Note 29 — Chapter VI · THE FAILURE OF THEISTIC ARGUMENTS

The old-fashioned idea that catastrophes, plagues, famines, etc., were sent as punishments for our misdoings is gradually being modified. Dr. Flint says distinctly: “I cannot agree with those who think there is no mystery in mere pain—that it is sufficiently accounted for by moral evil.”29 It seems a pity that his advocacy for benevolence in the Deity should lead him afterwards to qualify this sensible statement by an amazing assertion which begs the whole question. “The character of pain itself,” he says, “is such as to indicate that its author must be a benevolent being—one who does not afflict for his own pleasure, but for his creatures’ profit.”30 The profit consists, we are told, in the fact that we are prevented through fear of pain from running into danger. How peculiarly appropriate and consolatory such a view of pain must be to, let us say, a person crippled with rheumatoid arthritis! Man’s highly sensitive and delicate organisation inevitably entails pain when no useful purpose of this kind can possibly be served; yet we are to suppose that an Omnipotent Being devised this crude and cruel method for teaching us to avoid the perils with which He Himself has surrounded us! One of our greatest living surgeons, Sir Frederick Treves, assures us31 that “the symptoms of disease are marked by purpose, and the purpose is beneficent.” “The processes of disease,” he goes on to explain, “aim not at the destruction of life, but at the saving of it.” Here, indeed, is more grist for the mill of the apologist. But what does this special pleading amount to? To this: Because through suffering we may survive a dangerous disease, we should be grateful to the Supreme Intelligence who created the preservative as well as the destructive microbes; we should be grateful to the Almighty who has fashioned friend and foe, and who, much to our discomfort, has selected our interior economy for the battlefield! Surely, if the surmise of benevolence is to be entertained at all, it must be at the sacrifice of the surmise of omnipotence. The Supreme Intelligence cannot be an “Almighty God” if He be the “Father of all mercies.”