A Diversity of Joys

Provocation
Last night was quite a catalyst for me, which is why I anticipate several posts to follow this in rapid succession. For those unaware, Purdue hosted a debate between Dr. William Lane Craig, preeminent Christian appologist, and Dr. Alex Rosenberg, a famous athiest reasoner of whom I had never heard.

There were ideas, there were conjectures, it was fantastic.

This post, however, only concerns one of the panoply of fantastic statements made during said debate. During a discussion of the "Problem of Suffering", which, stated, is that a nice, all-powerful God wouldn't allow bad things to happen to people, but bad things happen to people, so either God isn't nice or powerful.

Many Christians (including Dr. Craig himself) respond to this with some variation of, "if there wasn't any evil/suffering/pain, we wouldn't know what joy is."

I Disagree.

and I have numerous, diverse examples. I disagree because of wine, birdwatching, and the smokers of fine cigars. I disagree because of people who like "every kind of music", because of the Detroit Auto Show and the existence of art museums.

All these things have in common an appreciation of subtle and not-so-subtle differences, but they also show that we appreciate good things not because they aren't bad things, but because of properties of the good things themselves. A sommelier appreciates fine wines, not because they aren't the kind of wines you can buy at the Circle K, but because this one has a fruity aroma, this one has a woody finish, and all manner of other differences I am unaware of. (I am not a sommelier).

If someone goes to the Detroit Auto Show and comes back saying that all the cars were "cool", it's obvious they know nothing about cars. If they come back comparing and contrasting the differences between the cars, the ingenious door designs or the extraneous horsepower (I'm not much of a car guy either), they have appreciated it fully. You don't have to know how poorly designed production Dodge interiors are to appreciate how well-designed concept Dodge interiors are.

Commodities
We have a tendency to commoditize joy, the same way we have commoditized food, drink, clothing, vehicles, everything we can get our grubby mass-producing hands on. It's efficient, but I'm sure it's not good. After the debate, a friend of mine described "times in his life when he really lived", or when he had felt joy. Times like marriage, the birth of your child, and the calm before passing on, he said, were experiences of the full joy. Being about to experience marriage myself, and so being embroiled in speculation as to its nature, has made it clear to me that someone who equates the joy felt in these situations has never experienced them.

The nervous excitement to start a new job, the utter adoration/abject terror of being expected to raise this slimy, writhing person-shaped thing into a speaking, walking, respectable adult, the complete calm of knowing that you are at the end of life and that there is nothing left for you to do, good or bad, these are all joys and are all completely different. If we lump them all into the vague category of "joy", as though they were all the same sensation, we might as well lose that sensation alltogether.

The Sin of Boredom
I am forever indebted to Colleen Whitver, who, in the normal everyday course of our middle school writing class stated that "being bored is a sin". She said that the ability to do nothing, not reading, not writing, not even particularly thinking, just being and appreciating without analysis, is crucial to our well-being as people, and that the inability, boredom, is detrimental to the point of transgression.

Yet some people look at Heaven, described as all-consuming joy, and think, "won't I get bored?"

NO!

Joys in our everyday experience are juxtaposed against pains, yes, but that juxtaposition is not necessary for us to appreciate them. The variety which defends against boredom in heaven doesn't come from the blackgreywhite gradations from pain to joy, treating each as a single point on a one-dimensional scale, but from an appreciation of the true colors, each fully saturated, brilliant each in their own way and different from each other as morning from evening.

If we ignore this, we will never know joy.