Links
Judaism Suffering and the Problem of Evil
The Problem of Evil in a Nutshell
Stanford's Take on the Problem of Evil
Elie Wiesel's Relationship with God
The Theme of Theodicy in Elie Wiesel's Night
Theodicy asks the question: How can God reconcile his assumed all-powerfulness or omnipotence with his assumed all-goodness or benevolence when there is so much evil and suffering in the world?
Why wouldn't a good God, who is all-powerful, intervene and stop evil and suffering from happening on the large scale that it does?
Some religious thinkers or theologians justify evil in this world, saying God is just in allowing it, by arguing that God must give us free will and use evil and suffering to "teach us lessons."
The implication is that we incite our own suffering with our sinfulness and that suffering is a tool to teach us toward gaining more wisdom.
Critics show that these arguments breakdown when we consider evil and suffering on such a massive scale that it would be cruel and unfair to say that people are being punished by earthquakes, tsunamis, genocide, etc. Not only are they not being punished for any "sins," there is no "lesson" to be learned. Their deaths are senseless.
Another Way of Looking at Theodicy Is Asking the Question: Can We Reconcile Suffering with a Belief in God?
Scholar Bart D. Ehrman tackles this question in his book God's Problem.
As he explored this question in his youth as a devout Christian, he gradually realized he could not answer the question to his satisfaction and he lost his faith, as does the boy in Night (though Wiesel is said to have recovered his faith in a different form).
God does not intervene to feed a hungry child, Ehrman writes. A child dies of starvation every 5 seconds. There is no lesson to be learned from this suffering, no theory of free will that justifies it. A starving child or baby is not being punished for sins. The child is innocent. Nor does a starving baby learn any lesson or wisdom from starvation. Theodicy is a failed and outrageous argument when placed against these examples.
More examples
God does not intervene to save the 11 million killed during the Holocaust. Many babies were thrown into burning ovens while they were still alive. God does not intervene.
It would be obscene to say, as some theologians do, that God is using suffering to punish disobedient sinners. In fact, much human suffering is senseless and pointless.
We could could example after example of senseless suffering, the kind of cruel, pointless suffering that has no meaning and we could conclude from these examples that there is no way to reconcile a just, benevolent, all-powerful God with the amount of suffering in the world.
The Dangerous Implications of Failed Theodicy
If we agree that theodicy, the attempt to justify God in the face of suffering, is not convincing, where does that leave us? What are the implications?
If we reject God, we are deluded if we think we are going to reject religion. All of us are religious whether we know it or not.
Alfred North Whitehead defined religion as what you do in private. In other words, where your heart lies your religion lies also. Where your obsession lies, so does your religion.
There are many religions that belong to the self-described "non religious":
humanitarian
self-interested altruist
money
pleausure (hedonism)
nihilism, the belief in nothing
Me
conformity and obedience
mediocrity ("I'll just get by doing the bare minimum")
my favorite sports team
self-pity
victimization
revenge ("I don't get mad; I get even.")
consumer technology
Apple products
Mini Cooper
Prius
BMW
Mercedes
So Weisel had to replace one religion for another:
His faith changed from unquestioning to questioning and angry. His anger doesn't show a rejection of God but a hunger for justice, which he believes comes from God.
For those in the concentration camps who lost faith in God, where did they go from there?
For some, having no faith in God meant "anything goes." The thinking is, "If there is no God, there's nothing for me to do but give in to my basest appetites, to indulge my whims and desires, to do whatever the hell I want, because life doesn't amount to a hill of beans."
For some, thinking the above thoughts appears liberating: "Lucky me, I just discovered that there are no rules, there is no morality, there's nothing I have to do. Therefore, I can do anything I want. I'm free. I have complete freedom."
But what is "freedom"?
And here lies the danger of rejecting God, according to some, because life experience teaches us that "freedom" is equivalent to self-indulgence and immorality and that the self-indulgent, those who live in accordance with there pleasures, are not free at all but slaves to the hedonic treadmill, the futile grasp of pleasure which becomes more and more elusive and numbing, resulting in despair, anguish, and nihilism.
Wiesel saw what happened to people who embraced nihilism after they suffered living in the concentration camps and he saw that nihilism is not a viable response.
Nihilism is the rejection of morality and meaning often prompted by no longer believing in God. Wiesel was tempted to be a nihilist but he rejected nihilism. Why?
Seven problems with nihilism:
One. Just because we feel God is indifferent to suffering doesn't mean we should be indifferent to it. Our humanity depends on not being indifferent.
The problem with applying failed theodicy is faulty comparison. If we reject an all-powerful God who does not intervene in the world's suffering, we should not apply God's presumed indifference with our moral behavior because we're human; no one ever said we were all-powerful or that we were indifferent. In fact, the purpose of life is struggle in the face of inexplicable evil and suffering. That is meaning.
