God Doesn’t Suffer With Us.
A Pantheist (Sort of) Theodicy
“Consider the work of God: for who can make that straight, which He has made crooked? In the day of prosperity be joyful, but in the day of adversity consider: God has made the one as well as the other, to the end that man should find no fault with Him. All things have I seen in the days of my vanity: there is a just man who perishes in his righteousness, and there is a wicked man who prolongs his life in his wickedness…”
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I distrust empathy.
“Rav Ketina was once walking along the road when he came to the entrance of the house of a necromancer and an earthquake rumbled. He said: ‘Does this necromancer know what is this earthquake?’ [The necromancer] raised his voice: ‘Ketina, Ketina, why would I not know? When the Holy One, Blessed be He, remembers His children who are suffering among the nations of the world, He sheds two tears into the great sea. The sound is heard from one end of the earth to the other. And that is an earthquake.’”
— Talmud Bavli, Berakhot 59a
I don’t know how many times I’ve heard or read someone asserting that “God suffers with us.” Here is just one recent example among countless.
“God suffers with us” is a line compatible with a range of meanings. Indeed, as will become apparent, it is roughly compatible with my own view — but only roughly so.
“God suffers with us” is compatible with your local, bog-standard minister’s/rabbi’s theodicy, along the lines of: “God has a plan, and His plan apparently includes a heinous tragedy, loss, grief, and/or injustice (which you have just endured), and that’s why He just made that happen to you. But please take comfort in the fact that, as we go through these hardships that God’s plan necessitates, God suffers along with us.”
“God suffers with us” is also compatible with the theistic finitist approach to the problem of evil, advanced perhaps most famously by Rabbi Harold Kushner’s When Bad Things Happen to Good People. Theistic finitism holds that God is all good, but not all powerful, and so the reason God doesn’t stop evil and grief from befalling us is that He simply and literally can’t.
I harbor a mix of skepticism and sympathy for both of these narratives, and so I do not propose (in this essay, at least) to judge between them. Instead, at the moment, I wish to raise an eyebrow at the word “with” in “God suffers with us.”
The “with” suggests (at least, possibly) an empathy model of God’s relationship to our suffering. And I distrust empathy.
Empathy is when you feel someone else’s pain sort of as if it were your own pain [even though it is not truly your own pain].
People really dig empathy. Empathy is very in. People seem to feel that empathy is very important for morality. Therefore, as a contrarian, I begin to wonder about its downsides, and this leads me to enjoy very much Paul Bloom’s 2016 book Against Empathy. Bloom persuasively argues that empathy is too fickle, too unsustainable, too prone to error and bias, and too irrational to be a trustworthy guide toward virtue, and he urges the reader to embrace compassion instead. It is good to be kind and helpful to people; we don’t actually need to feel people’s pain, or get ourselves into an emotional lather, or try to do so, or pretend to do so, or assume that our mirror neurons must be getting the other person’s experiences correctly, to do the kindness part well — and, indeed, we will probably be better at lovingkindness in action if we skip the empathy melodrama. I fully agree.
In the context of God’s purported empathy, though, I want to emphasize the condescension that is inherent in it. Empathy only works, only means anything, only counts as altruism or virtue, because the pain isn’t really your own. If it were your own, it wouldn’t even be empathy. There’s an unbridgeable distance to it. That’s why Rav Ketina’s necromancer’s story sticks in my craw. The necromancer’s God is way up there in Heaven; He isn’t suffering among the nations at all. He sometimes deigns to remember that we are, and when He does, He gets so farklemt (not in the Linda Richman sense, but the original sense of being gripped by depression and grief) that He cries tears that register on the Richter scale. And then, having dropped His tear bombs and had His catharsis for the day, He presumably goes back to watching angels perform brilliant new plays that the soul of William Shakespeare wrote for Him just yesterday, or whatever else He does all day up there, where He is, far, far away from us.
God suffers as us.
