On Pain
I’ve been doing a little reading on the problem of evil the past few days. Why is there so much pain and suffering in the world? This is obviously a difficult and complex question and I will not attempt to provide an answer in this brief post. However, a common practice of mine might shed some light on the subject.
As many of you know, I am a practicing emergency physician in one of the busiest emergency departments in the country. A common presenting complaint is that of abdominal pain. Fairly frequently, the cause of abdominal pain cannot be discovered. One can guess as to the problem but often cannot know with certainty what the etiology of the pain is (Perhaps greater than 50% of the time this is the case). One of the goals of an emergency physician is to relieve pain. It is pain that brings most people to see me. I would have a lot less business if it weren’t for pain! (This is not my defense of the existence of pain, by the way… that it provides me an income.) If I am able to discharge a patient home, in most cases I try to provide some medication for pain relief. There is, however, one prominent exception. I almost never send a patient home with pain medication if they are having abdominal pain of unknown etiology.
Why? Because there are a lot of bad things that can cause abdominal pain. I do not want to send someone home with a strong narcotic pain medication and have them ignore a worsening condition because I have blunted their ability to feel pain. Pain serves a purpose. If the patient’s pain is increasing, I want them to return to the emergency department for re-evaluation to makes sure they are not developing an emergent surgical cause of pain (e.g., appendicitis).
The point is this: Pain serves an essential purpose. It tells us that something is wrong and that we should seek help in order to obtain relief from the pain. The problem is not the pain. The pain is simply a symptom letting the person know that something is amiss, perhaps fatally so. Perhaps, the pain and suffering we all experience in this world serve a similar purpose in man’s relationship to God. Peter Van Inwagen, in a proposed theodicy, stated:
As essential and important component of God’s plan of Atonement… is to make us dissatisfied with our state of separation from Him; and not by miraculously altering our values or by subjecting us to illusion or by causing us suffering that has no natural connection with our separation, but simply by allowing us to “live with” the natural consequences of this separation, and by making it as difficult as possible for us to delude ourselves about the kind of world we live in: a hideous world, much of whose hideousness is quite plainly traceable to the inability of human beings to govern themselves or to order their own lives.
The perception by human beings of their incapacity to “live to themselves” is essential to God’s plan of Atonement because, first, without this perception few if any human beings would consider turning to God. (If, therefore, God were miraculously to “cancel” the natural consequences of separation from Himself, He would not only be a deceiver but would remove the only motivation fallen human beings have for returning to Him.)
As I want to “motivate” my patients to return to me if their condition is dangerous by not relieving all their pain, so does the pain which exists in our world serve to indicate to every man that something is indeed dangerously wrong and that we should seek the definitive cure - God’s plan of Atonement!