Is “Free Will” the cause of pain and suffering, as we discussed in the last post?
There are several aspects of this question that are worthy of consideration.
Firstly, are we actually “free” to choose? I have a lengthy discussion with an old friend on this question. Perhaps we have no choice at all! My friend claimed that we may feel that we are free to choose, but actually all our choices have been determined by our past.
As an example, consider the fact that I just had lunch with my wife and son at a café, instead of eating dim sum at a Chinese restaurant. I feel that I made this choice freely. Was it? It may actually be determined by my past experience. The dim sum was too salty when I ate it last week. Why was it so salty? It was because the chef put in too much salt carelessly. In the end, my choosing of not eating dim sum today was determined by the carelessness of the chef last week.
Do we have “free will”, or is everything determined already and there is no room for any “free” choices? It is a big topic, and I cannot discuss it in this post to disrupt the flow of my current topic. Friends, if you are interested, please let me know and I will discuss it in another post. For the time being, let us assume that we do have free will. I think that is what most people agree with.
Secondly, a free choice of an individual can bring suffering to other innocent people.
If a person chooses to smoke cigarettes heavily for years and gets cancer in the end, we may agree that such “evil” happens for an acceptable reason. That person makes a bad choice and so suffers from it. However, if an evil choice of one individual brings suffering to others, we may feel unfair and even angry with the Creator. A person out of his free will chose to shoot randomly. A few people died as a result. To these people and their families, their suffering has nothing to do with their own free will. It is the free will of the evil person that caused the suffering. Why did these people happen to be at the shooting range of the evil person?
Thirdly, there is suffering that has nothing to do with free will.
A magnitude 7.8 earthquake in Turkey on February 6th 2023 killed more than 55,000 people. These 55,000 people and their families suffer from natural disasters, not from evil bad choices out of free will from them or any other people. Why did these people suffer?
Just to make our discussion easier, we call the pain and suffering that comes from natural disasters as “natural evil”, and those that come from bad human choices as “moral evil”.
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