“In all their distress, He was distressed…”
As I have discussed before, at length and repeatedly, there is a theory of consciousness which I take to be the most likely explanation of reality, given all the evidence at hand. I might call that theory “pantheistic panpsychism,” but philosopher David Chalmers has called it “identity cosmopsychism with cognitive fragmentation.” The basic idea, in exponentially fewer words than the original posts, is this: Instead of positing that consciousness (the first-person feeling of being someone) is some special thing that arises in brains and nowhere else in the material world, I believe that all matter in the universe is conscious (that’s panpsychism). But to avoid the “combination problem” (how can vast numbers of conscious sub-atomic particles add up to one conscious mind?), I posit that there are not a bunch of separate little consciousnesses; rather, everything is one big consciousness and shares one universal first-person perspective (that’s “identity cosmopsychism”). However, to explain the fact that we don’t perceive what our neighbor perceives along with our own perceptions, I posit that the universal sense of Self (which is completely shared with everyone) is only shared in the form of that inexpressible and irreducible sense of selfhood we have, while information processing happens within each brain and is therefore limited to each brain. The bottom line is that the Universal Self, which only processes information within and by means of individual brains, has countless and simultaneous illusions of being separate (that’s “cognitive fragmentation”) even though it is One. For religious and cultural reasons, which is to say aesthetic and artistic reasons, I call this universal Self “God” (hence “pantheistic”).
You may find this theory compelling, not compelling, whatever. For purposes of this essay, I take it as given. Because what I want to talk about is one implication of it — an implication that provides a new contribution to the theodicy conversation. And here it is:
Forget “God is with us.” We can do better than that. Because God isn’t just with us. God is us.
Please don’t misunderstand me — we mustn’t idolize ourselves, because no human being is God. To “be God”, you have to be all of God, and even in the pantheistic panpsychist theory, each of us is just the tiniest spark of God. There is no part of us that is not God (“ein od milvado,” “there is nothing but Him” [Deuteronomy 4:35]) but there are billions of people, a whole Earth (at least) full of life, and vast galaxies of stars and planets and black holes and dark matter (etc.) that are still God but are not us. From our individual points of view, that calls for humility.
But from the other side — from God’s Point of View — there’s no problem for Him to assert that He is us. Because He is all of us. There’s plenty of Him that is not us, but there is nothing of us (or of anything) that is not Him.
If this is true, then God asks nothing of us that He (in the form of us) doesn’t directly go through Himself. (If you are a theistic finitist, you may quibble with God “asking” anything of us at all, since in that view He isn’t even in control, but let’s stir that kettle of fish another day.) In the instance of us going through something, that is God going through it. God, quite literally, has skin in the game — our skin, which is directly His. God does not empathize with us; He does not look down on us condescendingly from above and “remember” His children suffering. His tears don’t cause earthquakes, because they’re busy drying on our own cheeks. Our pain is His own direct, unmediated, personal, experiential pain. The Self who we are, who experiences all we experience, is none other than He.
For me, for now — from the vantage point of a time when I am not going through any kind of injustice or tragic loss (yes, it was pretty sad for me that my cat died recently, but come on, I’m fine) — this idea feels both meaningful and comforting.
Theodicy is (still) a mirage.
“Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding. Who determined its measurements, if thou knowst? or who has stretched the line upon it?… Hast thou entered into the springs of the sea? or hast thou walked in the recesses of the depth? have the gates of death been opened to thee? or hast thou seen the doors of deepest darkness? hast thou comprehended the expanse of the earth? declare if thou knowst it all… Hast thou entered the treasuries of the snow? or hast thou seen the treasuries of the hail, which I have reserved against the time of trouble, against the day of battle and war? By what way is the light parted, or the east wind scattered upon the earth? who has divided a watercourse for the torrent of rain, or a way for the lightning of thunder… Has the rain a father? or who has begotten the drops of dew? out of whose womb came the ice?…”
— God (Job 38:4-29)
What do we even mean by “theodicy?” What are we expecting here, and why are we expecting it? God never promised us any kind of solution to the problem of evil.
Quite the contrary. The book of Job ends with a mightily verbose Godly rant, of which the quotation above is only a sparse few fragments, the implication of which seems to be that unless we can achieve a God’s-eye view — which we cannot — there is no way we can understand any answer to the problem of evil that He could give us. Read the Bible as metaphorically or as literally as you like; either way, God explicitly tells us that we aren’t getting any satisfactory answers out of Him.
My dad, psychologist and author Dr. Bruce Chalmer, has defined faith as “when you accept that reality is right.” This makes sense to me, at least as a starting point; if you can’t get to that stance, emotionally even if not propositionally, then you will be in a constant state of resentment, anger, and despair.
