Problem vs Mystery

There is an old saying, evil is not a problem to be solved, it is a cross to be born.

This is the difference between a problem and a mystery.

The problem of suffering involves trying to eliminate, as far as possible, the suffering of people.

But that doesn’t touch the existential “problem”, which is a mystery. Why do we suffer ? What is its meaning ? And why MUST it have a meaning ? How odd this desperate demand that suffering be answered for…

Andrew Louth, in his essential book on reading scripture to enter into God's presence - Discerning the Mystery - writes the following :

One of the ways in which reason operates is by solving problems. In his confrontation with reality man isolates certain problems and seeks solutions. Mathematics represents this faculty of reason perhaps at its point of most acute development: it is mathematics that has enabled the sciences to pose problems in such a way that they are rendered soluble. Put like that, it may sound very humdrum, but this is far from the case. The solving of problems involves the exercise of imagination in posing the problems in such a way that they suggest ways of solution. Though methods can be developed here, what is much more important is a kind of imaginative insight into the pattern the problem presents. And indeed in the solution itself one looks for order, symmetry, even, one might say, for elegance, and not simply for any sort of answer. 

The pure mathematician, the pure problem-solver, does not at all see his task in utilitarian terms, but often rather in aesthetic categories (see, for example, G. H. Hardy’s famous defence of the pure mathematician’s vocation in A Mathematician’s Apology). None the less, the problems are there to be solved, and once solved they are of no further interest, except in so far as they suggest approaches to further problems. The sciences advance by being able to isolate problems that are capable of solution in terms of the position the science has at that time reached. Looking at problems too soon is not the way to advance, and looking at problems too late is either folly, or the menial function of tidying up what is already known in principle anyway. There is a very real notion of advance and progress: problems solved represent knowledge achieved and form the basis for further advance. It seems to me that it is the realization that science is this sort of activity that has led to the success of the sciences: and the notion of advance (with the implication that the past has been left behind) is part and parcel of this notion.

The distinction drawn here between two dimensions of reason, one problem-solving and the other contemplative, is obviously very close to the distinction, traditional in Western philosophy, between discursive and intuitive thought. It is also illuminated by the distinction drawn, for instance by the philosopher Gabriel Marcel, between mystery and problem:

"Distinguish between the Mysterious and the Problematic. A problem is something met with which bars my passage. It is before me in its entirety. A mystery, on the other hand, is something in which I find myself caught up, and whose essence is therefore not to be before me in its entirety. It is as though in this province the distinction between in me and before me loses its meaning.

The Natural. The province of the Natural is the same as the province of the Problematic. We are tempted to turn mystery into problem. The Mysterious and Ontological are identical..."

A problem is a temporary hindrance, and a proper response to it is to attempt to remove it. The mysterious is quite different: it does not so much confront me, as envelop me, draw me into itself; it is not a temporary barrier, but a permanent focus of my attention. They do overlap, though, or at least often appear to do so: for what confronts me as a puzzle, a riddle, may be either a genuine mystery, or simply a problem. 

Sometimes we are presented with a problem, the solution of which precipitates us into mystery: one recalls in this context Sir Edwyn Hoskyns’s famous exclamation, ‘Can we bury ourselves in a lexicon and arise in the presence of God?’Marcel speaks of ‘the transition from problem to mystery. There is an ascending scale here; a problem conceals a mystery in so far as it is capable of awakening ontological overtones (the problem of survival for instance).’30 A problem is clarified by an attempt to dispel the darkness of ignorance which it lays bare; we seek to explain it in terms of something more readily understood—it is obscurantist confusion to attempt to understand obscurum per obscurius. With a mystery we often find, in the words of Rückert:

Wie oft geschieht’s, dass ich ein Dunkles mir erkläre Durch etwas andres, das an sich noch dunkler wäre.

(How often it happens that I would explain to myself something obscure By something else, which in itself was yet more obscure.)

For it is not a matter of solving a mystery, but of participating in it. In another passage, Marcel says a little more about his distinction between mystery and problem:

"In fact, it seems very likely that there is this essential difference between a problem and a mystery. A problem is something which I meet, which I find complete before me, but which I can therefore lay siege to and reduce. But a mystery is something in which I am myself involved, and it can therefore only be thought of as a sphere where the distinction between what is in me and what is before me loses its meaning and its initial validity. A genuine problem is subject to an appropriate technique by the exercise of which it is defined: whereas a mystery, by definition, transcends every conceivable technique. It is, no doubt, always possible (logically and psychologically) to degrade a mystery so as to turn it into a problem. But this is a fundamentally vicious proceeding, whose springs might perhaps be discovered in a kind of corruption of the intelligence."

