Take the death of a child in an accident. We can explain how it happened, the physics, the sequence, the medical cause, but there’s no ‘why’ that satisfies reason or compassion. To see purpose in that kind of pain, you’d have to believe in a higher power who planned every scream, every breath, every second of suffering, and called it meaningful.
The ridiculous explanation I’ve often heard, especially from Christians, is that God has nothing to do with the suffering in this world. To that, I usually say: if you know the God of all that’s good, maybe you should go looking for the God of all that’s bad, and introduce the two.
To answer this question, let’s start with something else, not a human tragedy, but the death of an elephant.
Another elephant from the same herd comes across the corpse. It stops. It mourns. It touches the dead body with its trunk. Other elephants gather, doing the same, and for days they linger. One begins to cover the body with foliage, another assists. They eventually leave, but sometimes return to the spot.
Elephants clearly experience grief-- measurable through behavioral and hormonal responses -- and display empathy across individuals and even species. Yet despite their deep emotional intelligence, they do not ask why their companion died.
That’s because the human "why" isn’t merely causal (“A causes B”), but teleological--we want events to have purpose. We can describe the physics or biology of death, but our linguistic minds repackage causation into meaning. Complex language lets us construct abstractions that go far beyond experience--a powerful tool in science, but also the root of our metaphysical confusion. The same mechanism that enables abstraction in mathematics or philosophy also generates misplaced abstractions in moral stereotypes, conspiracy thinking, and theology.
So perhaps the “why” isn’t a metaphysical question at all. It’s a linguistic one--a product of how symbolic brains evolved to compress and generalize the world. Other intelligent species (like elephants, dolphins, or corvids) grieve and learn causality, but without recursive symbolic language, they do not imagine "purpose."
When a child dies, the grief is amplified not only by empathy but by expectation--the narrative that a child should live longer. A few centuries ago, when child mortality was common, grief was still real but perhaps less entwined with cosmic injustice. In modern societies, where we expect long life and emotional fulfillment, tragedy feels anomalous, intolerable, and in need of explanation.
Thus, the “why” emerges as cognitive dissonance against a backdrop of some organized philosophy of meaning, i.e. religion. A "patch" is needed to repair the cognitive dissonance. Religious excuses offer ready-made patches: the belief in a benevolent higher power whose plans, however cruel, are purposeful. Or "mysterious." Or "you will see them in Heaven one day." Logically, this resolves nothing--but psychologically, it soothes.
So what is god?
God is the ultimate abstraction--the final "why" layered atop all other whys. The endpoint of our recursive search for meaning, the personification of causation itself. The benevolent version comforts; the punitive version controls. But either way, god functions as both explanation and anesthesia--the illusion that there is a reason where there is only cause. And even when the illusion results in a massive contradictory network of data, the emotional need can be too strong to let go.
In case this reality sounds too cynical, I will add that purpose can exist. It is just subjective, not a metaphysical truth of the Universe. We can all find purpose and meaning in life by deciding what we value and making personal goals. As humans with empathy, those goals can be compassionate and we can seek our own happiness in our lifetimes.
