A Working Theodicy
The mother of a young child who is screaming because he dropped his first ice cream does not take her child's despair seriously. Amused by his innocence and simplicity, she may even find it difficult not to smile. But what must the child's thoughts be, seeing that smile? After all, he is not faking it. His despair, which his mother finds comical but which she herself could not match unless he were murdered in front of her, is real. He does not know ice creams are cheap and replaceable. He truly believes that an unprecedented wonder of sensory pleasure that was a moment ago his has been suddenly and unjustly taken from him and is gone forever. And even though the mother smiles because screaming hysterically over something as insignificant as a dropped-ice cream is endearingly naive, it is worth emphasising, firstly, that she smiles not only because the cause is insignificant but also because the hysteria is real; and secondly, that the adult perspective from which the event appears insignificant is utterly beyond the child in whose tiny world something genuinely horrifying has taken place.
I wonder if this simple observation could be worked into a formal theodicy to resolve the paradoxical coexistence of a God that is both omnipotent and loving and a world in which atrocities occur with punctual regularity. Presupposing His existence, it follows, firstly, that the intellectual differential between God and man is infinitely greater than that between a mother and her child and, secondly, that what we consider atrocities are to a divine intelligence infinitely more insignificant than dropped ice creams. Seeing a woman who has just lost a child break down with grief, it may even be that God is touched by her simplicity. He may even, unnervingly, find it difficult not to smile. |