Now if one’s understanding of God is not based on rational considerations, then theodicy may be the least of one’s worries, but it’s still a problem. One is supposed to simply put one’s trust in the God who drowns innocent chidren in Hurricane Katrina, or allows them to be burned alive at Auschwitz? What has this God done to earn our trust? Trust in wiser souls is important in nearly every tradition – but that trust must be merited, and must be merited far more so if the trust is to be blind and irrational.

If there was a ‘God for Dummies’ book it would have a chapter entitled – Dealing with Evil or When Bad Things Happen. Having a plan for that or an understanding that includes the torment of the innocent does not naturally issue, I think, from a rational understanding of the deity.

Theodicy is based on a naturalistic understanding of a deity that is subject to rational logical considerations. But that god is not the God of religion. The God of religion is mediated by an incarnation and our understanding is modified by that manifestation of the divine. Only Islam and Judaism have no strict theological sense of the human/divine though one could claim that there is a strong heterodox element in Islam amongst Sufi saints that have claimed divinisation. The faith that is preached through the sermon on the mount or the Bhagavad Gita is one in which cosmic justice prevails. The devotee trusts the word of the master on this.

The question remains whether a rational theodicy is possible. Taking theodicy as a rational exercise it is clear that the first step must be to demonstrate the existence of God. Having done so you can progress to examine the concept of god for its coherence. Is it not redundant to claim that there can be no God (or that there is probably no God and you are moreover on the wrong bus) because theodicy reveals difficulty in the concept of god. So what is logically impossible or inconceivable then determines what is or is not. Ought not the actuality of what is or is not be an empirical and not a logical question.

A sense of meaning is something that helps a lot in dealing with the world’s pain, I think. Two related problems: one, it is no good for those who cannot find meaning. The infant drowned horribly in a tsunami or thrown into a concentration camp’s incinerator is not developed enough to grasp the idea of meaning and purpose, but suffers all the same.

Two, a sense of meaning deals with pain at the level of the individual who has the meaning, not a larger cosmic level. In other words, while it may be able to deal with theodicy in a more generalized philosophical sense, it still doesn’t explain God’s actions – it doesn’t allow an omnipotent omnibenevolent God as the source of that meaning. (It could certainly allow some other sort of God, a small-g god like Ganesh who is not omnipotent, or a god so universal he contains all evil as well as all good within him.)

‘What about Lisbon’, ‘What about tsunamis? You may as well say, ‘What about the laws of physics?’ You look at the beautiful sunlit photograph of an Edwardian tennis party and know that all the players have one thing in common. They are all dead. There is no sense of an evil fate even though some if not all of their deaths were painful.

Consciousness involving introspection is a late blooming thing in the history of the cosmos. What’s the point of that and how did it come about? Theodicy is analogically speaking the virus that is surrounded and defeated by a larger sense of meaning and purpose. It is not an independent question that must be answered right off before we can proceed to forge meaning out of the ‘wreckage’.

It’s a while since I read Mans’ Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. Must root it out. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man's_Search_for_Meaning