What Marcel calls the ‘fundamentally vicious proceeding’ of attempting to degrade a mystery into a problem is what is involved in, to use George Steiner’s phrase, the ‘fallacy of imitative form’, which was discussed in the first chapter. For what I am suggesting is that concern for the mysterious is at the heart of the humanities, whereas at the heart of the sciences there is a concern with the problematic. That this is a contrast, and not a dichotomy, is seen in the way in which problem-solving has a place in the humanities—though the most significant kind of problem is one that, in Marcel’s language, ‘conceals a mystery’—and in the complementary way in which some scientists, such as Einstein, have spoken of a deepening sense of awe and wonder awakened in them, an awe and wonder in the presence of the universe, that grows through the advance of the sciences, through the growing success in solving problems. But the contrast remains, and since problem-solving can be successful, whereas contemplation of mystery cannot, there cannot be in the humanities any hope for the sort of success the sciences have known. Nor in theology: and especially not in Christian theology whose central mystery is focused in the birth of a child in a stable, and the death of a man on a cross.

In recent years several theologians have actually returned to the idea that the notion of mystery lies at the heart of Christian theology. Karl Barth in his Church Dogmatics sees the mystery of God’s self-revelation as the heart of Christian theology. He speaks of a God who reveals himself as mystery, who makes himself known as the One who is Unknowable: ‘God himself veils Himself and in the very process—which is why we should not dream of intruding into the mystery—unveils himself.

 This unveiling through veiling takes place in the Incarnation: so the section of the Church Dogmatics on the Incarnation is called ‘The Mystery of Revelation’. Karl Rahner, too, speaks in very similar terms. Theology is not concerned with the elucidation of mysteries which will eventually be revealed in the beatific vision—mysteries reduced to what one might call eschatological problems. Rather, theology is concerned with the mystery of God, the mystery of the triune God who gives himself to us in love in the Incarnation of the Son. Rahner argues that there are three fundamental mysteries which lie at the heart of Christian theology: the mysteries of the Trinity, of the Incarnation, and of the divinization of man in grace and glory. He concludes his discussion by saying, ‘There are these three mysteries in Christianity, no more and no fewer, and the three mysteries affirm the same thing: that God has imparted himself to us through Jesus Christ in his Spirit as he is in himself, so that the inexpressible nameless mystery which reigns in us and over us should be in itself the immediate blessedness of the spirit which knows, and transforms itself into love.’

The notion that Christian theology is to be seen as concerned with the mystery of God, the trinitarian God who loved us in Christ and calls us to participate in the mystery which he is, suggests to me that the main concern of theology is not so much to elucidate anything, as to prevent us, the Church, from dissolving the mystery that lies at the heart of the faith—dissolving it, or missing it altogether, by failing truly to engage with it. And this is what the heresies have been seen to do, and why they have been condemned: the trinitarian heresies dissolve the divine life, either by reducing it to a monadic consciousness, or by degrading it to the life of the gods; the Christological heresies blur the fact that it is in Christ that this divine life is offered to us—that it is through him and in the Spirit that we know ourselves to be loved by God himself—and do this either by qualifying the fact that God is who Jesus is, or by qualifying the fact that what Jesus is is truly a man; heresies concerning man’s divinization are no less insidious, as they blur the fact that we are truly loved by God in Jesus and are called to respond to that love, and that in thus loving and being loved we are drawn into a real communion with God. But the heart of the matter is sharing in the mystery of love which God is."

John Milbank on proving God & the problem of Evil

Below are portions of John Milbank’s response to Stephen Law’s criticism, the entire thing can be read HERE , Milbank talks proof of God, Goodness, and the problem of evil :

"So is there any evidence for this God? Not in the way there is evidence that my house, in which I am now sitting at my desk, hammering out this piece on my laptop, evidentially exists. Rather in the way that the entire world exists and being itself and the ‘thingness of things’, ie ‘reality’ exists. The trouble is, then, that there is just too much evidence that God exists and this is the trap which he sets (if Stephen will forgive me), for the intelligent but unwise – the ‘foolish in their hearts’ of whom the Psalmist speaks. For if everything speaks of God, all things symbolise him, then in a sense indeed nothing does – that is to say, literally no-thing does.

