“How long, o lord?” – The question of time in theodicy

Abstract

In this paper, the question of theodicy is viewed from the perspective of time. It is argued that even a very shallow analysis reveals that the concept of “long time” is deeply anthropocentric. We do not know what time is to God, but it seems that the only reason why we call billions of years a long period is because we use ourselves as measuring rods. What if the time questions we ask in this context say more about our temporal smallness than about reality itself? Three possible objections are answered: 1) It is acknowledged that this is of course not meant to be a definite answer to the problem of evil. It is merely offered as a reframing that seems strangely absent from the discussion. 2) The question of pastoral relevance is briefly discussed. 3) The troubling problem of why God created sequentially over time and not “instantaneously” is explored. It is concluded that perhaps our appraisal of time might not be ontologically valid at all. This does not make suffering easy to bear, but perhaps thoughts like these can provide a little hope and endurance—at least for those of us who are philosophically and theologically inclined.

Keywords:

• anthropocentrism
• duration
• problem of evil
• theodicy
• time

Ma vie n’est qu’un instant, une heure passagèreMa vie n’est qu’un seul jour qui m’échappe et qui fuit

Thérèse de Lisieux

1. Introduction

The concept of time seems to be strangely underdeveloped in discussions about theodicy and the problem of evil. Of course, eschatology and the hope for a new creation (creatio nova) are central to Christian thought about these matters. In that sense, the concept of time is hardly absent from the conversation, the creatio nova being situated in the future. Moreover, the intrinsic association between suffering and evolution (hence, long duration) lies behind evolutionary formulations of the problem of evil: Why would an omnipotent and omnibenevolent God choose to create by such a long and suffering-filled process as evolution by natural selection? Here, the past is in focus, and the long duration of God’s ongoing creative activity is viewed as troubling. The Big Bang, which could be seen to correspond to a creatio ex nihilo, occurred some 13 billion years ago, and since then God has been busy creating (creatio continua).

From a scientific point of view, the history of the universe up to the present can be divided into the apparition of four successive ages (Gleiser, 2012). First, the physical age, from the Big Bang to the formation of the first stars. Until then, there was no chemistry, only physics. Second, the chemical age, culminating in the periodic table of elements; the universe now contained both physics and chemistry. Third, the biological age, with the apparition of life, evolution by natural selection coming into play. And fourth, the cognitive age when consciousness takes centre-stage; there is a least one species in the universe which looks up to the skies and wonders “Where does all this come from?”. Hence, God’s creatio continua has generated an awe-inspiring universe. But, simply put, why did the Almighty need so much time to make all this? Isn’t 13 billion years rather a lot for an omnipotent being?

Both the above-mentioned aspects (the future and the past) are summed up in Christopher Southgate’s simple but profound question: “Why did God not just create heaven?” (Southgate, 2008). Or to be somewhat more precise (and perhaps a little less “platonic”): Why did not God at once create “a new heaven and a new earth” (Rev. 21:1)? What accounts for the delay? Why this detour of billions of years of cosmological expansion and evolution?

What I have written so far seems to be a refutation of the opening sentence. How can I pretend that the question of time is underdeveloped in theodicy? Isn’t it right there, plain for all to see? Yes, the concept of time is right there in the middle, but the concept itself is seldomly discussed. The aim of this short essay is to propose that even a very superficial critical analysis of the concept of “long time” significantly reframes the problem of evil.

2. A time-related reframing

Let us begin with a thought experiment. Suppose that the history of the universe had been exactly the same as the one we live in, but with one crucial difference: in this imaginative universe, time would be very much “contracted” and 13 billion years would have happened in 13 milliseconds instead. All the events would be the same, but they would be “fast forwarded”. Consequently, all the suffering contained in the universe would have happened not over billions of years but in less than a second, and this extremely short period of time would then be followed by eternal bliss in the presence of God. Wouldn’t this entail a significant reframing of the problem of evil? Intense suffering during a fraction of a second is indeed disagreeable, but its disappearance being practically simultaneous with its experience, the amount of suffering would be negligible compared to the eternal bliss that would follow it. If all the suffering and pain of this universe would be contained in less than a second as just described, would we still really speak of a problem of evil?