Two. We can look at the woeful consequences of nihilism and hedonism: numbing and despair. Self-centered pleasure seeking always puts us on the hedonic treadmill, meaning we soon become numb to the stimulation that used to give us pleasure. We increase the stimulation more and more but this proves feeble and self-destructive.
Three. We cannot be nihilists because we are equipped with sympathy and empathy. Most of us, in fact, with the exception of sociopaths and clinical narcissists, have sympathy and empathy, and these qualities compel us to reach out toward the suffering. Societies that flourish are built on trust, which cannot exist without empathy.
Four. Nihilism leads to misery. In contrast, helping others, self-interested altruism, helps us attain more happiness than nihilism. In fact, people who help others rank highest on the Happiness Index. There is a certain "selfish altruism" or "self-interested altruism" in helping others.
Wise people know that helping others makes them happy.
Five. Happiness is increased, not from nihilism, a false freedom, but from social reciprocity ("You help me and I help you"). Cultures that flourish have high levels of social reciprocity and self-interested altruism. See Elizabeth S. Anderson.
Six. Elie Wiesel's Night is implicitly anti-nihilist because in writing the book there is a message: It is necessary to expose evil and to expose the truth. It is necessary to record an accurate version of history. There is real history and fake history. There is truth and falsehood, but the nihilist doesn't care. For the nihilist, there is no truth or falsehood. Everything is the same old B.S.
But there is truth and the truth matters. For example, in Wiesel's memoir Moishe the Beadle has seen the truth, the evil of the Nazis, and no one believes him. Their disbelief and denial comes at their own peril.
Likewise, Wiesel's memoir, an account of an evil that takes place, is ignored or denied at our own peril. Wiesel, who lost his faith in his childhood God, still believes in truth and in telling the truth. He is no nihilist.
Seven. If in losing your faith, you go the opposite direction, embracing nihilism, you are committing an either/or fallacy. "Either I embrace my definition of God and religion or I throw morals out the window." This is lame. You can lose your faith in a particular God or religion but maintain morals. Why would you abolish morals? Would you marry someone with no morals? Of course not. Morals are the foundation of trust.
Writing Option for Night
In a two-part essay, analyze the challenge of Wiesel's childhood faith in the face of a God who remained silent during the Holocaust, but how this challenged faith never translated into nihilism, despair, and moral extinction.
For the first half of your essay you would define theodicy and how a Wiesel the boy is tormented by what appears to be a failed theodicy and the loss of his faith.
For the second half of your essay you would discuss the implicity moral imperatives of Night that would prevent us, even in the process of losing faith, from embracing nihilism, despair, and moral extinction.
Some implicit moral teachings we learn from reading Night that you might want to address:
Night (which is NOT a novel but a memoir) is a powerful first-hand testimony to an unprecedented evil that spread across the world. Writing testimony is about exposing truth and a nihilist doesn't care about the truth. Exposing the truth is a moral act.
Night is not about a boy who gave up on God and faith; rather it is about a boy's whose questions about God's justice burn with even greater fervor evidencing a heightned morality, not a lesser one. In other words, the memoir (not novel) renders a boy who hungers for justice and such a hunger is incompatible with nihilism.
The boy never loses his sympathy and empathy for others and these qualities exist in people who engage in social reciprocity and self-interested altruism. These are not the qualities of a nihilist.
For your first three pages, you would analyze failed theodicy in the memoir and how this failed theodicy torments Wiesel's psyche and soul, causing him to question his faith.
For your last three pages, you would explain how Wiesel's compromised or lost or evolved faith (it's up to you to decide) does not result in nihilism but has an implicity moral message.
How Would McMahon Write an Essay for Night If He Were an English 1A Student?
I would probably do one of these two strategies:
Thesis One:
While clearly the God of Wiesel's childhood failed him completely, his book Night is not a book of nihilism and despair. To the contrary, Night is a moral force evidenced in four powerful ways. First, as a powerful narrative, the memoir offers first-hand testimony, which is crucial for us to remember the Holocaust, an antidote to forgetting. Second, Wiesel's book evidences a desire to prevent us from being apathetic but to be vigilent about the possibility of this type of evil recurring. Third, Night contradicts those anti-Jewish Holocaust deniers who assert their pseudo-history on the world. And finally, Wiesel's book offers testimony that evil can exist on a grand scale that cannot be defined or explained away by psychology and science.
Thesis Two:
My research into the various explanations for the evil behind Hitler and Nazism has made me conclude that the use of science and pyschology to explain evil in fact denies evil and as such is harmful for our understanding evil. The scientific and psychological explanations are wrong for several reasons, not the least of which are they are compelled by the fear to look at raw evil in the face; they are often influenced by the arrogance of science and psychology that thinks it can come up with an explanation for all things, including evil; they often resort to absurd over simplifications to come up with their explanations; and perhaps worst of all their explanations often implicitly excuse the evil behavior by, one, arguing that no behavior can be truly evil (but simply misguided) and that, two, this misguided behavior is born from victimization so that we portray the evil doers as victims of forces they cannot control.
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