God and Pain

How God could create a world knowing there would be suffering and not intervene is one of the fundamental questions theists have to confront. A pretty intellectual answer is definitely not going to make it all better, but here's something I've been thinking about that I haven't heard before.

Suppose existence itself is a positive good, and a very big one. If that were true, the suffering in the world -- even the real evil in the world -- wouldn't be able to make creation a bad deal.

We often tend to think of existence as sort of a neutral state, not really worth much unless something ostensibly good happens to it but not harmful unless something bad happens. But God creates things. (I'm working with the assumption that God is good and wise here.) God creates things that don't experience pleasure or pain, so far as we know. God creates things that will probably never touch the experience of humans. The universe is huge, maybe infinite. Creating things seems to be a positive expression of God's energy good in itself, not a good subordinate to that of generating happiness among created things. Creating is God's happiness, it's not just used as a means to human happiness.

The point of that isn't, "Suck it up, the music of the spheres doesn't care about your drama." (Though I suppose that's probably true.) God can create because creating is good and still care about the human condition. But if creating is good -- if it's just fundamentally better for things to be than for them not to be (exit Hamlet) -- then that gives a different perspective to the way we see our condition and make sense of suffering.

If existence itself is an intrinsically good thing, then it could outweigh a lot of bad things. If it's very good to be, then maybe the things we see as bad aren't bad enough to make the answer come out negative. Maybe a person could be starving and still be blessed to be at all. Saints and martyrs have believed that God and God-given existence are still richly good even in painful circumstances, and maybe that applies to the whole world even if we don't recognize it. Perhaps being, and with it the potential for infinite quality of life and fulfillment in God, itself is stronger than the evils that often seem to encumber it.

Disclaimers: The maybes and perhapses above are not rhetorical -- I'm speculating and I know it. Also, I understand if my dear readers (all 4 of you) wish to smack me for propounding such a sanguine philosophy of life at this time in the semester. ;)