WHY SUFFERING? – PHILOSOPHICAL & CHRISTIAN REFLECTIONS Since: 1^st May 2003 Last Update: 30^th June 2003

“Seeing much, suffering much, and studying much are the three pillars of learning” Benjamin Disraeli

TODAY (30^th June 2003) At last, Miss Canny Ong is laid to rest. May the good Lord rest her soul. (For you readers who are not from Malaysia, Canny Ong was a young married woman who was abducted, raped and murdered while retrieving her car from the basement carpark of a shopping center in Kuala Lumpur, the capital city of Malaysia) Father Larry Tan, the Roman Catholic priest conducting the memorial service, was quoted by a local newspaper to have said that we would never know why God has allowed such a thing to happen to her, but Canny has indeed gone to a better place where there is no more pain, suffering and striving but instead a place of eternal peace and joy with Jesus Christ. And Father Larry Tan is right, perhaps we would never know the reason. What matter is Canny is safe in the arms of Jesus, the Saviour of her soul. However, that does not stop us from thinking through how God fit in in this event; or for that matter the many more events of horrendous and excruciating pain and suffering that human beings had gone through throughout the history of mankind. There are basically FOUR ways of looking at this highly complex subject. (I am saying this again; this web site does not pretend to be a definitive nor an authoritative voice on the subject of pain and suffering; far more capable and enlightened Christian scholars and writers have dealt with this subject more extensively and scholarly. Some of these writings are linked to my web site. Remember this web site is my “Philosophical and Christian REFLECTIONS” ) 1. God Foreordains [Determination; NOT Fatalism (Fate)] This says that God has ordains everything that would happen in His created orders, the universe, the history of mankind, of nations, of civilizations, and thus, our individual lives. From eternity, from before the foundation of the world, God has set things and events in motion; and everything would happen just as God has, in His sovereignty decided. Nothing ever surprise God and nothing can thwart God’s plan simply because He is the one that plans and sees to its fulfillment. There is only one plan; no such thing as plan A and plan B. 2. God Foreknows [He does not foreordain but knows the future exhaustively] This says that God knows the future exhaustively, ie. completely. Nothing ever surprise God because he knows all there is to know; including future acts of all men for all times and at all times. However, God does not foreordains; He has given man the freedom to decide for himself (henceforth man or men is taken to mean both male and female as a word to describe genders) what he wishes to do; what we call today FREE WILL. God could have decided to create us as perfect beings without the ability to sin and thus pre-empting us from suffering for our sins. However, that would make us sinless automata (machines). 3. God Self-Limit His Intervention [He can intervene, but He often would not; for some greater reason which we cannot understand on this side of heaven] This says that while God has absolute sovereignty, power and dominion over His creation, He very often does not intervene for some reasons best known to himself. The Christians calls this the “greater good”. It is an assertion that when God chooses to refrain from intervening, it is for a valid reason and is for the “greater good”.Perhaps, it is His way of chastising His wayward children, disciplining and correcting them to bring them back to the right path. Perhaps, He decides that the natural, physical and moral laws that He has put in place must be allowed to take their course without interference from Him. 4. God Self-Limit His Power [He could have but cannot now since He has decided to self-limit His own power] This says that God can only watch the pain and suffering of His people; but unable to do anything since He has decided to self-limit His own power. A variant of this thinking says that God can have power over something but not others in accordance to His own agenda. (Please note that it does say that God is not powerful or weak; it merely says that God has SELF-LIMIT His own power for some undisclosed reason; this in no way deprecate God’s power, sovereignty or character. It merely reflects God’s decision and desire to self-limit himself). 5. God Self-Limit His Knowledge [He could have but not now since He has decided to self-limit His knowledge] This says that God decided to limit His own knowledge of future events. 6. God Cannot Know the Future Acts Of Man [simply because free acts of man cannot be known until they are made by the free man, ie there is nothing to be known by God because these free acts have not been made. This is not to be confused with prophesies where such future acts are decided by God and carried out by God Himself and therefore would happen exactly the way God has decided]. “Come with me and let us reason together.” (Isaiah 1:18) [Isaiah is the 23^rd Book of the Old Testament of the Bible]