thoughts on pentecost

Religious folks who believe in a loving, omnipotent and omnipresent God have been bothered for centuries by the existence of pain and suffering. This 'problem of evil' has even been turned into the main atheist argument. So I think it is worthwhile to take a closer look.



First, notice that any good physicist would make the argument that 'pain and suffering' only seem to exist - they are not part of the true reality as described by our best theories. Newtonian physics already eliminated all emotions from reality and they never did reappear in our current 'theories of everything'.


Of course, sound theology cannot rest on such arguments, so we need to take a closer look at 'pain and suffering' as they appear in our conscious experience.

I think you would agree that in your world, i.e. in your conscious experience right now, you do not suffer from too much pain - otherwise you would not be able to read this very sentence.

Perhaps some slight discomfort sitting on your chair (already for too long) and perhaps some unpleasantness from reading this blog (as usual); But it cannot be too bad, otherwise you would not continue to read this argument. All the 'pain and suffering' in the world exists right now in your memory only and perhaps in your expectations of what might happen in the future.



But Augustinus noticed already that the past no longer exists, the futures does not exist yet and the present is only of infinitesimal duration.



In other words, God created time so that we can handle all the evil.

The eternal, omnipresent God is certainly aware of all the pain and suffering, but such is the love of God that the sad truth of our sins is revealed to us only in infinitesimal portions - anticipated by our own thinking and experienced only in our memories.

keeping the distance

My distance to Lubos, Jacques and the Pontiff is 6; Sabine is one step closer with 5. I am not connected to Peter Woit.

But I am truly honored that I am only four handshakes/publications away from Richard and only six from Albert and Werner.

My Erdős number is also 6, but it should be 4 (i.e. less than the median of 5 and the mean of 4.65) if the tool would know about an unpublished preprint with Des Johnston; This would also bring my 'Hawking number' to 4.

added much later: Btw my Bacon number is also 4, because my wife appeared in the movie "The Other Woman", with Cameron Diaz - who has a Bacon number of 2. Of course, there are some home movies where I appear together with my wife. However, this requires a liberal application of the rules, because my wife was an uncredited extra and our home videos are not in any movie database 8-)