Characters who don't know how the story will end: part 1
Does the existence of "evil" and suffering disprove the existence of God, or authors?
There’s a saying attributed to the ancient Roman philosopher Epicurus that you might have seen floating around social media as with the meme graphic below, thanks perhaps to an atheistic or secular humanist friend who figures that such a quote, accompanied by a stern faux-Greek bust (which should be painted to make it authentic, by the way), marks the final word where the existence of God is concerned.
Because this series of statements claims to disprove the existence of an omnipotent (that is, all-powerful) creator, namely God, then it should also apply to others who create worlds and people to populate them, namely authors of fiction. That is, if the logic here about God is sound, then it should also disprove the existence of fiction authors who are omnipotent where their story worlds and the lives of their characters are concerned.
Yet we know that omnipotent, world-creating fiction authors do exist, and exist in abundance, which means there must be something wrong with the reasoning. And indeed there is—not so much with the reasoning per se but with the false assumption upon which it’s based: that the perceptions of characters within a story about what constitutes “evil” provide sufficient evidence to disprove the existence of the story’s author.
Put that way, the assumption sounds rather ridiculous, doesn’t it? Still, let’s dive into the matter because if characters in a story were to act like people in the real world—especially people that create meme graphics like the one above—then they’d insist that the author’s job is to make life easy for them when the truth is exactly the opposite!
A few preliminary clarifications
For the purposes of this post, I’ll be taking the text of the meme graphic at face value to see where it leads when we apply it to fiction. But for the record, let’s set a few details straight (feel free to skip these if you’re not a stickler for details like I am):
Epicurus, who lived 341-270 BC, did not use the modern proper noun, “God”, which is a much later English construction according to the World History Encyclopedia. Epicurus rather used the Greek equivalent of “gods.”
Epicurus was no atheist; his writings clearly show that he believed in deities.
The statements in the graphic are not actually found in any of the writings of Epicurus that are available to us., although a version of it was reported by the Roman-era Christian author Lactantius. The words here instead come from an analysis of Epicurus’ philosophy by the 18th century philosopher David Hume. And Hume, for his part, was not trying to disprove God but was instead exploring the “problem of evil,” also known as the Epicurian Paradox or Trilemma.
Hume’s summary of Epicurus’ trilemma contains only the first three statements in the graphic (hence the “tri” in “trilemma”). The last two questions, “Is he neither able nor willing?” and “Then why call him God?” have thus been added by someone else in an attempt to extend Hume’s analysis to disprove God.
But, like I said, let’s take it all at face value and go from there.
What makes a story a story?
To set the stage for our exploration, we first need to understand what makes a story a story.
Consider the staple plotline of eleven-year-olds who dream about fairytale romances: “Once upon a time there was the most beautiful princess who lived in the most beautiful castle and had the most beautiful unicorn who went off and married the most beautiful prince and they lived happily ever after in an even more beautiful castle.”1
On the flip side, eleven-year-olds obsessed with chaos and destruction might instead imagine something like this: “Once upon a time a man fell off a bridge then got hit by a car and then was given the wrong drugs at the hospital so they had to chop off his legs and then he went broke and begged on the streets in a wheelchair.”
If neither of these story lines strike you as particularly engaging, you’re right. They’re really just forms of fantasizing because they lack the basic elements that the entire fiction community pretty much agrees upon as necessary for a meaningful story:
A protagonist who wants something. Without a want, there’s nothing to drive the protagonist to action. You can’t make a protagonist out of someone who is unconscious or dead. Nor, on the other end of the spectrum, can you make much of a protagonist out of someone who is perfectly content.2
Agency, the protagonist’s deliberate pursuit of that goal. If the protagonist wants something, even something trivial like a cookie, but does nothing about it, then there’s no story to tell. Similarly, there’s no story if the protagonist is merely a passive character who is acted upon by external forces.
Obstacles or “conflict.” In the pursuit of the goal, the protagonist encounters external obstacles (coming from the world or other people) or internal obstacles (coming from within themselves, often referred to as “flawed beliefs”). The conflict created by these obstacles drive the protagonist to make choices and bear the consequences. Without obstacles, a story is nothing more than “I wanted a cookie and so I got one from the jar.” Big deal. But if there are no cookies in the jar and the protagonist goes to a store but then gets caught up in unexpected situations that they’re forced to navigate, then there’s something to work with.3
Change. In the face of those obstacles, the protagonist either overcomes them (a positive character arc) or is overcome by them (a tragic arc). Even with static arc characters, change still happens in the world around them. For more about these arcs, see the series Mystical character arcs in fiction.
That last item, change, is the essence of a meaningful story, because without change the world and every character within that world are exactly the same as before. What, then, was the point of telling the story at all?
The job of the writer-creator is to inflict suffering
If change is the essence of a meaningful story, then an author must invite, encourage, or even pressure a character to change. And that is accomplished through the painful, even desperate struggle against the obstacles.
In real life, most of us probably wish that our lives were some variant of the beautiful princess story: it happens whenever we dream of money, success, fame, or other “goodness” coming to us with minimal effort and minimal to no conflict. Most of us also try to avoid conflict and struggle, especially after we get to a place of comfort that we’d like to preserve. Consequently, many people (young or old) who decide to “write a story” bring these same sensibilities into their fiction, writing again a stream of successes or, on the opposite extreme, a stream of disasters.
But both miss the point entirely. Editors will ask, “Where’s the conflict? Where’s the change in the protagonist?” That’s because the point of story, if it’s to be more than mere entertainment, is not to relate a series of events or even how or why characters respond as they do. It’s rather to communicate meaning that is applicable to the reader’s own life in the real world.
