HUSAM AHMED
For our shortsightedness, we human beings tend to appreciate immediate gifts more readily than meaningful and long-lasting favours. A phone over a book, Netflix subscription over a library card, and so on. The deeper and more transformative a favour is, the more elusive it becomes to human comprehension—especially when its immediate outcome appears as unpleasant, like cultivating discipline or hard work in a person.
Oftentimes, such favours are mistaken for unkindness, or even cruelty, while in truth, man’s very survival depends upon these virtues. Ironically, the ever-baffling question of suffering in the presence of a Merciful God emanates from this same inability to see beyond what is immediately visible.
This perceptual narrowness, believe it or not, is not limited to atheists but is also shared by believers, who often try to explain away the pain of this world alluding to the blessings awaiting man in the Hereafter.
Does God require man to suffer to reward him?
Needless to say, divine justice is fully understood only when viewed in its entirety, taking into account both this corporeal life and the reward phase that follows it.
However, interpreting suffering merely as a contrasting phase that God created to balance the pleasures of Paradise would be a stark devaluation of His wisdom. Such an understanding naturally raises the question as to why God would not allow man to experience blessings without first subjecting him to hardships.
Undoubtedly, even the slightest discomfort experienced in this world will be compensated immeasurably in the Afterlife—so much so that a person would crave pain if they knew the rewards it is worth.
Yet, from a divine standpoint, this view gravely distorts the image of God, portraying Him as a being unable to manifest His grace until He has not—as atheists put it—materialised His ‘sadistically savage and barbarously brutal fantasies’.
Thus, given all the suffering in the world, should we concede that God is either not All-Powerful or not All-Merciful, and if He is both, then not All-Wise?
Are we meat robots? Between consciousness and suffering
We are so innately averse to pain that we fail to understand one fundamental fact: to escape suffering would be to escape life itself.
The question of what defines life has become all the more complex in this age of technology. With artificially intelligent chatbots and robots that can detect, process and respond to inputs, many traits once thought as exclusive to life are now increasingly shared by non-biological entities.
Yet, we never count these systems as living. This is because they are merely designed to mimic the characteristics of life in a mechanical way, while to be living requires a being to be conscious of its existence.
Beyond sensing and responding to stimuli, it is this sense of awareness that truly differentiates us from generative AI models, makes us sentient beings with feelings and emotions, and renders us capable of being compassionate towards others.
AI chatbots, as much as they seem to exhibit these qualities, in fact possess none of them. Interestingly, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman once remarked that saying ‘thank you’ and ‘please’ to ChatGPT was costing the company millions of dollars.[1]
And quite rightly so, in the absence of a conscious mind, these chat models are incapable of comprehending our gratitude and respect—and likewise our happiness and sorrow. They are designed to recognise emotional cues and mirror appropriate responses, while not experiencing those emotions themselves. They cannot be excited by the prospect of future upgrades, nor threatened by the possibility of their elimination. They do not cherish happiness, nor suffer hardships—all owing to the lack of consciousness.
Interestingly, this principle is no less true the other way around. That is, to eliminate suffering requires us to eliminate consciousness altogether. However, without consciousness, any sense of happiness—or more precisely, life itself—would cease to exist.
This begs an important question: What would constitute God’s mercy? To create us as biological robots with no faculty for awareness? Or to create us as sentient beings with the capability to feel love, compassion and happiness—and also their absence, known as suffering?
Emotional ignorance: A way out of pain?
We often see children in bereaved families play cheerfully while their adults grieve over the death of a loved one. This is because the cognitive faculties of children are largely underdeveloped, granting them only a limited understanding of the complex emotions attached to relationships. Moreover, they lack a proper apprehension of the concept of permanence associated with death, hence finding no reason to be sad.
However, we never envy their ignorant ‘happiness’; rather we feel pity for their inability to perceive the affliction that has befallen them. Fortunately, for us human beings, these faculties develop over time and reach a stage of perceptual richness, allowing us to experience a wide array of emotions—love, affection, admiration, respect, compassion, empathy, gratitude, and so on.
But what of those organisms that are neurobiologically destined to remain in a state of emotional oblivion?
The ‘happy’ bee that never knew what happiness is
In simple organisms with rudimentary nervous systems, awareness is not completely absent, as in the earlier case of robots, but exists only in a very minimal form. Studies show that bees, and other insects with similar levels of consciousness, distinguish between negative and positive stimuli—for example, being drawn to rewarding conditions such as food sources, and avoiding threats or harm.[2]
However, there are no markers—studies clarify—that bees subjectively experience these states as emotions.[3] They are not happy at the birth of an offspring, nor sorrowful at the death of a partner. There is no parental sense of “this larva is my child”, but only chemically regulated behaviour with no emotional bonding.
Undoubtedly, none of us—in the faintest presence of sanity—would desire to live in this ‘suffering-less utopia’, but would shun this barren emotional void.
Yet, at every instance of misery, we haste to question suffering, forgetting that it is only the privation of happiness, emerging from man’s well-endowed faculty to feel emotions—just as light and darkness both emerge from our faculty to see.[4]
Despite this, no person in their sane mind would blame vision for perceiving the dark. In the same way, it would go against the principles of wisdom to condemn consciousness for experiencing suffering.
