This post
fulfills a promise I made to discuss the tough examples readers raised in my
post on beauty and suffering.  I do it from a Pagan perspective, one emphasizing the sacredness of the world
and of the basic processes that make it up.

Every time I go
to the local grocery store I put a contribution in a jar for Haile.  She is a three year old deathly ill
from a rare form of leukemia.  From
what I am told, her chances are not good. 
A display in the store (where her father works) shows a lovely little
girl blowing bubbles and clowning around. 
They were taken before she lost her hair as one effect of therapy.

I know of
nothing more heart wrenching than the suffering and deaths of children.  Death is a part of life, but these
little beings have got very small helpings of life and a very big ones of
death. 

How can this be
in a good world?

One could
answer, and answer truthfully, that it is far better than it used to be.  With one exception, no sons of our
country’s Founders lived to adulthood. 
The exception was John Quincy Adams.  In 1853 in New York City half of all reported deaths were
children of less than 5.  Today
cases like Haile’s are a small minority.

But one could
argue, and argue truly, that these improvements are due to the growth of
scientific knowledge and hygiene – they are not evidence of a benevolent world.

Personal Evidence?

At bottom my
confidence that the world is ultimately good and sacred is based on another
order of experience.  Having had
encounters with deities and with divine love, a love that is super human, I am
sure that at its bottom there is an answer to this mystery.  Having encountered entities without
bodies in our sense, I am equally sure that consciousness can exist
independently of our physical selves. 
Is our consciousness of this nature?  Of course I cannot be sure, but it seems more likely to be
so than for it not to be so.

But these
experiences do not come close to explaining why so many came into this world
only to linger briefly, and die, let alone dying so horribly.  Their suffering underlines  an ultimate mystery but cast no light
on its solution. In a good world why do bad things happen to undeserving
people?

Bigger Patterns

And yet some of
us – and I am one such – try and discern a pattern, a logic, to our experiences
that penetrates more deeply than simply saying we have faith based on personal
experiences that there is a moral and loving order to the world, and that no
one suffers for naught.  Yes, I
have such a faith.  No, I do not
believe anyone else should find that particularly convincing.

What follows is
my own effort to find a plausible pattern that is motivated by my experiences,
but hopes to make a case to those who have not had them that the issue of why
suffering exists is not so cut and dried as atheists and Gnostics might
suggest.

If consciousness
is as irreducible as matter – and this is a reasonable position – it does not
thereby follow that all consciousness much resembles our own.  Atoms have very little consciousness by
our standards.  In particular, they
seem to have no individuation in our sense of the term.

Individuation
arise with complexity. 
Extrapolating from this insight, individuation of awareness also
increases as complexity increases. 
Until a certain level of complexity has arisen, awareness is more
oriented towards flourishing and vitality than towards more complex value perceptions.  Organisms take advantage of whatever opportunities
arise to grow and reproduce and flourish. As part of a larger field of
consciousness their individuality is partial, but real.

At a certain
point organisms begin to be able to experience “higher” forms of awareness
because their complexity has grown to the point where such awareness can be
located within a body.  I have
posted on animal morality as an example.    

In the case of
human awareness this capacity has grown to the point where ‘disinterested” care
and love is possible, a delight in the flourishing of others who need not be
useful to us.  Many economists and
“game theorists”  have trouble with
such a concept, but most other people probably do not because we have not been
trained to think as sociopaths do.

An environment
that makes such awareness possible in physical form rests on a foundation of
many other forms of life that are increasingly focused only on growth and
reproduction as we move towards ever simpler kinds of life.  A degree of complexity must arise from
simpler foundations in order for qualities such as love and care to manifest in
the material world.  The chieft
impelling physical force leading to such an outcome is rooted in the rise of
predators.

Predators and
parasites arose when organisms able to extract energy from other organisms
arose.  This forced prey organisms
to adapt or die.  Absent them the
world would be little beyond blue green algae.

And so there is
a paradox: a world able to have beings capable of love must emerge from a world
where love in physical form has no home and where predations is the principle
physical cause for change in the direction of ever more varied degrees of
awareness and mind.  The Pagan
insight on the interrelatedness, the necessary interrelatedness, of death and
life, growth and decline, could not be better exemplified.

And so we have
evolved in a world that is indescribably beautiful with wonderful opportunities
to learn and grow – but a world that can kill us, and ultimately will.  Organisms doing what they do and have
always done are a primary cause of such death, particularly early deaths.

And so we cry
and cry deeply at the deaths and suffering of the innocent, knowing that this
is the unavoidable price we pay for creativity and love in physical form.

So Why Have a World at All?

But why have it
then?  Am I not just trying to make
lemonade out of a lemon?  No.

I think
individuated consciousness grows from being within a body.  Philosophers and scientists are
discovering just how much of our thought processes are rooted in our
physicality.  Our thought is
ultimately metaphorical, and our initial metaphors are rooted in our experience
of our bodies. George Lakoff is one of the pioneers in this area of
knowledge.   

I suspect once a
degree of self-awareness arises, consciousness is both individuated and able to
exist independently from a body. But the body is necessary for this to
happen.  Perhaps it is like an egg
shell that makes development of the embryo possible.  In such a case our bodily existence is part of the process
by which individuated awareness develops. 
If there are multiple incarnations, it may be how such an awareness
deepens. 

So afterwards do
we reincarnate or simply move on? I have no firm idea and I suspect both
possibilities are possible.  A
series of existences leads to an ever deeper and more complex expression of the
kinds of awareness that having a human body makes possible.  But there seems to me no reason to
believe that is anything but one possibility out of many. 

Because my
experience with ‘higher’ consciousness indicates it is characterized by
superhuman love, I believe no being dies and is simply gone, leaving a
permanent hole in the heart of all who loved him or her.  That is, until they die themselves,
leaving still more holes in others’ hearts.  Here we are in the realm of final mystery, and I try and not
go very far along that route. If we cannot grasp how a photon can be both a
particle and a wave, how can we believe we can get a firm grip on these issues?

Even so, the
perspective I have provided can account for the existence of deep and unmerited
suffering and tragedy within a good world where ultimately all of value is
redeemed.  Those children who did
not make it are not gone forever. 
Their core ‘gestalt’ survives, once it has developed self-awareness.

This argument
would not convince an atheist to abandon atheism, nor does it try to.  Rather, it seeks to convince an atheist
or Gnostic (whom I think it does directly challenge) that I can agree with them
on the observables and demonstrate a coherent alternative interpretation of the evidence, one that rests on
experiences many of us have had, acknowledges hideous undeserved suffering, and
still finds the world fundamentally good.