Science, Suffering, and Theology

In times past pain was considered to be the manifestation of evil.  All human suffering was viewed as an occurrence against the will of God.  A lot of people still carry this attitude toward suffering, especially when they themselves are the ones who suffer.  The human reaction to suffering is at the core of all religious experience.  All ethics, all morality, in one way or another tie back to the existence of suffering and the question of what the proper human response is.  All such forms of thought seem to share the idea that pain is not the way things "are supposed to be".  The problem is that Darwin really threw this line of thinking for a loop, and we've never really adequately recovered from it.

In nursing it's common to refer to pain as "the sixth vital sign".  One way to assure that a person is alive is to test for their reaction to pain.   According to a Darwinian way of viewing the world pain is simply an adaptive response that helps life to survive.  In this way, pain ceases to be an enemy, but becomes a necessary part of clinging to life in a hostile world.  The reason we feel pain is that all the beings which did not feel pain died, and we suffering creatures were the only ones to survive and procreate.  

From this perspective we cannot continue to vilify pain, but must allow that it is a necessary part of our humanity.  Pain is a vital part of all animal nature.  Yet, still, there is the sense in which we know that pain, or the avoidance of, is not and should not be the meaning of human life.  

There is a very real sense in which pain is a force that drives us forward.  We make our plans, we educate ourselves, we wake up before we want to, we devote ourselves to caring for our bodies in part to avoid pain and suffering.  Those who would like to believe that humanity would continue striving for a better future with no recourse to pain, I cannot believe are being very practical or honest.

Yet, it does seem that this is the purpose that pain has come to fill in life:  it inspires the struggle of the greater whole to survive and live in ways that minimize pain.  This seems straight-forward enough, but I think for humans especially this becomes the place where our experience of suffering becomes the experience of evil.  As conscious beings we know that pain should serve as an impetus for driving us to a better life.  This is where we find meaning and identity in the experience of pain.  This is not intended to gloss over the experience of pain, but to explain that pragmatically it serves a purpose for humanity:  to drive us collectively to overcome, inspiring us toward a better future.

Thus, evil, in my view, is the experience of pain where the potential to overcome is denied.  In this situation pain ceases to have a meaningful purpose.  It is "dumb suffering" to quote Schillebeeckx (oops I said it).  This is suffering that has no greater purpose for humanity; it has no redemptive victory.

This is the suffering of the 'third world' that disturbs us in the 'first world', for our unintended complicity to it, and our knowledge that the death of a child in a sweatshop solely for the purpose of making our t-shirts cheaper has no redemptive meaning.  It is the existence of meaninglessness that we suffice to keep out of the public eye, but never completely out of the back of our minds.

This is what I mean when I say that sin and evil is simply the denial of human (or even animal) dignity.  Pain in evolutionary perspective serves as an impetus to adapt, but all situations where pain is real yet all opportunities for adaptation are denied obstruct an intrinsic drive of all organisms.  This takes the richness of human life, with its experience of emotions and depth of consciousness, and denies it the dignity that even insects have.

This experience of evil as the oppression of adaptive drives in the face of pain has a wide scope of implications and manifestations, which I would have to go into at another time.  But, I do feel it is at least a start for a new perspective on suffering and evil in human experience; one which is more consistent with the implications of modernity and yet still offers a reverence for life consistent with religious thinking.