Yet another pointy-headed tech-type has jumped in to batter Andrew Sullivan about the head and shoulders; this time Jay Rosenhouse, a mathematician at James Madison University, in Virginia.
It is nice that people can use the suffering and setbacks of their own lives to rise to new heights and new understandings of existence, but do you really think that is an adequate answer for the child dying of leukemia, or the victims of monsoons or earthquakes? [ ... ] If you treat theology as a game in which you begin with the assumption of an all-loving, all-powerful God …
Like I’ve said over and over, the whole of theology is really just a parlor game, Dungeons & Dragons for folk too weeny-ish to go goth.
The ‘problem of evil’ is a problem only because it is defined by unsustainable assumptions.
(1) There is a God, and
(2) God is all knowing, and
(3) God is all powerful, and
(4) God loves us, so
WHY is there so much suffering in the world?
Clear any one of those four unjustified assumptions out of the way, and the so-called ‘problem of evil/suffering/pain’ ceases to be interesting; it is exactly what a sane person expects from an indifferent and evolving world.
What makes this whole conversation interesting is the inability of Sullivan — and bazillion of others, I am certain — to understand that the entire problem is make-believe, that it arises not from any objective set of facts about reality, but wholly from its own make-believe terms.
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