So we are talking about a saturated evidence for God – the world is so soaked in this evidence that no particular aspect or item of the world bespeaks God more decisively than any other, albeit it may do so with more intensity. Is this, as Stephen terms it, ‘pseudo-profound’ evasion on my part? No, because the ‘saturated evidence’ is not really and seriously deniable, save by sophistry. There is a mystery of being and of reality. Reading them as the action of a personal or tri-personal God is one serious attempt at solving the riddle of our existence, though not, of course, the only one and not the only religious one. Nonetheless it is clear that if one does adopt this interpretation, then one is not offering a hypothesis about something within the world, subject to evidence and testing, but a thesis about the world as such, about its universal and transcendental dimensions. How can a proposal that seeks to account for the ‘everythingness of everything’ be subject to proposed counter-instances? It cannot.

The crucial point to make here is that being is not the only transcendental – the only term applying to anything whatsoever and not just to a particular kind of thing. Some other terms like this are equally ‘grey’ – like ‘thing’ and ‘anything’ and ‘unity’ or ‘numerable’. But others are more highly coloured – everything that exists is also ‘true’ because it is the case and holds as such, ‘beautiful’ because without some harmony, even of an ash-heap, nothing at all would be apparent to us. And finally it is also ‘good’ as the God of Genesis sees his creation, because anything we see as evil we immediately see as deficient or distorted, or as lacking in a fullness of existence that it ‘should’ have. Without question the default position is immediately to receive any existing thing not as neutrally grey, as if we were metaphysically colour-blind, but as positively good.

Therefore it is not an ascertainable amount of evidence that gradually accrues to evidence God – a mighty pile of fine facts of benignity – but the saturated transcendental universality of goodness. This includes the fact that the most contaminated thing could not exist at all without some germ of benevolence – the always remaining possibility to imagine that such a dire reality could have been or could even now be made to be better, like wasted Europe after World War Two.

How does all this then relate to Law’s crunch point about the disprovability of an omnipotent good God? The riposte is easy, entirely traditional and follows from what has been said so far. For religious believers, the existence of good things in the world is not evidence of a good power lying behind the world. Rather it is immediately the experience of good as the outflowing to us of a gift – as neoplatonism taught and as any traditional person or child experiences when they look at nature. Equally, the thought of a good to be done is again immediately the thought of the need to impress somewhat upon the world a higher, more real and hidden ideal order. As Prince Charles rightly stresses in his book Harmony, this is again as true for most tribal societies and ancient civilisations as it was for Plato. Therefore to see the good is not to infer God but to receive him.

Again, evil was not first observed and then causally considered, rather it was immediately perceived as a failure of causality, a failure of emanative transmission, a deficiency of reason, a weakening of the good and so of being itself, since existence and its various modes were regarded as inherently benign and wonderful. It follows that there was no problem of evil because evil was, by definition the inexplicable, the monstrous, even the impossible. At the intellectual level this was the mystery of ‘privation’ or of lack, at the popular level of the perversely demonic. In neither case was this seen as evidence against God who is wholly the provider of good (albeit in sometimes mysterious and torturous ways) but rather of cosmic, spiritual and human enmity against God. As Kenneth Surin now long ago pointed out, evil did not in the past pose a theoretical challenge but a practical one. How might it be extirpated? How might we be redeemed?

…insofar as we perceive evil as evil and not just as a fantasised projection of our inconvenience or discomfort, then we also perceive the reality of the good as also not our mere projection but as a true arrival from an ‘elsewhere’. The latter must be presupposed else we would imagine that we had exhausted the plenitude of goodness which in fact defines it.

Even were the world one vast concentration camp, the fact of their remaining one last believer, one last good person, would still carry infinitely more evidential weight for the reality of God than the all-pervasive horizon of accumulating contaminated dust. Indeed, to a certain extent this is just how some Christians do truly perceive a fallen world. Yet for all Christians, the star and stable of Bethlehem vastly outshine the darkness of the Herodian midnight in which the world has always tended to dwell.

It follows that the logic of the evidence of faith is not that of the logic of the laboratory. This evidence is at once so omnipresent as not to be able to be singled out as evidence for one thing or state of affairs rather than another, and yet equally so very particular that just one instance or exception can establish a universal truth or rule. This is all in keeping with the fact that, as Aquinas points out, God exceeds any contrast between universal and individual, abstraction and exemplification. 

