Suffering, Freedom, Love & Justice. How can you believe in God after experiencing politicians?

A journey into the exploration of theodicy; or how a loving God allows suffering.

One of the risks of pursuing a life in politics is that you may find yourself exposing and displaying some your ignorance in public. You may find yourself saying some rather facile and silly things. Kemi Badenoch has just given us a fresh reminder of what that looks like.

An equivalent risk for those of us who listen to politicians, is the danger of laughing at them and feeling a degree of patronising contempt in the face of their ignorance. This is bad for the soul, and is best avoided. Once again, no thanks to Kemi Badenoch.

So when I heard that Kemi had lost her belief in God documented in an article in a daily newspaper in August, I feared for the consequences of reading it.

Politicians hardly do anything without being directed by Spin Doctors. So I wondered if talking about this now, in the silly season for news, was an attempt to gain some kind of moral credit for her sensitivity in the face of human tragedy; especially with touchy-feely people; feeling perhaps that she could risk offending Christians, since there weren’t very many of them.

But the fact is that this degree of superficiality is not just her. Our children ought to have been educated in the basics of the philosophy and spirituality since our whole culture has been created on this edifice, but they haven’t been. They have instead been given a diet of relativistic pap by superficial propagandised left-wing teachers who don’t seem troubled that they are unable to think independently for themselves.

As we will see later on in this article, CS Lewis raises an essential but almost always neglected question. He asks how you can criticise a line for being crooked if you’ve never seen a straight line and so have no means of comparing straight with crooked, or even knowing what they are?

This becomes a reaction that if the universe falls so far short of my expectations of what fairness and justice are or ought to be, I might choose to disbelieve, as a kind of protest. Frankly this feels a little like trying to punish God because he has underperformed and made life too difficult or uncomfortable.

CS Lewis asks something like this:

“but where did you get your ideas about justice and love from if the universe is not infused with them? You can’t have invented them ex nihilio”’

and,

“If you were not created by the universe with an apprehension of what justice and love is, why is it you’re so offended by their insufficiency?”

and

“If the universe has not given you an apprehension of the need for justice because it appears to you to be absent, why would you be disappointed?”

If this seems remotely incongruous, perhaps the right response might be to take time and effort to continue to think about what the relationship is between justice, love, and freedom of choice might or ought to be?

Sadly, our education system, our teachers and our culture usually refuses. It can’t be bothered. Instead responding, “I’ll just complain and throw brickbats against the rather superficial image of God I’ve carelessly picked up and make my protest by refusing to believe.”

On listening to who it was that Kemi Badenoch has lost her belief in, the figure she was rejecting had more in common with Father Christmas than the God of Christianity.

She is not alone. There seems to be a relationship of inverse proportions between our technical competence as a society and our philosophical wisdom.

We are probably one of the most philosophically maladroit cultures that has ever existed.

Of course it’s worse than that. We have gone mad.

The gender wars and the trans debates have formed a kind of group psychosis. The self-satisfied smugness of preferencing fantasy over reality is solipsistic hedonism of an extreme kind.

This has been going on for some time. No doubt since CP Snow warned in 1963 of the two cultures that were emerging, creating a gap between the sciences and humanities. People educated in the one would not be able to converse or understand people educated in the other.

It has turned out worse than that. Intellectual relativism morphing into post modernism has made it close to impossible for the concept of understanding to even exist in the Arts. In a post truth society what is there to understand?

I remember in my 25 years of teaching at a university that it seemed astonishing to me that some of the cleverest scientists I met in the University community clearly had stopped thinking philosophically or theologically at about the age of 11. Having decided the quest for God was a cul-de-sac they stopped bothering. And only death and disaster had the capacity to kick start the normal human capacity for metaphysical and moral curiosity.

Kemi Badenoch had explained in a TV interview how she lost her faith in God after reading about the abuse that Josef Fritzl inflicted on his daughter Elisabeth.

Imprisoned and raped for 24 years, Elizabeth had prayed for a release that took decades to come. Badenoch could not find any parity in her own expectation for her more mundane prayers to be answered if Elisabeth’s weren’t.

What is so dispiriting in this account is its limited ambition. Did Kemi Badenoch not suspect for a moment that other people at other times might have given some thought to the perennially difficult issue of how a God of love and power allows suffering (theodicy)?

Was her life so sheltered and blinkered that it took the story of Fritzl and Elizabeth to jog her into what was clearly for her and unusual series of thoughts?

It’s not that this conundrum is easy. It is as difficult as undeserved suffering is emotionally offensive. But there are of course different models of ‘god’ beyond the Christian one.

CS Lewis placed into the public domain one of the clearest maps of the options available to humanity. In his book ‘Mere Christianity’ our choices are limited to: atheism (no god), pantheism (all kinds of gods), dualism (two gods at odds with each other) , monotheism and Christianity (incarnational monotheism).

Which of these 5 ‘gods’ did Badenoch find not up to her moral scrupulosity? Paradoxically, she rejected the only one that actually offers something of an acceptable answer to the issue of theodicy.

The problem did not lie with the Christian description of God, but with Badenoch’s shallow and under informed grasp of what Christianity taught.

But she lives in a culture where this question had been wrestled with by some extraordinary lucid minds.

Perhaps the most provocative European natural disaster of the last few centuries took place on 1^st November 1755 (All Saint’s Day). Lisbon was devastated by an earthquake, tsunami, and subsequent fires, killing tens of thousands. This catastrophe struck during a major Catholic feast day when the faithful were on their knees at Mass, and crushed by falling masonry and collapsing churches. This had the effect of particularly sharpening the theological question: if God is good and all-powerful, why allow such suffering, especially to the devout?