An author demonstrates that meaning through how characters choose to respond to obstacles, how they respond to the consequences of those choices, and, most importantly, how they change in the course of that choosing. For those choices, as Dumbledore tells Harry Potter at the end of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, “show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.” That’s why both the beautiful princess storyline and the unending disaster storyline, in which characters lack agency and are just pushed along by circumstance, are equally meaningless: there’s literally no point to them.
If an author, then, whom I’ll call an author-creator now and in part 2 of this post, wants to write a good story that communicates meaning, he or she cannot just make life easy for the characters, fulfilling their every desire with the wave of the author-creator’s hand of omnipotence. No, author-creators must invite characters to change by throwing increasingly difficult obstacles between them and their goals.
To put it bluntly: the primary job of the writer-creator is to deliberately inflict what characters perceive as suffering. This doesn’t mean that author-creators are happy about the job—author-creators oftentimes suffer along with their characters even to the point of needing therapy. But it’s a responsibility they accept nonetheless because it is necessary or story.
“Story,” as Daniel Schwabauer puts it in his forthcoming book, The God of Story,
…demands that the protagonist suffers. Why? Because suffering is the only currency by which the value of the story goal can be established.
It’s a simple calculus: the more pain and suffering that the character is willing to endure in pursuit of their goal, the more valuable that goal must be. (That’s why Jesus’ suffering and death via crucifixion is so central to Christian theology.) If a character turns away from the goal at the least sign of resistance, then the story goal is trivial or worthless and there’s no reason to tell the story in the first place.
In a good story, suffering is meaningful and purposeful
Because suffering is how the author-creator demonstrates the value of the story point, then the suffering cannot be random of pointless. That would be sadistic. Instead, the suffering must be purposeful and meaningful because no matter how intense the suffering, the author-creator knows the end of the story toward which he or she is driving the characters.
The author-creator, in other words, knows the happy ending. Even in the case of a tragedy, which ends “badly” for the protagonist, there is yet a happy ending for readers who may be inspired by the story to make different decisions in their own lives. There is even an implied happy ending for the tragic protagonist: we intuitively know that no matter how low someone might fall, there is yet an impetus within the depths of their soul that will, someday, somehow, reawaken an aspiration for something better. We came from God and to God we must ultimately return.4
But here’s the real clincher: do the characters who are immersed in the story know that there’s a happy ending? Usually that’s not the case, because what creates tension and suspense in the story is the uncertainty, the doubt, the not knowing. But even within that doubt, characters must believe that the happy ending is at least possible, for no one bothers chasing what they know is patently impossible.
A clear expression of this faith is found at the end of the movie The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. Frodo, lost in the struggle to destroy the Ring of Power, is on the verge of giving up and says, “I can’t do this, Sam.” But Sam clings to faith.
Sam: I know. It's all wrong. By rights we shouldn't even be here. But we are. It's like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger, they were. And sometimes you didn't want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it's only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn't. They kept going. Because they were holding on to something.
Frodo: What are we holding onto, Sam?
Sam: That there's some good in this world, Mr. Frodo... and it's worth fighting for.
Indeed, throughout The Lord of the Rings, Frodo is the character who is repeatedly tempted to give up the quest. His ally Sam, on the other hand, retains the faith in the happy ending. Only after they succeed in destroying the Ring of Power toward the end of Return of the King and are stranded on a rock surrounded by lava on the slopes of Mount Doom, does Same finally lose hope in ever returning to the Shire. But then Frodo, now released from the oppression of the Ring, is able to console him.
Coming up in part 2
In this post we’ve established that to make any story meaningful, an author-creator is actually obligated in a story to inflict the kind of pain and suffering that characters will most certainly perceive as “evil” and perhaps use to try to prove that the story’s author doesn’t actually exist or isn’t doing the job properly. (Hmmm. Sounds like an interesting scenario for a story!) In truth, however, the existence of suffering demonstrates that the author is doing exactly what’s necessary for the story.
The nature of fiction thus provides a different way to perceive the existence of “evil” in the real world…to allow that maybe, just maybe, there is a happy ending and that perhaps there is more going on than we see or understand.
That’s the thread we’ll pick up in part 2 of this post as we look at the question, “Why does God permit evil?” through this same lens of fiction.
This example comes from a teacher training video for a homeschooling curriculum called Teaching the Classics offered by the Center for Lit. In that video, the instructor, Adam Andrews, tells of a time when he gave an assignment to “write a story” to a class of a dozen 5th-grade girls and got, in return, a dozen versions of this “story,” each rendered in pink glitter gel pen.
This begs the question, “Why did God, being already perfect and complete in himself, bother to create the universe in the first place?” The scriptures of India answer the question by stating that he had the “desireless desire” to enjoy himself through many, which seems about as good an explanation as any!
The 1991 movie Regarding Henry is built around such a simple beginning, wherein the sleazy trial lawyer Henry Turner, played by Harrison Ford, goes out at night because he wants a pack of cigarettes. At the store, he walks in on a robbery and gets shot, resulting in brain damage that requires him to go through a long rehabilitation. In the process, he sees the truth of who he was and how he lived and decides to rebuild his life, none of which would have happened had he been able to acquire his cigarettes without difficulty.
With this statement, it should be clear that I do not subscribe to the doctrine of eternal damnation. How can finite and temporal causes—sin—have infinite and eternal effects? A truly loving God must also be infinitely patient and forgiving, as many humans themselves demonstrate. Yes, a soul must suffer for its evil deeds, but such atonement must also be finite and temporary. And God, as in Jesus’ parable of the prodigal son, is always there to welcome the soul back to its true home.