How does this relate to the question of theodicy? Clearly the ‘evidence’ for good necessarily outweighs that from evil. But can any amount of evil be compatible with God’s omnipotence? By the logic of privation it can. All being is, just as being, good, and so all action is good and all power. By definition, evil is inhibition of being: an inhibition of action and so of potency. Evil is weakness, a house divided against itself which cannot eventually stand, as Jesus teaches in the gospels. Thus, by definition also, evil is an attempt to deny and resist divine omnipotence which is co-terminous with God’s infinity of act. It is not, then, that the circumstance of evil calls into question divine omnipotence, but that evil ‘impossibly’ attempts to deny and resist it. Only, by contrast, were evil to be wrongly granted real positive force and power would there be any question as to why God authored or allowed instances of malice and suffering.

The question must then be rephrased. How is the impossible possible – the denial of power, action, being and reason, besides the denial of goodness? Here lies a mystery that religion tends (rationally) to recognise as such. Christianity speaks of a ‘fall’. This is meant pre- or meta-historically. The Fall is exactly like a malign transcendental – again not a thing, but a kind of meta-event that taints and stains the entire radiance of being.

Here, after all, is the simple empiricism of Christianity: the world is clearly primarily good if one understands anything whatsoever about ontological priority. (It is usually here important not to be a certain kind of analytic philosopher.) But equally clearly it is tragically riddled with inexplicable natural and cultural evil.

Quite simply then, the doctrines of Creation and Fall tell it as it obviously is. That this obviousness became historically hidden is itself a ruse of fallenness. Thus revelation – everywhere, but supremely with the arrival of God himself as human – was needed in order to disinter the most evident, to unhide the obvious once again. But now for us today to miss this evidence is a further mystery and a further human disaster.

Naturally though, Stephen can still object: if evil is ‘impossible’ in a created universe, then does not the fact that it has nonetheless arisen to despoil existence suggest that we are after all subject to a kind of ‘transcendental illusion’ – that being as good is somehow secretly hollowed out by nullity: an appealing apple that is rotten to the core? Here the religious view is forced to switch from the register of ontology to that of narrative: in particular, the ‘apocalyptic’ perspective as exemplified in the books of Daniel, Enoch (outside the Bible) and the Apocalypse of John (or ‘Revelation’ which brings the Christian Bible to a close). Apocalypse discloses eternal reality to be also (as the German 19th-century romantic idealist philosopher Schelling saw) an eternal ‘Victory’ closing up and closing off history in a struggle that is at once temporal and eternal. 

If God is good and omnipotent, then indeed we have to have faith that evil will be eschatologically overcome and all creatures be restored and redeemed. It is this apocatastasis which the New Testament and many of the Greek Church Fathers teach – the eternity rather than the penultimate character of hell being a disastrous later misreading, itself arguably responsible for the aberrant view that both punishment and then evil itself can have any positive and so seriously ontological aspect.

But is this faith simply irrational? No, because in the face of the baffling and intolerable mystery of evil, we can only proffer hope – hope which is always hope beyond hope, flying in the face of any possible evidence to believe that if good is indeed good, which is to say a reality lurking in all real things as such, then evil must be unnecessary, overcomable and both eternally and eventually, if for now invisibly, indeed overcome.

This hope is naturally linked to our experience that, by enduring evil and forgiving it and seeking to find again the elusive harmony between people, the damage inflicted by evil can be repaired."

The *myth* of secular rationality and science

It is assumed that it is possible to hold an autonomous, unbiased, neutral, objective point of view which is free from the influence of a particular tradition or particular faith stance. 

In relation to the basic assumption of modernity that it is unbiased, neutral, objective reason which determines rationality and knowledge, postmodern theorists argue that such an assumption is simply not sustainable. The reason is that there is no such a thing as pure reason. As Mark McConnell says,

It is a myth. There is no such thing as an unbiased, neutral, objective standpoint.

But more significantly, for our purposes, there is nothing wrong with this. Postmodern thinkers therefore call into question the ideal of pure reason and rationality and thus call into question the project and doctrine of secularism.

The critique of postmodernism says to the post-Enlightenment modernists, “What you are calling ‘rational’ is not ‘just reason.’ It is based on a set of prior commitments. It is based on a belief system.” 

So, according to thinkers like James KA Smith, the basic critique of postmodernism has the effect of levelling the playing field. This in turn means that religious belief cannot be discounted as irrational, Smith writes :

On this basis it means that Christians (and other people of faith) can say to the fundamentalist secularist, “If you get to bring in your fundamental beliefs and commitments and pretend that they are rational and objective, then why can’t I?”

In fact, Christianity, and Judism, is one of the few world vies that escapes the postmodern suspicion of metanarratives. 

