there is still something to your contention that we need even to forgive God something.  Richard's response to your remark here was quite insightful, I thought.

>Consider: I build an enclosed playground for my children, let them go in 
>to swing, climb, play in the sand, and then I throw a deadly snake into 
>their playground. I have done something evil.

This isn't the point of the Edenic myth.  Those who conceived it clearly refused to place the responsibility of any evil on God.  "Where are you Adam?"  Good question.  We always want to blame anybody but ourselves for the evil we commit, and the the author(s) of the myth quite adeptly illustrate this point by failing to take responsibility for his deliberate act and seekikng to place the blame on the woman.  I think this is part of the import of the saying in the Dhammapada where the writer remarks that as long as one actually blames the Other for his suffering, then he has yet to attain right knowledge.  At any rate, your remarks strike me as anachronistic when you opine that:

>God, the heavenly father, has done something even more evil, because 
>that imaginary being in the sky created the snake, knew what the snake 
>would do, and went ahead anyway, causing unnecessary pain, suffering, 
>and death.
>
>
>The only ones who MUST find earthquakes evil are Christians, not Buddhists.
>The reason is that Buddhists don't claim that this universe/world was 
>created by a loving father, a loving father of infinite power, infinite 
>knowledge, and infinite goodness.

Clearly there are very precise notions of evil that one comes across in the various forms of Buddhist thought (the Abbhidarmakosya texts for instance), and the responsibility for much of that evil resides noteably in the collection of the skandhas we term a human being.  In the Wisdom Sutras one finds quite explicitly a conception of reality that originates from some transcendent (meaning non-objectifiable) prajna and karuna.  So, even granting that these systems of thought do not posit a Creator, nonetheless, they must account for evil in some fashion.
 
>The Christian God is the architect of the world and could have made it 
>better. God chose not to make a safe world but one that falls down on 
>us, erupts under us, etc. etc.
>God is the building supplier (created everything out of nothing, and had 
>no limits on what God could create).
>God is the building contractor, building everything.
>God, being omniscient, KNEW in advance all the undeserved pain and 
>suffering his creation would cause -- could have built it otherwise 
>(omnipotent), but chose not to.
>God could have created the best of all possible worlds.
>God didn't.

This makes sense if one prescinds from the responsbility of intellectual creatures who of necessity are possessed of free will.  My remarks relative to the edenic myth are to the point here.

>I'm very aware of the free-will arguments (by the way, why do you 
>suppose that the concept of free will does not exist in Chinese 
>philosophy, Indian philosophy, etc.?)

I don't suppose this at all.  I've studied these matters in college and in graduate school.  That is part of the reason I make a point of mentioning free will.

>Free-will is a theological concept needed to explain Adam and Eve's 
>misuse of their "free-will" to account for the alienation of God and humans.
>As I teach it in my philosophy classes, free will is a fundamentally 
>incoherent notion. I prefer pratityasamutpada.

So what is it going to be?  You note that notions of free will are discernable in Indian and Chinese philosophies (and they are not after-thoughts, but quite substantial).  Now you claim that free will is but a Christian theological construct conceived to account for some alienation of humans from God.  But the Indian and Chinese notions developed apart from Christianity and are also a means to account for the fact that some people do evil things and that the responsibility truly is theirs, not some Other's.  Apparently this business isn't the provinance of Christians alone.

>I'm also very aware of the distinction between natural evil and moral 
>evil, and teach these when I teach Augustine and Aquinas.
>Evil as an absence of good is not a meaningful explanation, but that 
>would be another discussion.

Actually, Bob, I think this notion isn't really tangential to the present discussion.  But it can be discussed sometime in greater depth perhaps.

>I still find Christianity something that makes sense ONLY if one has 
>started out accepting the supernatural claims as true, and then one does 
>one's best to try to make sense of it all.

I understand this, even if I don't judge these claims to be at all antagonistic to reason.  In part this is the import behind Augustine's and Anselm's notion of "faith seeking understanding."

Regards,

Stan