Theodicy

CS Lewis's The Problem of Pain is very much the same as The Problem of Evil, which is called theodicy. Sometimes the slightly different focus can illuminate an important point. When we consider pain instead of evil, its inevitability in any meaningful reality becomes more clear. We think of evil as some artificially-imposed difficulty on humankind, but pain we recognise as part of the overall package.  You can't get by without it, on both a practical and a theoretical level. Yet the difference, down at the root, is slight.

Lewis was quick to counter that the real problem is good, not evil. How did we come to acquire the notion?  Why is there any of it at all? A purely physical world would have just Stuff, occurring tomorrow as it did yesterday.  It would not have any good or evil, it would be neutral. Hard to see how that would be desirable. Lewis also suggests there may be pains of a sort in Heaven, partly because of memory, but also because of consequences if we are to have free activities at all. Dr. Jerry Root asks a few quick questions about second grade, who your teacher was, who your best friend was, what you studied. We do remember things but they are distant.  We realise that they had importance, because everything in fifth grade had some back-relation to it, and everything in twelfth grade had back-relation to both fifth and second grades.  Our conversion story, whatever it is, is based on events that are not only past events now, but were past-events then.  He thinks our memories in Heaven of what our lives were on earth will be like that.  Earth will not be erased, but with be subsumed in what came after.

“When pain is to be borne, a little courage helps more than much knowledge, a little human sympathy more than much courage, and the least tincture of the love of God more than all.”