For Lyotard a “metanarrative” has a specific meaning. The key thing about metanarratives is the nature of the claim that they make. They are stories that not only tell a grand story; they also claim to be able to legitimate or prove the story’s claim by an appeal to universal criteria. The key issue is one of legitimation. In relation to modernity and its metanarrative there is, for example, an appeal to science or scientific method for legitimation.

In other words, there is an appeal to the universal criteria of a shared autonomous reason.

But as Smith says, the biblical narrative and the Christian faith claim to be legitimated not by anpeal to a universal, autonomous reason.

 Indeed, David Bentley Hart remarks, 

"Postmodern theory simply confirms theology in its original condition: that of a story, thoroughly dependent upon a sequence of historical events to which the only access is the report and practice of believers, a story whose truthfulness may be urged - even enacted - but never proved simply by the processes of scrupulous dialectic. 

What Christian thought offers the world is not a set of "rational" arguments, it stands before the world principally with the story it tells , Christian thought has no stake in the "pure" rationality to which dialectic seems to appeal - the Christian ratio, its Logos, is a crucified Jew - and cannot choose but be "rhetorical" in form.”

Peter Leithhart, quoting Lyotard HERE says,

“The appeal to reason as the criterion for what constitutes knowledge is but one more language game among many, shaped by founding beliefs or commitments that determine what constitutes knowledge within the game; reason is grounded in myth.

On the one hand, science claims to have expelled fables and stories from the world, and replaced them with reason and scientific method. Yet, in the end, science justifies itself with fables and myths, as Lyotard says, there is an “inevitable” move that amounts to a “return of the narrative in the non-narrative.”

States spend “large amounts of money to enable science to pas itself off as epic.” On the other hand, Lyotard criticizes the modern assumption that an appeal to science or to universal reason is an appeal to a standard of judgment that is beyond all particular language games (hence the meta of metanarrative and meta-discourse). 

The plurality of language games is simply a fact of late modern or postmodern life; science is one language game among others, and reason is always (in MacIntyre’s terminology) tradition-bound.

Putting these two points together, “the language game of science desires its statements to be true but does not have the resources to legitimate their truth on its own.”

As Stanley Fish puts it HERE,

"If there is no thought without constraints (chains) and if the constraints cannot be the object of thought because they mark out the space in which thought will go on, what is noticed and perspicuous will always be a function of what cannot be noticed because it cannot be seen. The theological formulation of this insight is well known: Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen (Hebrews 11). Once the act of simply reporting or simply observing is exposed as a fiction — as something that just can’t be done — the facile opposition between faith-thinking and thinking grounded in independent evidence cannot be maintained.

Pking gets it right. “To torpedo faith is to destroy the roots of . . . any system of knowledge . . . I challenge anyone to construct an argument proving reason’s legitimacy without presupposing it . . . Faith is the base, completely unavoidable. Get used to it. It’s the human condition.” (All of us, not just believers, see through a glass darkly.)

Religious thought may be vulnerable on any number of fronts, but it is not vulnerable to the 
criticism that in contrast to scientific or empirical thought, it rests on mere faith."

Science, of course, is value laden as well, and it relies on an arbitrary marshaling of metaphors to contextualize it's free floating data into a meaningful narrative that makes sense to humans - natural "laws," DNA is *like a blueprint, X is *like a light particle and a wave etc etc

This is known as the difference between the manifest image and the scientific, as Sellers has so richly written about.

And Hart asks,

“Why presume that the scientific image is true while the manifest image is an illusion when, after all, the scientific image is a supposition of reason dependent upon decisions regarding methods of inquiry, whereas the manifest image — the world as it exists in the conscious mind — presents itself directly to us as an indubitable, inescapable, and eminently coherent reality in every single moment of our lives? How could one possibly determine here what should qualify as reality as such?

Perhaps the scientific and manifest images are both accurate. Then again, perhaps only the manifest image is. Perhaps the mind inhabits a real Platonic order of being, where ideal forms express themselves in phenomenal reflections, while the scientific image — a mechanistic regime devoid of purpose and composed of purely particulate causes, stirred only by blind, random impulses — is a fantasy, a pale abstraction decocted from the material residues of an immeasurably richer reality.”

As Orgen said, “Truth never appears to us completely free from figures”

I end with this fine quote by Dom Gregory Dix :

‘It is not myth or allegory which is at the heart of the mystery of the Christian Faith but something rooted in a solid temporal event, wrought out grimly and murderously in one Man’s flesh and blood on a few particular square yards of hillock outside a gate, epi Pontiou Pilatou’