I'm reading Heartaches by the Number, one of the best books out there about country music. In it, David Cantwell and Bill Friskics-Warren list what are in their opinion the best 500 country & western recordings ever and show how, taken all together, they provide us with a web of understanding about what country music really is.On the back cover, a blurb contributed by one of the brightest stars in the C&W firmament, Loretta Lynn, reads: "If it weren't for heartaches, there'd probably not be country music!"
Reading that and what Cantwell and Friskics-Warren say inside the book about their Top 500 country records of all time set me to thinking that there must not be any country music in heaven. Why not? There can't possibly be heartaches in heaven, now can there?
It all goes to show the difference between this world and the next. And it all leads one to ask, why so much pain and heartache here?
I think there is an answer in the worldview I espouse, but it is not necessarily an answer that will please everyone ... or anyone, for that matter.
My worldview is basically a Judeo-Christian one, yet as a Christian (of the Catholic faith) I am not one to reject scientific ideas about evolution and the origin of our species. In fact, my view of the theory of evolution leans heavily on ideas contributed to it recently by the sciences of complexity.
Among these ideas is the realization that evolution takes place, mathematically speaking, at the "edge of chaos." There are mathematical regimes of order (actually, two of these, one that is static and the other that cycles endlessly), of chaos properly speaking, and of the boundary between order and chaos that has been dubbed the edge of chaos.
Chaos, recent science has shown, pervades the natural order. The weather, beyond a few days of limited forward predictability, is basically a chaotic system. Lots of stuff that goes on in the world is as unpredictable as the weather because it is so exquisitely sensitive to initial conditions and tiny perturbations as to be in thrall to a chaotic "strange attractor." These are the systems that the term "butterfly effect" applies to: it is said that a butterfly beating its wings in Brazil can wind up causing a tornado in Texas, under just the right conditions.
Of course, a tornado tearing through Texas or a hurricane wrecking New Orleans qualify as a big part of the pain we suffer, when something like it happens to us here on earth. Chaotic systems can be pain-causing to us, because they just don't care about us.
But God, we hear, does care about us. God is all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-loving, so how can it be true that there is so much pain and heartache in this world he made?
This is what philosophers call the "problem of pain," also known as the "problem of evil." How can the God we read of in the Bible allow so much pain — or evil, if you want to call it by its right name — to transpire in this world?
Another way to put it is to ask why God doesn't vanquish and banish Satan right away, instead of waiting until the end of history. It is Satan, by any of his several biblical names, that religious folk blame for the evil in the world. We know that God and Satan are at war. We know who wins the war: God. We, as Christians, know that God's victory is vouchsafed by Christ's death on the cross and resurrection. So why is there still so much pain and evil in the world? Why hasn't Jesus come again to end the tribulation once and for all?
The answer I would suggest is that evolution, which has produced our species under God's aegis, takes place at the edge of chaos, and you can't have such a boundary zone between order and chaos if chaos (the realm of Satan) has already been quenched by order (God's victory over Satan).
