The traditional definition of 'God' is a perfect being that designed and created the universe. I won't go into an analysis of the nebulous word 'perfect' here, but in general it seems most people take this to include attributes such as omnipotence (unlimited power), omniscience (unlimited knowledge.) and benevolence (kindness, compassion, lacking ill-will or malevolence). These three attributes (along with that of being a creator, designer or first-cause-by-choice of the universe) are firmly ingrained into the meaning most religious believers give their God, and if one or more of these attributes should fall, I think it would require some rethinking on the part of the believer about the nature of the being they often heap so much praise upon.
The Problem of Suffering is one that has been around a long time, and in my opinion one of the most powerful reasons why it seems extremely unlikely a deity, as described above, exists. It hinges on a sort of disproof by contradiction, so to speak. If it can be shown that the three characteristics listed above (along with that of being the creator/designer) are incompatible and cannot logically exist in the same being, then that demonstrates that, logically at least, such a being is impossible, cannot exist. I should add here, however, that I do not take this argument as an absolute proof, per se, but instead as at the very least a good reason not to give much consideration to the possibility of existence of such a deity.
The idea behind the Problem of Suffering is fairly simple. Any one of us can look around and see the existence of pain and suffering in the world. We see people spending years slowly dying in hospital beds from terrible cancers; we see children abused, raped and killed by the adults who hold power over them; we see cities destroyed, families crippled, innocents dead from not only war, but unavoidable natural disasters as well; we see a world where age brings with it a terrible decay, mentally and physically, cured only by death itself. Suffering is all around us, that much is undeniable. And I think we all have some sort of natural aversion to it. If we can minimize our suffering, we tend to. That's not to say that suffering can't be a learning experience - but at some point in the extent to which people suffer, I think most people would draw a line. How much can a child of two learn from a torturous death by cancer? And so I think most of us do desire suffering to be, if not abolished or minimized, at least reduced from what we can so easily observe around us every day of our lives.
How then, can a world so full of unnecessary suffering exist, if it was created by a deity of not only unlimited power and knowledge, but benevolence as well? Even our limited human understanding can conceive of a logically possible world where there is less suffering. Why then, would not the god in question create such a world instead of the one it did? Perhaps it lacked the power to create a better world - in this case it is certainly not omnipotent, by the usual understanding of the word. Perhaps it lacked the foresight and knowledge to understand what it was creating, or to see how to create a better universe - in this case it is certainly not omniscient, by the usual understanding of the word. If it had both the power and the knowledge to create a better world, and did not do so, then its choice seems a malevolent one; not something a compassionate being would choose. So given the suffering that most certainly exists in our world, an omnipotent, omniscience and benevolent deity seems an absurdity. No such deity can exist - it would have to give up its claim to at least one of those attributes.
One common objection to the Problem of Suffering is the widespread claim that evil is necessary for good - that suffering is necessary for happiness. This is an opinion often shared by believers and non-believers alike, and it basically states that if we never experienced any suffering, we would have nothing against which to gauge our happiness - we would exist in a single static state which we could not truly enjoy without knowing what another state is like. The argument has some intuitive appeal to it, but that alone does not establish it. After all, contrary to intuition, cold is not the opposite of heat, but the lack of it - there is in fact no 'opposite' of heat, and no such opposite is needed for heat to be a meaningful concept. It seems at least somewhat plausible then that an analogy could be made between heat and happiness. If we lived in a world where there were merely degrees of happiness, but no suffering, happiness could still remain a meaningful thing. Of course, one might define suffering as the lack or relative lack of happiness. Even in this case, however, I think most of us can imagine happiness still existing meaningfully in a universe where there is less of even this type of suffering (in other words, where no one is so lacking in happiness as to have a terrible cancer or be killed by a natural disaster); thus again the universe could have been created with less suffering without destroying happiness. Happiness could still be balanced by suffering in a universe where innocent children (who lack even basic understanding of the situation) don't die slow deaths from disease.
Given the ideas presented above, it seems to me not unreasonable to conclude that the omnipotent, omniscient and benevolent creator deity is a contradiction, and thus not logically possible. Because there is so much unnecessary suffering in the world, it seems that if any omnipotent and omniscient being created the world, that being could not have been benevolent as well. If benevolent, it seems it must have lacked one of the other attributes. There is one objection to the Problem of Suffering which I have not yet covered and that is that a being of such power and knowledge would be so far beyond our limited human understanding that we cannot come to any sure conclusions about its nature, its choices, the possibilities involved, and so forth. This is indeed a valid objection, and certainly one of the reasons I do not categorically claim that no such god exists (it could, for example, 'transcend' logic itself, and contradiction would thus present no problem to its existence). However, all the evidence we do have, all that is at our disposal as beings of limited understanding, points towards a universe where such a being is not possible, does not exist. While the possibility for error is certainly there, I see no reason to give it any more thought than other seemingly-contradictory possibilities which we pragmatically rule out every day - that the sun will simply disappear from existence tomorrow, or that the universe is actually the mixed droppings of a pair of transcendent invisible pink unicorns, or that the universe was simply created by an omnipotent, omniscient evil deity !!!
They, and literally anything else (!), may in fact be the case, given the fallible understanding we humans have, but that doesn't give us any reason not to rule them out as far as living our lives goes. The existence of something that is so far beyond us is indistinguishable from that thing simply not existing.
This seemingly irreconcilable paradox received the attention of Hindu philosophers and resulted in the fundamental difference Hindu religious belief has with other religions. The baffling quiz facing western thinkers since Biblical times has been addressed quite succinctly by Hinduism. The key to all such paradoxical dead-ends comes in the form of the theory of reincarnation. That the soul travels through endless cycles of birth-death-rebirth and eventually refines itself by Karma to a state where its purity pushes it into the waiting arms of the Almighty is a solution to the vexing issue. Earning divine retribution for bad deeds and succour from pain for the good deeds, the journey of the soul seasons it to the right state. Thus, a child in pain is seen as divine justice for the soul which erred unforgivably in one of its previous births !
Sanjeev Bhakay
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