self help reading + music

A world claimed to be the creation of a good and powerful God, but which nevertheless contains so much evil and suffering --This is surely the greatest difficulty holding people back from religious belief, and it is one that continually troubles religious believers. One could not claim that there is a complete and straightforward answer available to remove the perplexity. Interestingly, science is of some assistance in this regard. Its understanding of how the world works shows that natural processes are inextricably entangled with each other. They cannot be separated out, so that those with good consequences could have been retained by a competent creator who, at the same time, eliminated those with bad consequences. The integrity of creation is a kind of package deal. For example, the process of genetic mutation produced new forms of life, but it has also resulted in malignancy. You cannot have the one without the other . . . Why are there not repeated divine interventions to avert evil consequences? Because such things could only happen in a magical world, and that kind of world is not this one, because its creator is not a capricious magician. Only a world with sufficient reliability for deeds to have foreseeable consequences could be one in which moral responsibility was exercised. These insights do not dispose of all the anguish and anger that we feel in the face of individual human suffering, but they suggest that it is not simply gratuitous, easily removed by a God who was a bit less callous.


-from “One of the Hosts”, John Polkinghorne

"If I Lie Down," Aloha
"If I Ain't Got You," Alicia Keys