'As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport,'
— Gloucester in Shakespeare's King Lear
The religious problem of explaining pain is often reduced by blurring it in with quite different kinds of suffering. We don't expect perfection in ourselves or our decisions. Errors occur and what we learn from small mistakes may save us from disasters; and disappointments are inevitable in a world of limitations, and we find how to recover. In these cases experience has clear utility, and even the grief of self-conscious mortal beings, social in a sometimes dangerous world, at least reminds us of what is valuable. Unhappiness is multiple, rather as is love.
Unrealistically seeking to avoid all pain and distress, envying the apparent 'having everything' of celebrities, brings its own consequences. Failures may be blamed on others with consequent revenge, rather as faiths blame sinners. In a world of polarised privilege both suffering and remedy are of course unequally distributed. Amidst unfamiliar and remote threats (so unlike the here and now existence of ancestral adaptation), we assess risk poorly. We fall into the biases and errors familiar in cognitive therapy and procrastinate, exaggerate or deny. Nowadays many are also preoccupied with and deluded by social media and screen time that is often violent. We can become more tolerant of pain (compare the reactions of those in occupations of injurious physical challenge and of someone with minimal pain experience). Avoidance of all displeasure by drugs damages personal health and coping and, ill managed by society, supports a hugely destructive criminal industry.
The major faiths originated in times with little possibility of evading pain. Excusing God for forgetfulness after a life-time of illness will of course not do, nor can it be a mistake in design. The singular gods of creation (setting apart paganism, ancestor worship and such-like which have other roots) know what they are about and have unlimited power, so there must be a divine purpose.
Many religious explanations given may be loosely bundled together as 'purifying the soul', and that prompts the antecedent need to account for souls both divinely created and impure. A familiar escape is that the gift of free will must allow the option to evil (itself a concept puzzling for utter goodness to conceive?). The 'must' is surely dubious and being not nasty is entirely viable for individuals and communities. Finally we are judged (Islam's life 'in order to test which of you is best in deeds'). All this improving and testing business smacks of an intrusive and stern up-bringing by God the Father: consequent psychoanalytic hypotheses also contain concepts of displacement and projection to relieve anger and a sense of personal hurt.
The pride of God is unique, and evil springs from disobedience. Whatever God wishes is the Truth (a contemporary psychological note would find an exemplar in Trump, so adored by evangelicals). In Genesis, Eve endows us with perpetual sin by the disobedience of trying the fruit of the finest tree and, if the serpent (suggestively seductive) is to be believed, 'to be as gods, knowing good and evil'. This was stunningly persuasive (Eve lacked tutoring and our experience of scams) and God's retribution has the widest of consequences as Eve and Adam are doomed to sorrow and the very ground is also cursed. Desire is attributed to Eve, who is therefore to be ruled over by her husband, and will sorrow in conception. The sin problem later requires solution by a virgin birth of Jesus preceded, in Roman doctrine, by Mary's immaculate conception. The religious preoccupation with sex would self-righteously outnumber the opposition, but its psychology is even more shamed by abuse (yet we privatise schools to faiths).
There could be no clearer charter for the misogyny that still blames women as the source of desire, maintains them in ignorance, and compels their subservience (Genesis enabling covenants for a patriarchal society, then the redeeming grace of Augustine's theology). Much of our present world and its faiths are infused with this wrong that also denies the benefit of women's participation and justifies male excess of sexuality (Islam provides the faithful with houris) and procreation. Many women are enlisted in their own limitation (from social rigidity as Queen Victoria on emancipation to 'deserved' domestic violence and 'gaslighting') and some succeed by endorsing 'manliness'. Around the world the female body is extravagantly displayed or wholly concealed. Our own society is reactively obsessed by issues of gender identity (any possible 'trans' biological effect from hormone pollution of drinking water?) and 'correctness', and the punishment of women who transgress by acting as if equal ranges from sexist trolling to the pain and humiliation of rape.
We should celebrate every woman who has managed to achieve sensible progress, now restrains the global population by contraception (menstruation the painful Curse, religiously unclean) or finds enlightening fame – as perhaps Malala seeking education, Greta about averting climate chaos, Kamala representing the denigrated.
Unsurprisingly, if gods sometimes represent our ideals they also enshrine and endorse our worst features of self-centredness and the cruel rage of frustration. Even our gene-driven normal sexual behaviours that sometimes extend to incorporate pain, and the evolutionary contrivances of reproductive anatomy, are surely very strange: hardly what might be best or most pleasingly designed.
'Everything is for the best.'
— Pangloss in Voltaire's Candide
The common argument of faiths is that pain is no divine oversight but necessary and valuable. By experiencing pain we appreciate freedom from it, and an imaginary ideal existence without contrast would be meaningless. How persuasive, in a world of pain, is the promise to the obedient of heaven where all is well eternally, and even greater in effect the vivid threat of unending torment.
Furthermore, pain is said to be actively purifying. It originates in the sinning imperfect body of this world as distinct from the faithful adoring soul of the next: self-punishment is a good thing, cruel martyrdom to be sought. A further idea is that enduring pain now may suffice as just expiation. Confession to authority, perhaps of psychological value, or the purchase of indulgence may sustain religious power, but in worldly life practical atonement for injury inflicted seems a more just settlement (compare both 'an eye for an eye' and unreforming prisons).
Spiritual detachment from this temporal life is urged as in Buddhism and reduces suffering, while in Hinduism future lives may be bettered by present well-doing and virtue. Christian Science and Scientology (multiple lives) are modern developments that advocate spiritual treatment for disorders. There are useful borrowings (mindfulness etc.) from religious tradition for pain tolerance and reduction. Various religious practices of distancing meditation and distractive devotion (repeated words and actions) create altered states of mind that alleviate pain with some effectiveness and are explained by theology; and the former is rather too easily taken to validate the latter. The Stoics (as Pangloss) also advocated bearing up calmly, passion a misjudgement.
