Reading 2024 - The Hardest Problem by Rupert Shortt

I believe, sometimes with more or less difficulty, in Catholic Christianity. I understand that part of my obligation as a Catholic is to explain why I am a Catholic, in the hope others may join the faith. Yet I have to admit that I do not find faith explicable in a simple way. It is for me a mysterious response to mystery. I recognise that, especially now, in this age of technology, believing in something called God seems preposterous, let alone the idea that the being we call God decided to bring into the world via virgin birth an incarnation of himself whom he then allowed humanity to kill - and as for the proposition that whenever I go to mass I am spiritually renewed by eating a wafer that is Christ trans-substantiated, I am left only with the statement that that is what I believe, ever more so as I experience the certainty that consumption of the sacrament makes me a (slightly) better person. 

The one faintly rational argument I have ever come up with is that the Christian doctrine of love and self denial demonstrates such an accurate understanding of what humans are bad at and need to be good at that I can't help feeling only a greater power could have constructed it. Jesus's Lord's Prayer seems to me a similarly miraculously clear articulation of an entire religion, suggesting to me it was not formulated by a mere human. 

All this is not enough to make me confident to try to persuade, especially as I am possibly one of the least persuasive people around on any subject. I rarely lay out an argument succinctly or with clarity, and my fondness for meandering off point is a major fault. 

Thus, I decided to read The Hardest Problem by Rupert Shortt. I hoped to arm myself with excellent arguments for faith, in the face of the sometimes scornful disbelief of most people I encounter.

The book begins with Shortt quoting David Hume: 

"Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?"

My immediate thought on reading this was that Hume has not defined evil. Shortt does not go on to do so either, but simply remarks that people of faith should be chastened by Hume's remarks. He then quotes a scientist, Freeman Dyson, who says: 

"to worship God means to recognise that mind and intelligence are woven into the fabric of our universe in a way that altogether passes our comprehension."  

Shortt concludes from that that: 

"we should move through the world in somewhat the same way as we move about in someone else's home, noticing that we are the guests and someone else is the host."  

He goes on to suggest that a specifically Christian framework regards self-sacrificial love as necessary for happiness, so that "service is perfect freedom" and "endurance is a spur to salvation in a longer perspective." 

Shortt goes on to look at Hobbes and his misuse by Richard Dawkins, at Jonathan Sacks on Auschwitz (he said God was there "in the words 'Thou shalt not murder'"), at Joseph Ratzinger, at the actor Matthew MacConaughey and at a journalist called James Marriott, before arriving at Schopenhauer who, Shortt tells us:

"is only one of a posse of major philosophers to have seen as clearly as any theologian that a grown up life necessarily involves struggle softened by periods of contentment." 

Shortt then quotes Father Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who said: 

"The world is an immense groping, an immense search...It can only progress at the cost of many failures and many casualties."

Shortt passes on to cosmological arguments - as he describes them, "a recognition that it is not possible in the terms naturalism allows to say how anything at all can exist." 

He cites a physicist called Peter Hodgson, who wrote:

"Simple or complicated, small or large, the passage from non-existence to existence is the most radical of all steps...the transition from non-being to being is beyond the power of science to detect."

Shortt adds the observation of a philosopher called Denys Turner who wrote:

"'Nothing' has no process, no antecedent conditions, no random fluctuations in a vacuum, no explanatory law of emergence, and, there being nothing for 'something' to be 'out of', there can be no physics, not yet, for there is nothing yet for physics to get an explanatory grip on."

The mind-boggling mystery of existence versus non-existence is for me a compelling argument for a higher power than man, but it does not address Shortt's "hardest problem."

Nor, I think, does his next set of arguments - those for moral truths. He looks at the question of why most humans do have a sense of some things being morally right and some wrong, and points out that a creditable life can be led without religious convictions, but it is hard for an atheist to explain why a moral compass is not simply arbitrary. Shortt ends this section by in a sense returning to the cosmological, stating that "Abrahamic monotheism starts with the fundamental intuition that in the beginning God created."

The next section of the book is largely devoted to Iain McGilchrist's insights into left and right brain interaction, or lack thereof, and their relevance to religion. Shortt observes that: 

"One of the things good religion can do is remind us of how contentious it is to take for granted a model of human beings as greedy minds and wills roaming about a passive world in endless search of stuff to satisfy ourselves."

At last, Chapter 3 comes to the matter in hand, "God, Evil and Suffering". Aquinas scholar Timothy McDermott is quoted, Rowan Williams is quoted, CS Lewis's The Efficacy of Prayer is quoted. Shortt points out that while the Gospels (specifically Matthew 7:7, "Ask and it shall be given you") suggest that there is "a simple equation between faithful discipleship and the realisation of one's goals" the refusal of Jesus's prayers for deliverance in Gethsemane rather undermine that possibility. 

Shortt goes on to quote Herbert McCabe, David Bentley Hart, Eleonore Stump and various others, in an attempt to answer the question posed by Dostoevsky in Brothers Karamazov - is the unspeakably violent death of one small child justification for the saving of all humanity? He makes many good arguments but from my point of view as a would-be proselytiser most of them seem to be arguments that rest on a Christian faith. He says himself at one point that he is arguing "from a Christian standpoint", whereas what I had hoped for was an argument to persuade others who as yet don't see "from a Christian standpoint".

Perhaps that is impossible though. Perhaps the very first step in being a Christian is to give up trying to solve "the hardest problem", opting instead for a humble acceptance that humanity will never know why anything, including suffering, exists, because these things are beyond human comprehension. It is this acceptance that can bring an individual to the recognition that there is something greater in the universe than human ingenuity. 

But much of humanity - including extremely intelligent individuals - seems not to have noticed the impossibility of understanding either eternity or infinity, nor to have recognised that the very fact of existence is profoundly mysterious. Without perceiving those things - (and also without accepting - [reluctantly and with constant difficulty and effort, as it is very hard to repress one's own deep belief that the centre of everything is oneself and one's happiness] - that we need to desire what God has created us for, even though it may not include getting what we want) - it is hard (and probably to most people, seems unnecessary) to think about anything beyond oneself and the pain we suffer or see others suffering, apparently unfairly. 

However, by recognising the mysteriousness of existence itself, the strangeness of eternity and infinity, I think we can begin to understand how much we do not understand - and at that point faith, (most particularly the faith described by St Anselm - "I do not seek to understand in order that I may believe but I believe in order to understand") can enter. After that, it may be possible to recognise that the hardest problem is not suffering but learning the habit of self sacrifice. And that's where Christ comes in.