Now, as we have seen, suffering has been accumulating on this planet for billions of years, and the thought experiment could therefore be deemed as meaningless. After all, billions of years is indeed a long time, is it not? To this, I would like to reply: Well, is it really? How do we know that? On what basis do we ascertain that 13 billion years since the Big Bang is “a long time”? As expressed by the psalmist, “The length of our days is seventy years—or eighty, if we have the strength” (Ps. 90:10). Yes, compared to an average human life, 13 billion years is indeed a vast period of time. But the critical part in the previous sentence was the “compared to” part. What if our thoughts about the age of the universe say more about ourselves and our smallness than about how things really are? Are we justified in using the length of our own lives as a measuring rod? What if, from God’s “point of view” (whatever that may mean), God is creating all of this in the blink of an eye? Perhaps our lives are an insignificant fraction of that blink? Maybe the whole history of the universe is compressed into a short twitch of God’s ocular muscle?

All of this is, of course, metaphorical speech. What is “long time” to God? I do not think that we are in the position to know. The purpose of this paper is not to discuss God’s relationship to physical time and the related question of what it means that God is eternal (classical ‘divine timelessness vs. “divine temporality”). Neither is my aim to position myself with regards to the difficult question of whether physical time is best understood dynamically or statically (Deng, 2019). Such issues would indeed be interesting to explore, but my aim is more modest. I simply wish to point out the obvious, yet often forgotten, fact that our appraisal of 13 billion years as “a long time” is not an objective fact; it is an anthropocentric evaluation.

3. Answers to some possible objections

“Suffering must always be seen from the point of view of the sufferer, so this is really not a solution to the problem of evil.” What I have presented is not meant to be a “solution”; it is merely a reframing of the problem. But I do think it is a significant one. Philosophical and atheological (the prefix “a-“ is important here) formulations of the problem of evil are a legacy from the Enlightenment and therefore do assume an anthropocentric standpoint. As a contrast, it seems evident to me that a Christian perspective on evil and suffering should be grounded in thoughtful Christian dogmatics. As Jacob H. Friesenhahn puts it: “Christian theology must ground Christian theodicy” (Friesenhahn, 2011). And if this is the case, there will inevitably remain a significant element of mystery no matter how much we think about these issues. The importance of cognitive humility has been stressed in recent times by so-called “skeptical theism” and “skeptical responses to evil” (Rudavsky, 2013). According to William P. Alston, human knowledge is hampered by: lack of data; complexity greater than we can handle; difficulty of determining what is metaphysically possible or necessary; ignorance of the full range of possibilities; ignorance of the full range of values; limits to our capacity to make well-considered value judgments (Senor, 2013). Such aporetic (rather than atheological) ways of thinking are well in line with the biblical texts and with Church tradition. A number of Christian thinkers today question the assumption that, as expressed by Stanley Hauerwas, “there is a so-called problem of evil which is intelligible from anyone’s perspective” (Hauerwas, 1990). I am deeply sympathetic to such views, not least because they stress the importance of context. However, when for instance, Calvin preached 159 times about the book of Job during a two-year period, wasn’t he focusing on the problem of evil—viewed from his own perspective? As Paolo de Petris puts it: “There is little doubt that Calvin developed a genuine Theodicy in all of his works if one utilizes the standard definition, namely ‘The vindication of the Justice and Goodness of God in spite of the existence of Evil’” (dePetris, 2012). One could perhaps argue that Calvin was an early modern man, but then what about (for instance) Origen? According to Marc S.M. Scott, Origen did have a theodicy:

[T]heodicy, at bottom, merely denotes the attempt to ascribe meaning to suffering, particularly through religious, often theological, symbolism. So reference to Origen’s theodicy does not insinuate an anachronistic importation of a contemporary category into an ancient context, but rather simply signifies his theological and cosmological strategies for explaining the reality of evil (Scott, 2012).

