The Book of Mormon, the new Broadway musical by the South park creators, gets a lot of cheap laughs from the audience by depicting naive earnest young white kids who believe in (to non-Mormons) apparently absurd stories. But the spine of the show is the question of theodicy. If God is omnipotent and benevolent, why are the innocent Ugandans encountered by the 19-year-old missionaries suffering so badly? And what is the best thing that a moral person can do to alleviate that suffering? The answers aren’t necessarily profound and the evening might be better spent reading Leibniz, but it makes for a very entertaining, if somewhat forgettable, two hours in the theater.
2 thoughts on “Book of Mormon: South Park takes on theodicy”
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Or better yet, the evening could be spent reading The Book of Mormon!
I haven’t seen the musical, but The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons) theology brings several interesting things to the question of theodicy.
First it recognizes God’s omnipotence is limited, both by natural laws and his respecting our agency (freedom to choose actions, not consequences). For instance, on the natural law side, when God creates things, he does not do it ex-nihilo (see first law of thermodynamics) but through the process of organizing existing matter (or energy). Also, God will not force us to be good, he respects our freedom of choice, which is not to say there are no consequences for wrong choices or that he won’t help us to be good.
Second, many people suffer on earth, but when you understand The Plan of Salvation (described in The Book of Mormon) it is put into perspective, both that we all knew what we were getting into when coming to earth and that earth life (and the suffering here) is only a very small part of our existence, and that it helps us progress in two fundamental ways.
We all existed before birth as spirits and lived with our Heavenly Father before coming to earth, in fact before earth even existed. We were different from him in several ways, two being that he had an exalted body and he was more righteous than us. He presented a plan to us where by we could become more like him, and it consisted of us leaving his presence for a while by being born into mortality here on earth where we’d receive a body and be tried and tested and (hopefully) learn to choose the right. All of us would sometimes choose the wrong and eventually die, losing our bodies, so a central part of our Heavenly Father’s plan was Jesus Christ and his mission to live a perfect life and save us from sin and from death through his Atonement and his Resurrection. Anyway, after resurrection, where we receive a glorified immortal body, we continue to live and progress. Originally when this plan was presented we knew that there would be opposition and pain here on earth, both by nature (earthquakes, floods, famine, etc) and by the choices of other men (rape, etc). Despite these chances for suffering, we believed out Heavenly Father that benefits we would receive from mortal life were much greater, and chose to come to earth. 1/3 of the spirits followed Lucifer and rebelled against God, Jesus Christ, and his plan and were expelled from his presence, yielding devils and all that jazz. Anyway, some friends are waiting on me to go out to dinner so there’s tons more check http://mormon.org
(The problem of evil, including natural evil, is the main reason I am an atheist – Richard Dawkins’ books are secondary.)
However, Alvin Plantinga offered an interesting, from a formal point of view, free will defense, which appears to address the logical problem of evil.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plantinga%27s_free_will_defense