A knife that cuts vegetables but never wounds a finger
But does the mere ability to suffer imply that we must suffer in reality?
At first glance, this objection seems fair. Afterall, our internal capacity for suffering does not mean that external factors of suffering must also exist. Does the fact that we are capable to sense pain necessitate that we must stub our toe on a doorframe?
Indeed, it sounds appealing to enjoy the perks of consciousness while finding no reason to suffer. However, this would entail the elimination of every condition that could give rise to negative experience. That is, there must be no bereavement so that love is never wounded, no failure so that ambition is never challenged, and no death so that the will to live is never threatened.
Such a hypothetical reality—if at all possible—would be chaotic in every respect, disrupting the very mechanisms of our physical universe. It would require gravity to hold us firmly to the ground, yet prevent falls from heights; a knife to cut vegetables, yet never wound a finger; fire to provide warmth, yet never burn our skin.
But a sceptic might still object: regularity in the laws and properties of the universe is an inevitable necessity for life. How does this justify the ‘pointless’ suffering of children born with congenital defects and physical impairments, condemned to lives of endless misery?
A world of identical clones: A better alternative?
Unlike gravity or fire, some requisites of life are so complex that we notice only their undesirable outcomes, while their inherent necessity often escapes our understanding.
At its core, what we perceive as physical anomalies is only an expression of difference—manifesting in diverse forms, ranging from subtle variations to obvious abnormalities.
It is this difference that not only gives rise to unfavourable states but also creates a sense of deprivation when viewed in comparison to others. As such, the suffering of a blind person emanates from the relative disadvantage felt in a world of vision; whereas in a world entirely devoid of sight, blindness would not constitute a lack, but the norm.
In fact, suffering begins with the slightest deviation from an optimal state and extends all the way to its total absence. Along this spectrum, any shift towards reduced capacity is perceived as greater suffering when measured against a more favourable alternative.
For instance, a person with colour blindness may long for perfect vision, while for someone with myopia, colour blindness itself might seem a considerable gain. Likewise, a person with low vision would regard both the above states as significantly advantageous, while for a totally blind person, any capacity to see would be counted as a luxury.
No condition along this continuum can be singled out and deemed objectively acceptable. This means, nullifying suffering would require nullifying the possibility of functional variations altogether. Furthermore, beyond disabilities, differences in other factors such as physical strength, bodily features, or even mental and intellectual capabilities can also give rise to relatively unfavourable conditions, and consequently, distress.
Eliminating suffering in this scenario would mean eradicating the very phenomenon of difference—leaving no diversity, no interdependence, and no meaningful distinction. Living in such a world, populated by identical clones, would be far worse than it already sounds.
A worthy transaction?
The paradox of how suffering can coexist with God’s mercy vanishes when we recognise the nightmarishness of all the possible alternatives to our current reality.
In fact, what we eagerly imagine as a ‘suffering-less paradise’—when examined closely—reveals itself to be a bleak emotional hollow. Sacrificing our most cherished consciousness for such a godforsaken world would be the worst price to pay.
When perception itself involves feeling both an experience and its absence, it would be impossible to separate pleasure from pain, joy from sorrow, or any experience from its contrast. The Holy Quran acknowledges this truth and describes life as a phenomenon that unfolds between two poles—sustenance and death:
“Blessed is He in Whose hand is the kingdom, and He has power over all things; Who has created death and life that He might try you—which of you is best in deeds; and He is the Mighty, the Most Forgiving.”[5]
Happiness, given this, is not the absence of suffering, but the capacity to live, grow, and find meaning in the presence of both extremes.
So the next time you grieve over a loss and feel compelled to blame God, pause—and realise that you are in fact blaming consciousness—your most valued possession, which allows you to experience any sense of happiness, from smiling at a simple joke to feeling the overwhelming warmth of embracing your loved ones. This eye-opening realisation will no longer leave you blind to the boundless abundance of blessings that surround you. Suffering, thereafter, will only appear as the tiny shadows cast by the all-encompassing, luminous light of God’s mercy.
Still, this whole deliberation proves only the inevitability of suffering within the framework of existence. A deeper conundrum remains unanswered: why would man—a conscious being endowed with moral awareness by a Merciful God—choose to inflict suffering upon others?
But that is a question for another discussion.
END NOTES
[1] Are You Saying ‘Thanks’, ‘Please’ to ChatGPT? It’s Costing OpenAI Millions, 20 April 2025, The Economic Times
[2] Do Insects Have Emotions? Some Insights from Bumblebees, David Baracchi et al. (2017), Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience
[3] Ibid
[4] For their inability to sense light, we might think what blind people ‘see’ is pitch black darkness, like something we experience when we are blindfolded. However, darkness is the perception of the absence of light, while blindness is the absence of that perception itself. Blind people (at least those who are born blind) lack this perception. Thus, what they experience is not a dark void without light, but the absence of a visual field altogether. It is something that we encounter when we try to see with the back of our head: no light, no darkness—just nothing.
[5] Holy Quran 67:3
0 Comments