Wednesday, January 26, 2011

theodicy for a young woman in pain

People are the best wonderers in the world. We wonder why the sun rises and why the rain falls, we wonder why bad things happen and we wonder what we could have done to make things happen differently than they did. This capacity can - at once - be our greatest strength and our greatest weakness.

Some of the questions we ask are easy. The Sun rises because the Earth rotates constantly and changes how it faces the sun. Most every rock in the universe does this unerringly so it wasn't all that hard to figure out. So too have we figured out the rain, winds, tides, fire, atomic theory, relativity, ecologies, and parasites. All of these are pretty great accomplishments which resulted from asking why and then watching the world for its patterns and regularities. It is not enough to ask why, we also have to add causation to our explanations for them to be useful. The Sun rises because the Earth rotates, the tides ebb because the Moon tugs on the Earth.