Pain #2
(Warren Dunes State park in SE Michigan)
I recently re-read C.S. Lewis’s The Problem of Pain. Lewis writes to give answers to the philosophical or intellectual “problem” of pain, not to give ideas about how to relieve pain and suffering. Yet for me, and I think for others, it helps to get answers to the question “Why is there any pain at all?”
Lewis argues that a main reason pain exists at all is because 1) God gave persons free will to choose; and 2) not even God “could create a society of free souls without at the same time creating a relatively independent and ‘inexorable’ Nature.” Let me try to explain this.
That you and I have free will to choose between alternatives seems obvious (though, philosophically and scientifically, it’s hugely debated today. If you want to see examples of this debate go to my more academic website johnpiippo.com).
We can make free choices. Lewis says we make these choices in a natural environment that is for the most part already fixed. Lewis writes that “Society implies a common field or ‘world’ in which its members meet.” Let me use this analogy: If you and I are playing chess we are free to move the chess pieces as we choose, but the chess board we play the game on is fixed and cannot be changed. If this were not so we couldn’t play the game of chess at all. So Lewis reasons that if we did not live in a world that was common to us all we would not be able to have free will. Our free will does not impact the fixed world we live in, but has to do with the free choices we make within that fixed world.
If you were the only person that existed in this world the world “might conform at every moment to [your] wishes.” For example, trees might crowd into a shade for you to sit under if you chose this. But because I and many others live in this world along with you we could not expect Nature to conform to human free will, since what I choose would not always be what you would choose. If I were a farmer I might pray for rain today, while you, the golfer, would pray that it would not rain during your game.
Lewis writes it this way: “If the fixed nature of matter prevents it from being always, and in all its dispositions, equally agreeable to even a single soul, much less is it possible for the matter of the universe at any moment to be distributed so that it is equally convenient and pleasurable to each member of a society.” (23)
What’s the point Lewis is trying to make? It’s this. God has given you and I free will. Why? Because without free will love is impossible, and love, for God, is his highest value. God IS love.
Now if I had a piece of wood I could use it to make a chair for you to sit on. Or, I could use it to make a club to beat you with. If I chose to do the latter, why couldn’t God turn the club into something as soft as grass every time I swung it at you? Because, in such a world, wrong actions would be impossible, and therefore “freedom of the will would be void.” In fact, says Lewis, “evil thoughts would be impossible, for the cerebral matter which we use in thinking would refuse its task when we attempt to frame them.” (24-25)
Lewis’s conclusion is this: “Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself.” For there to be human free will it must be the case that there is also human suffering. Read Lewis’s entire chapter in PP for more detail.