The World Should Be Like Heroin

     In Richard Swinburne's, "Why God Allows Evil", he argues that the presence of suffering in the world ultimately increases the significance and worth of the human experience of life. He makes a very memorable statement on page 112, in which he proposes a choice of two different lives you could have as a human being. In one choice, he says you have a brief period of extreme pleasure--like the experience of heroin--and then your life ends without any other influence or impact on the universe. In another choice, he says that you can take your current life, in which you suffer large degrees of pain, but you have the ability to have a good impact on others' lives. In his conclusion, Swinburne says that the choice is obvious. The second option is clearly the best.
    I completely disagree with Swinburne here. If everyone lived in a period of brief pleasure and then passed on painlessly, I feel like the world would be an incredible place. It would be an experience of great joy and ecstasy followed by a fleeting passing on into death. The reason he disagrees with me, however, is because we all obviously live in a world ripe with suffering. In order to justify the meaning of his life, Swinburne protects his self-esteem and mental health by reassuring himself that the current world that he lives in is the most superior life possible. If he would use his imagination somewhat and think outside the realm of reality, I believe he could see the greatness in a brief pleasurable life. Furthermore, nobody would actually need to impact anyone elses life in a heroin-like universe, because everyone would be happy on their own.
     Swinburne would refute this point by claiming that the suffering that we go through in the current universe has great meaning. He would tell me that all the pain I am going through will ultimately improve my life and others around me. Swinburne would then probably prompt me to give him an example of a period of tribulation in my life in which I encountered hardship and then became better for it in order to illustrate the strength of his argument. I would claim that when i lost my sister in a car accident, I encountered a lot of pain and stress. He would likely apologize and then tell me that because of that, I have grown as a person and have been provided an amazing opportunity for development because the incident happened.