If remedial ritual, conducted with gravity, mystery and perhaps splendour, is identified as a placebo it is nonetheless to be noted as effective. It must be added that deterrence and pain by torture are also increased in effect by a heightened setting that builds fear (from public Inquisitional burnings to contemporary interrogation techniques).
Our medical attempts against pain are varied: analgesics act either at point of origin or centrally, nerve conduction is interrupted, though side-effects include addiction and pain phobia. Physical distraction includes self-inflicted pain, stimulation by tactile devices, and simple relaxation. There are also some direct psychological means – hypnotic suggestion and guided visualisation, activity and conduct opposing the behaviours of pain. Distraction is obviously helpful as an endless focus on pain simply makes its salience more dominating.
In passing it seems worth noting two interesting disorders that readily self-perpetuate. The wide prevalence of back pain (poorly treated, high economic cost) is due to both the imperfect evolutionary contrivance of hominid uprightness and our much changed balance of activity. Many are now lured to self-inflict obesity (compare images of divinities) that escapes any warning by pain, perhaps because it could scarcely arise in natural circumstances, but leads to numerous health problems. Globally, 40% are overweight amidst concerns for feeding our vast population.
'The wisest and soundest people avoid speculation.'
— Burke
Pain limited in intensity and duration has an obvious natural value: it alerts us that something is wrong and needs care, and may deter us from activity that would increase injury: some causes we can learn to avoid in future. But what of severe, interminable pain? We know very well how it multiplies distress, the making of mistakes, being unable to pursue desirable courses of action, and falling into general misery. Many stimuli fade from perception when prolonged (household hums become unnoticed etc.) so a limit on sensation is quite plausible. How is it that natural selection admits such severity? This seems a serious question, as challenging as other remaining puzzles for evolution.
Continuing with some attempts at novelty, consider the pain experience of animals. If pain is gifted by God for the improvement of our human souls, why might animals experience severe pain? As for the early investigators who performed vivisection (there were of course no anaesthetics), did they calculate the knowledge gained worth the suffering inflicted (consoled that carnivores devour mercilessly), or did they assume absence of pain in beasts?
There seems no objective evidence that those suffering severe pain have contributed in an exceptional way to human well-being (excluding religious assertions of exemplary personal refinement), certainly not that it somehow promotes their fertility, the replication of genes. Our lengthening lives extend beyond our fertile period and then escape the main force of selection: ageing, we decline. There may be some selection pressure to justify survival in age by the continuance of support given to fertile kin through less demanding work.
Can we find an evolutionary explanation for severe pain? There exists kinship theory which explains why we are helpful to other individuals sharing our genetic constitution, why at the simplest parents sacrifice for children. Contrarily, what if an individual is handicapped and becomes a burden? (Archaeology and anthropology illuminate.) Can we replace the parameters of positive helpfulness in kinship theory with negative effects? An advantage of severe pain might then be that by advancing death it reduces the burden on genetic kin?
We now intervene to spare animal suffering, we kill terminally ill pets with every sense of unhappy kindness. Yet in the case of human beings this is very widely prohibited. It is well argued that once we start killing humans, it becomes impossible to draw a line of acceptability. There may be some discontinuous criteria (as brain death is widely used) but pain and much else are on a spectrum. And admitting the possibility of killing might risk many attributed defects becoming justifications.
For unbearable pain and distress the alternative is suicide, that if one wishes to pop off then one must rightly take the moral responsibility upon oneself. Should we all know a means (subject to suitable hurdles, noting that attempts are often unjustified and failures not repeated) that is not too unbearable nor too horrid for others? All rules are fraught with difficulty (our criminal law, for example, makes do with 'beyond reasonable doubt', hardly a reliable triumph), and social safety inclines to reject all provision, either because life is God-given or 'hard cases make bad laws'.
Genes do not in general actively obstruct what is irrelevant to fertility, and our intelligent brain can extend beyond the genetic biology that can never plan ahead. But foresight is never certain and science, for example, declines blame for consequent harms both deliberate, such as weaponry, and unforeseen, from combustion turned greenhouse to uncompensated survival turned unsustainable. Such pitfalls surely invite the response of faith that 'they were happy in the Garden', rather as fundamentalist religions often seek to maintain uncritically the circumstances and customs of their origin.
It is perhaps unsurprising, given the florid cruelty of ancient texts, that the gods are unhelpful in our sufferings (compare 2020 with the desperate religiosity of historic plagues), and nowadays 'miracle' is a word of casual use and divinity seems most proclaimed when misfortune afflicts the disobedient and the disbelievers. If we do not understand our pain, we may be reminded of our utter limitation compared to God with consequent uncritical acceptance of 'not knowing' (pleasurably confined by Burke to aesthetics), the mystical retreat of apophatic theology, or (highly commended) faith unqualified. Reassurance, if accepted as authoritative, may be enough.
Preferring reason, the background argument here is that helping does develop as reciprocal benefit and thence as a good principle of society. We have natural empathy, which can include some actual feeling of another's pain, and conscious ethics: those who suffer are to be helped. Pain, so problematic, can be considered without religious explanation, though faith practices offer some clues to its mitigation. At best, through intellectual and social development, we enable self-fulfilment and achieve altruism even at sometimes painful cost.
Dr Edwin Alan Salter, based in King's Lynn, has had unduly assorted work including philosophy, with humanism as an enduring concern.