I therefore think it is fair to say that believers before the Enlightenment did indeed struggle with the question of evil and suffering, but that they did it in another “spirit”—an aporetic spirit. The existence of God was taken for granted and reflections on evil and suffering were made within an overall theistic worldview. But with the Enlightenment, as Marcel Sarot has shown (Sarot, 2003), the problem of evil was reframed in many ways. It went from being a problem within the Christian faith to being viewed as a problem about the Christian faith; the locus of doubt shifted from doubting the cognitive capacities of humanity to doubting God himself; the focus turned from practical to theorical; and the focus shifted from a will to counter false beliefs about God to a concern about apologetics and a felt need to convince outsiders. We need not follow the “Enlightenment spirit” just because we think about evil and suffering. There are other ways of asking the questions.

Incorporating thoughts about time and human finitude in the context of Christian theology and its emphasis on God’s greatness is, it seems to me, a strategy worth pursuing when Christians try to make sense of suffering and evil. And it is a strategy that seems to go back all the way to the book of Job. For what was God’s answer to Job from the storm, if not an admonition to be aware of his smallness? My proposal of a time reframing fits well into an overall theological framework in which reflections over evil and suffering are an important part of what it means to be a thoughtful Christian. And part of that thoughtfulness is a significant portion of intellectual humility combined with a realization of human smallness (spatial and temporal).

“This reframing is pastorally irrelevant when meeting a person who suffers.” I agree. Lest we become like the friends of Job, it is essential to be able not to try explaining the suffering. I don’t pretend that the presented time-related reframing offers any direct pastoral advantage when interacting with sufferers. What really counts in those situations is, as expressed by Hauerwas, the existence of “a community of care” that is capable “to absorb the destructive terror of evil that constantly threatens to destroy all human relations” (Hauerwas, 1990). The importance of such practical theodicy is stressed by John Swinton (Swinton, 2018) who writes about redefining the problem of evil “from a philosophical dilemma to a relational task” (p. 68), and about “building theodic communities” (p. 35). Swinton defines practical theodicy as follows:

Practical theodicy is the process wherein the church community, in and through its practices, offers subversive modes of resistance to the evil and suffering experienced by the world. The goal of practical theodicy is, by practicing these gestures of redemption, to enable people to continue to love God in the face of evil and suffering and in so doing to prevent tragic suffering from becoming evil. (p. 85)

Yet, and interestingly, one of the church practices Swinton describes as central for practical theodicy is “the practice of thoughtfulness” (p. 180), which he also calls “the practice of critical thinking” (p. 180). I would like to suggest that one aspect of such thoughtfulness is the insight that our measuring rod for “long time” is inherently anthropocentric, and that perhaps our experience of 13 billion years as “long time” might say more about our smallness than about how things really are.

“Even if you are right about ‘long time’ being an anthropocentric category, the question remains: Why did God still have to create in stages, in an increasing degree of complexity? Why not create everything literally instantly?” These are interesting questions. But what do we mean by calling something instantaneous? What are we to make of this concept? In ordinary language, I take instantaneous to mean something along the line of “happened very quickly”. I snap my finger; it is an instantaneous act. But it is nonetheless an act in time. It is just that it happened in a very small proportion of a normal life span. Are we sure that the act of creation does not logically entail the presence of time, however brief? If this is the case, we are brought back to the major contention of this essay: that our notion of 13 billion years being “long time” says more about our smallness than about objective reality.

