God's Role in Our Lives

Recently, I've been reading a book by an American called Phillip Yancy on prayer. This has been very helpful in changing the way I think about the concept of prayer generally and in helping me find an answer to one point in particular: what do we mean if we ask God to "give us this day our daily bread"? What about the miracles in the Bible? How is this apparent belief in a God who can intervene at will in human history compatible with the tremendous amount of suffering in the world? This has always been a big sticking point for me in terms of faith in God but I think I may now have found a way of understanding it.

The essence lies in the way we understand God as acting in the world. God has created a physical universe, governed by the familiar laws of physics and cause and effect. Therefore, in order to act in the world, God will act in accordance with those laws (although I'm less clear on whether He must act within them, but this is probably irrelevant and is almost certainly unanswerable by human beings at this point in history). Therefore, rather than asking "why doesn't God do anything about x?" (where x equals world hunger, the conflict in Palestine etc....) we should be asking "what can I do (or, if you prefer, what is God calling me to do) about x?". Thus we move away from the rather unhelpful image of human beings as helpless little children, waiting for the manna to fall from heaven, towards a conception that tallies much closer with what we recognise ourselves to be: individuals with abilities and autonomy.

Some would doubtless raise objections to this, of which two spring immediately to mind. The first is that it is a rather too neat avoidance of responsibility on God's part: whenever a human being does something to alleviate the suffering of someone else, God takes the credit, yet whenever they cause harm to another, then it is entirely their action and God has nothing to do with it.

This, however, is not what I was trying to say. The explanation for what has been termed "the problem of evil" lies, in my understanding in the causal or creative nature of God. As Thomas Aquinas would put it, God is the cause of causality, the causa ultima. Therefore, God lies behind every human action, both good and bad. Not in the sense of a person driving a car, directly under control, but in the sense that, since God as creator is the foundation of everything, He lies behind every action.

The second objection is the problem of suffering which is not caused, either directly or indirectly, by other human beings, such as a person who has led a healthy lifestyle developing cancer. This is, admittedly, more of a challenge. Here it seems that God has designed a distinctly unpleasent universe and all we as humans can do is exercise our ingenuity and skill in minimising its effects. One argument is I suppose that God has given us that ingenuity and skill as well, giving us both solution and problem. Another point might be that we need some form of suffering in our lives: if our lives were unrelentingly good and pleasurable, those things would cease to have any meaning.

Yet although both of these points may have some small merit, it is true that they provide scant comfort to those who are actually suffering, since they do not answer the fundamental heartfult cry of "why me, in particular? why must I suffer?". To this, sadly, there is perhaps never going to be a satisfactory answer. Perhaps all we can say is that it is necessary to have some negative elements in the world and try to do our best to distribute them as equally as we are able.

This conception of God as the causa ultima also allows me to overcome the difficulty I expressed in my last entry: the idea of there being one (or even a variety of alternative) best ways to live life that have been chosen for us by some higher being. This idea somewhat misses the point. God's "plan" for our lives is not like that of a controlling parent who uses a combination of direct orders and emotional blackmail to push their child into going to university or choosing a particular career. Rather, God's intention for us is that we should simply be happy, his "purpose" for us is living fulfilled lives, in whateverform we choose. The only condition or rule here seems to be that whatever we do should be genuinely fulfilling. So, just as many people would question the fulfillment to be found in a life of drug addiction or making porn films, God would also say that there are perhaps better ways to spend your life.

Ultimately, my understanding of all these questions is rooted in our relationship with God: if we have the same kind of relationship with God as we do with our more terrestrial best friends, we will minimise the harm we cause and try to live a fulfilling life.