because all important problems are insoluble: that is why they are important. The good comes from the continuing struggle to try and solve them, not from the vain hope of their solution.On Friday, in a comment on the problem of evil, I myself wrote about one important problem:
I meant to contrast my "wide-eyed sobriety" with a person's typical wistfulness when it comes to God (and to most everything else important); that is, we typically believe what we want to believe.Do we tend to believe what we want to believe when it comes to such problems just in order to avoid that "continuing struggle to try and solve them"? The continuing struggle in my case seems to have resulted in my somber disillusionment, to quote my friend Tom Sheepandgoats's comment on the "problem of evil" post.
Tom offers me a way to get around the impasse of this particular one of Schlesinger's insoluble important problems—the problem whether God (if God exists) is both good and evil. He suggests that I assent to the Jehovah's Witnesses' contention that the Bible shows that we humans (and other animals? I asked Tom) were intended to live forever, which I take it the Jehovah's Witnesses interpret as meaning that we, in fact, do live forever—that is, that we will be miraculously resurrected and find that our suffering and death here on earth were illusions and we didn't suffer that much, really, however many times we may have been raped and stabbed or whatever, and that God really was totally good after all.
I am skeptical that Tom and the Jehovah's Witnesses have found by their Biblical interpretation a reliable way to avoid Schlesinger's vain hope. Of course they have found a way to avoid it, but you've probably already guessed that I can't share their solace, for I doubt that their interpretation is reliable.
I can already hear Tom ask, "Well, would you like to remove your doubt by studying the text and our interpretation of it?" In asking that, he would be challenging me to put up or admit that I don't so much doubt the interpretation as assume that it's wishful thinking and inherently unreliable.
Am I putting too much faith in Schlesinger's contention (by implication) that this problem is and must remain insoluble? Is this skeptic's faith any better than the faith of the believer that "whatever the Bible [or the Quran or the Book of Mormon or some other book held to be 'God's word'] says is so must therefore be so"?