Antje Jackelén (Jackelén, 2005) summarizes one of the central insights of modern physics concerning time in the following way: “Time can no longer be understood as a ‘container’ for nature. Nature is not in time, but rather, time is in nature.” Time, at least as we understand it, should not be viewed as something that can exist without space and matter. Time is not absolute. It hence seems that by creating anything at all, God at the same time creates time. I will not even try to even have an opinion concerning the question of whether God is truly an atemporal being or if God for instance, “could be temporal in the sense of having a life ‘marked by temporal succession’ while not being located in physical spacetime at all” (Deng, 2019). My point here is simply that time, as we know it, could perhaps theologically be viewed as a necessary by-product of the act of creation, an act in which we are still very much immersed. Associated to this is the thought that creation perhaps must happen in a certain logical order if it is to happen at all. In that case, “instantaneous” would a meaningless concept if viewed literally. To summarize the two interconnected proposals that I have made in this section: time could be a necessary by-product of creation; and in that case, there might be an intimate connection between logical order and temporal order. Let us explore this a little bit more by going back to the four successive ages of the universe described in the introduction.

Presumably, there must be some kind of life for consciousness about the universe to exist; the biological age is the logical foundation of the cognitive age. And for life to exist, it must be constituted of something; the chemical age is the foundation of the biological. And this matter must itself be made of some kind of “basic stuff”; the chemical builds on the physical (surely, Rowan Williams must be right when he denounces the “unexamined notion of matter” that many of us are bearer of, our world not being “a world where little solid things bump into each other and nudge each other around” (Williams, 2018)). To make this a bit more concrete by exemplifying with something we can all relate to, one could say that the presence of oxygen is the foundation for a being such as myself or yourself to exist. If God “automatically” created time when he created oxygen and beings that breathe, then it seems to me that the logical order “oxygen before breathers” perhaps also must translate in time. Maybe the temporal and the logical are more intertwined than we tend to believe?

Hence, perhaps even an omnipotent God could not do otherwise than to create in a particular sequence, at least given the kind of universe that we do have. Moreover, two additional theological pointers are perhaps worthy of consideration: God’s use of co-creators (c.f. humans as Imago Dei) seems to necessitate a gradual development over what we call time; and if the incarnation is taken to be central to the creative purposes of God (i.e., not being a “plan B” thought up in haste by a God surprised by the Fall), then we also need creation in stages—simply because there must be matter there for God to take on.

4. Conclusion

“How long, o Lord?” asked the psalmist (Ps. 13). Suffering is suffering because it takes place in time—a time we often feel inclined to characterize as long. Too long. The simple question I have asked in this mini-paper is whether this perhaps says more about our temporal smallness than about things really are. Our appraisal of time might not be ontologically valid at all. Perhaps the whole history of the universe is embedded in a blink of the ocular muscle of God? Maybe creatio ex nihilo, creatio continua and creatio nova should be distinguished only in order to better understand the stages of God’s big, single and “rapid” (from God’s perspective) act of Creation. And it is perhaps possible that we will one day look back at all those billions of years and exclaim: How quickly indeed did God act, when he made all this in such short a time!

In considerations such as these, theology fuses with the mystic. Our lives, as Thérèse de Lisieux expressed it so well, are just a fleeting hour, a minimal instant in the grand scheme of things. This does not make suffering easy to bear, but perhaps thoughts like these can provide a little hope and some kind of endurance—at least for those of us who are philosophically and theologically inclined.

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Notes on contributors

Emmanuel Bäckryd

Emmanuel Bäckryd is associate professor of pain medicine at Linköping university, Sweden, and senior consultant in pain management at the Pain and Rehabilitation Centre in Linköping. He holds double specialties (Anesthesiology and Intensive Care as well as Pain Management). His pain research focuses on the pathophysiology of chronic pain conditions and on the use of medical opioids. Emmanuel has also written 19 book chapters in, and is the co-editor of, a two-volumes textbook of pain medicine totaling 1300 + pages. He has a documented interest in medical humanities and has authored a book discussing what it means to become and remain a good doctor (Att bli och förbli en bra läkare, Stockholm: Liber 2021). In addition to his medical and scientific education, Emmanuel has a BA in theology from Umeå university.