God Log of suffering

 

It's hard for someone who believes in a Western type of god, active in history and filled with love, actually exists, for sure. There are other gods people have thought up. A King Log kind of god would allow suffering, not being motivated to do anything about it. Or maybe suffering is just necessary for there to be good. Without it we would take all the good that happens for granted and not give god proper thanks when he give us a little relief now and then. That one really is a bit much when you think about it, and it is good Voltaire took Leibniz to task for it. The deist would tell us God made the world so perfect he doesn't need to do anything more and just go away, hence he "rested" when creation was done and had been resting ever since.

You’re circling around what philosophers have wrestled with for centuries—the tension between a loving, active God and a world that very obviously contains suffering. That tension doesn’t go away just by refining definitions; it presses on the whole structure.

When you mention a “King Log” sort of god, you’re close to what many people intuitively drift toward when they try to preserve God’s existence without attributing moral responsibility—something like a passive or indifferent creator. It avoids the problem of evil, but at a cost: such a god becomes religiously thin. There’s not much reason to worship or trust a being that simply lets the world run.

Your discomfort with the “suffering makes good meaningful” idea is well placed. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz tried to argue this is “the best of all possible worlds,” but as Voltaire famously skewered in Candide, that can sound grotesque when faced with real suffering. It risks turning pain into a kind of accounting device—useful for contrast—which feels morally off.

The deist position you describe—God as a kind of perfect clockmaker who steps back—is in some ways intellectually cleaner. It removes the expectation of intervention, so suffering isn’t a failure of divine love so much as a feature of a lawful system. But again, the cost is existential: it gives you a universe that may be intelligible, but not one that responds, cares, or redeems. It explains order better than it explains meaning.

What’s interesting is that each of these views seems to preserve one attribute by weakening another:

• Preserve goodness → struggle with power or presence

• Preserve power → struggle with goodness

• Preserve both → struggle with the observable world

The classical Western (especially Christian) response tries to hold all three—goodness, power, and involvement—by shifting the explanation to human freedom, moral growth, or a larger story not fully visible. But that move always risks sounding like a deferral rather than an answer.

Given your own sympathy for Buddhist ideas, you might notice how differently the problem is framed there. Instead of asking “Why does a good God allow suffering?”, it asks something closer to “Given that suffering exists, what are its causes, and how can it be reduced?” That sidesteps the need to justify a creator at all. It’s less satisfying if you want a cosmic moral author, but more practical if your concern is what to do next.

If I may push you a bit: do you find yourself rejecting the Western-style God mainly on logical grounds (the problem doesn’t cohere), or on moral grounds (the picture of God that results isn’t acceptable)? Those are slightly different objections, and they tend to lead people in different directions.

I don't believe because there is no convincing reason to believe, no credible evidence, just claims. The suffering problem is the cherry on top.

That’s a clean position, and it has a long pedigree. What you’re really doing is setting an evidentiary bar: claims about reality—especially big, consequential ones—should be backed by something more than assertion or tradition. On that standard, many classical arguments for God don’t compel.

Even the more sophisticated ones—like Thomas Aquinas’s “first cause” or William Paley’s design argument—tend to get you, at best, to some sort of originating principle or ordering intelligence. They don’t get you all the way to a loving, intervening, morally engaged deity of the Western type. There’s a gap between “something explains the universe” and “that something cares about us.”

And as you say, the problem of suffering doesn’t just add a minor complication—it sharpens the question. If the evidence for a benevolent, active God is already thin, then a world with pervasive, often indiscriminate suffering pushes the balance further away from belief. It’s not merely an emotional objection; it’s evidential in its own way: the world looks less like what you’d expect under that hypothesis.

People who do believe often aren’t actually persuaded by arguments in the strict sense. It’s more a mix of upbringing, personal experience they interpret as meaningful, or a sense that belief answers existential needs—belonging, purpose, moral structure. From the outside, though, those don’t function as public evidence; they don’t transfer well from one mind to another.

Your stance, then, isn’t so much “anti-religious” as it is empiricist: no sufficient evidence, no assent. That’s basically the line taken by David Hume, who was skeptical not because he could disprove God, but because the case never rose to the level of convincing demonstration.

If anything, the interesting question becomes not “why don’t you believe?” but “what would count as enough?” Not in a vague sense, but concretely—what kind of evidence would actually move the needle for you? Most people have never really specified that, and without it, the discussion can drift into trading intuitions rather than testing claims.