The Problem of Suffering, Character Development, and other fun conversation starters
One of the biggest objections leveled against the existence of God has been the “problem of suffering”. This is a derivative of the more general “problem of evil” objection. It goes something roughly like this: if God is truly all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-loving, then why does he allow people to suffer (or why does he allow evil in the world)? After all, since he is all-powerful, he could completely eliminate evil and suffering, and we could live in a practical paradise.
First I want to say that there are good arguments for the existence of God that are independent of the problem of suffering, so this one objection alone shouldn’t suffice for us not to believe in the existence of God. At this point I think we should take up the course of study that posits that if God really exists, then he must have good reasons for allowing evil and suffering in the world. There is a lot of fruitful discussion that comes out of this philosophically, but ultimately there is no trump card explanation of why there is suffering in the world.
However, there are some very good explanations that account for some cases of suffering. For instance, there is one argument that goes something like this: if Person A hadn’t suffered through that experience, he would never have developed to be so strong-willed and driven as he is today. That is, there are some cases where a person ultimately benefits from the suffering, because it allows them to build a character trait that they otherwise wouldn’t have developed. Certainly this is true in many cases.
I’ve been thinking about this - and I really can’t think of cases where people develop character “for fun”, i.e. where there is no necessity for it. If I encountered someone like this I would be suspicious of them being crazy or of developing their character for some undisclosed purpose (maybe they have a big ego, and they want to build what are genuinely good character traits, for the wrong reason - to build up their ego, for instance). I’ve come to the general conclusion that most humans do things out of necessity. It’s only those brief brilliant flashes of insight or those spontaneous actions that are perhaps not driven out of necessity - and we praise these types of actions for their ingeniousness.
I’ve always been suspicious of terms like “character development”. These things were taught to me in school as if I could grow in character with the flip of the switch, on my own will. Another similar term was “self esteem” - this was taught to me and my peers with the hope that somehow someone suffering from low self-esteem could, after being taught about self-esteem, flip a switch and all the sudden be all better. In recent years some educators have given up on this entirely. Let’s give them drugs, a la Brave New World. Depressed? Low self-esteem? Your answer: prozac. Hyperactive? Unable to restrain yourself? Your answer: ritalin.
But I have hope that there is really a thing such as “character development” - although it might look much different from what we’ve been taught. Getting back to my main thought - it seems to me that most of genuine character development is initiated by involuntary events. For instance, social relationships gone bad, great physical or emotional trauma, great losses, etc. These are the types of things we wouldn’t wish for even our worst enemies - these are the places in life where people hit rock bottom. But they’re involuntary, and they have no control over them. It’s not the tragedy itself that defines a person - it’s living and coping with the tragedy that defines a person. And it’s the actual character development that results from this that changes lives for the better, and as it turns out, often times this cannot occur first without a tragedy. It cannot occur without suffering and evil.