God created the universe but life contains suffering as well as pleasure; satisfactions and accomplishments, as well as sorrow and failure. If evil exists, perhaps as a conscious force, did God create it? Questions such as these run to the core of our human experience posing an existential paradox.
If one posits that the creation does not require a conscious Creator in order to exist, then the questions are merely academic and we ought better to deal with life as we find it. Fair enough, since that counsel exists no matter what else we may think about it.
But for those who feel, imagine, believe or know that God exists, the question demands an answer to the proverbial inquiry, “If God be loving, how can evil exist?”
Paramhansa Yogananda, author of the modern spiritual narrative, “Autobiography of a Yogi,” likened our paradox to that of the experience of watching a modern movie in a theatre. The movie is seen upon the larger than life screen but its seemingly real people, objects, good guys and villains are all but projections from a white beam of light issuing forth from behind the audience in the booth of “eternity” above.
Visible objects, seen through the eyes or created in material form by an artist, require contrasting dots of dark and light in order to be seen. All dark or all light is impossible to observe. The stuff of life requires contrast in order to both exist and to be observed.
The beam of light contains both light and dark but originates from a source of energy that has neither. While this may be interesting metaphysics, it does not address our ethical, spiritual or emotional understanding and response.
To augur down into the heart, we have to go beyond an quasi-mechanical explanation. We, too, partake in the self-awareness that has created us. It is with this existential awareness that we intuit the existence of a greater Awareness.
The proposition, common to science today, that matter produces consciousness may seem logical from the observation of the stages of evolution from gases to matter to sentient beings, but when self-awareness cognizes itself it is confronted with the question (and an intuitive sense) of whether Awareness, not gases or blind chemical or atomic forces, was the Origin of matter and life to begin with. Where would the organizing and responsive impulses of atoms, molecules and chemical have come from to begin with. And, why?
Since consciousness can only be outwardly proved by what it manifests (words, form, energy, matter, action, attitudes and so on) the question cannot be answered by observation or logic. Consciousness is known to itself and this proof is undeniable to itself. Insofar as the existence of God (or gods et al) has been posited since ancient times and affirmed by the greatest of human beings (Jesus Christ, Buddha, Krishna and prophets everywhere), a betting man would do well to place his bets in the God basket.
Next week we will move into “why suffering?” Why didn’t God create a paradise rather than a battleground? Or, maybe God did? But then, what happened?