You’ve very likely heard the phrase “if only in a perfect world” several times throughout your life. All the pain and suffering that we either observe or endure makes us wishful of some utopian paradigm. However, the phrase is a strange one. Not strange in the sense that it is wrong for us to wish for better but strange because, when one ponders the phrase, we do, in a sense, live in a perfect world.
What do we mean by perfect here? If you look up perfect in any dictionary, you will likely come across a definition such as the following: being entirely without fault or defect. Well, the world we live in most definitely has its faults and defects. How can I say that we live in a perfect world according to such a definition? In the context of a Godless world, I could not justify my thesis. Since I do not believe in such a context, I can say the following: we live in a perfect world because it is exactly the world God meant to create.
Let me unpack that a bit. Considering many of us believe that God is omnipotent, omnipresent, and in short, all Good, anything He created would not be lacking in any due good. Creation at its beginning then seems to fit with our definition of perfection, insomuch as it is without fault, i.e. not lacking any due good. Once you expand the framework beyond the realm of mortality and this world, you can see the holistic reasoning behind why the world has to be the way it is. From the perspective that nothing could exist, the infinitude of different scenarios in which the world could have existed is overwhelming. But the singular fact that God created us in his image and likeness, and thus gave us free will, is a foundational reason for why the world is the way it is. By the very nature of free will, suffering enters the picture because we choose to live outside the perfect will of God.
St Augustine is perhaps the most influential early Christian thinker on the topic of free will. In his disputes with the Manicheans and Pelagians, Augustine developed a robust understanding of free will in the context of a predestination and a benevolent God. As part of that understanding, Augustine asserted that evil originates in the will, and not in the creation of man by God. The importance of such a claim is to say that evil does not originate from God, because albeit we can choose to reject God and cause suffering, He gave us free will, so as to choose the good, not evil. All of creation is good in its essence then. Free will is the lynchpin whereby the question of an all-loving God and suffering is reconciled.
The “perfect” world we all allude to is similar to living in the matrix. Actually it would be worse, because even in the matrix we have the ability to make our own decisions. If we were “perfect” in that we were entirely without fault or defect, then we would be programmed like computers to choose God. There would be no salvation history, no story, and in a deeper sense, no point. We cannot aspire for perfection without already being imperfect. In the same way light does not make sense without the darkness.
Beyond being an interesting speculative exercise, what are the implications of thinking in such a way? In short, such thinking shifts one’s perspective from wishful thinking to gratitude. From reluctance to acceptance, or denial if we so choose. From a stance where we do not wish for better, but understand that we can act so as to make better. Such a perspective is not to promote an existentialist viewpoint. I am not purporting, as Nietzche would, that our Will is the creating and sustaining force of the universe. What I am affirming is the innate ability of each person in choosing freely to adhere to the natural order of the world, as instituted by God.
“Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself.” - C.S. Lewis