There are many roads you can take to get to that kind of faith, from a kind of merry nihilism (“lol nothing matters and I guess I have to choose to be fine with that”) to a more serious Buddhist style of detachment (“everything, and all our feelings about everything is all just waves in water that is always changing”), and from traditional Western religious narratives (“God has a good plan, even if I can’t see it”) to my own bespoke thoughts, above. There are probably also many people (perhaps most people?) who don’t need any kind of analytical narrative to get to, or stay in, the emotional place of “reality is right.” After all, it’s enough to be there; you don’t have to explain or know why. Birds sing all the time, but nobody ever seems to ask them for a reason. The idea that a reason is needed for this approach to life — or for anything at all — is not some fundamental reality written in angels’ blood on the sky; it’s just a conceit that philosophers invented. That’s the meta-reason that any “reason” for faith that works for you can, well, work for you.
More ominously, it’s also a reason that if it doesn’t work for you, nothing and nobody can make it work for you. Nothing and nobody, that is, but your own inner orientation and/or choice to have faith — if, in fact, free will is a thing, about which, please expect me to write more in this newsletter in the future.
Expect, as well, a future essay about the problem of how to ground morality — not because I have a good idea about how to do it, but because I don’t. Indeed, it seems to me that my preferred (partial) theodicy, as laid out above, is compatible with moral visions that I like (I try to treat others well, because we’re all the same self!) but also with moral visions that I abhor (I do whatever I want, because if I hurt someone else, I’m really just hurting myself, and I consent to my own abuse in the form of that other guy, so who’s to say that’s wrong?!). It seems to me that it would help humanity to have some shared grounding for moral principles beyond “Do What Seth Chalmer’s Intuitions Dictate,” but, at the moment, while I find that I know good and evil when I see it, I find rationally shared grounds for morality devilishly hard to come by. Bloom is right that empathy is a highly questionable and problematic shared ground for morality… But, then, honestly, and vexingly, so is everything else!
A favorite verse of mine is Ecclesiastes 7:16, which appears directly after the acknowledgment of the problem of evil with which this essay opened. The verse: “Don’t be exceedingly righteous, and don’t make yourself too wise; why should you be destroyed?”
I love that verse, but/and, I must admit I don’t fully understand it. Perhaps the mystery, alongside the audacity, is the appeal. Still, I have a sense that this verse points us toward the self-undermining idea that ideas cannot save us. Morality, wisdom, intelligence, knowledge, stories, common sense, tradition, revelation, religion, philosophy, utilitarian calculus, effective altruism, categories, language, technology, reason itself — none of this is ultimate. None of this can save us from uncertainty.
From the problem of evil — which is to say, from the tragedy of limitation and impermanence — there simply is no rescue. At least, no rescue within the scale, in time and space, of any human life. Death and limitation come for everything; reason teaches us this. Reason declares the limitations of everything, even and especially itself.
However we conceive, mentally or linguistically, of God/The Ultimate Reality, if and when we come to that emotional orientation of “faith” that “reality is right,” I suspect it’s because, at some level, our hopes, and even our pretensions of selfhood, extend far wider than our individual lives and far beyond our capacity to comprehend — beyond stories, beyond reasons, beyond thought — to something stranger and stronger than we can ever understand, let alone “know” or “believe”.
Yes, yes, yes: I’m with you all the way. The parsing of these ideas, which parallel my own theological thinking over the decades, is helpful. Finding them expressed here gives me hope that these notions are “out there”, not just banging around in my own head.
I’ve found consolation in the theologies of “God with us”—after all, Christianity has the Incarnation: “who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness." Phil 2:6-7–not to mention the Holy Spirit: “the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered.” Rom 8:26 KJV. In my day I’ve also preached from Rabbi Kusher’s book (without mentioning any problematic heresy about the nature of God.)
But your Talmudic and Hebrew Bible references seem a lot more straightforward, since they don’t get tangled up in the paradoxes of emerging New Testament Christian theology. I love the story of the tectonic tears.
I’ve arrived at the notion that pantheism as sketched here has the best chance of forming the core of our next spirituality. I think (well, kind of assume) that it’s compatible with the woo-woo side of physics and can thus lure the hyper-rationalists into actually finding some joy in reality. But it’s also high time for humans assume humility as a species and learn to treasure the rest of life on earth. This allows us simply to go outside to seek spiritual pathways. It provides an inspirational basis for addressing climate change. Finally, your preface is pertinent: in these “sophisticated” days few will be content with the traditional balms of religion.
I agree that what comes next is finding a ground of morality. If we can just get people to revisit Genesis without all their 21st century cultural preconceptions, we might find some clues there.