about as helpful to the sufferer as a lecture on the chemistry of foodstuffs to a starving man

Mythological attempts at a solution cannot help us here.  Not the dualistic assumption of a good primal principle alongside an evil principle of equal rank,  so that the good God cannot be the one sole God (as in the ancient Persian religion and Marcionism in the second century).  Nor can pushing back man's guilt to the beginning, attributing it to angelic power fallen away from God; which merely means the question is to back to God again (as in early Jewish apocalyptic).  Attempts at a solution in terms of the history of philosophy have not been lacking.  K. Lowith traces a line backwards - Burckhardt-Marx-Hegel-Proudhorn, Compte, Turgot, Codorcet-Voltaire-Vico, Bossuet-Joachim of Flora-Augstine-Orosius- and points out: "that the modern philosophy of history corresponds to the biblical faith and fulfillment and that it ends in the secularization of its eschatological model.   

I will break in here to say though I certainly am not conversant enough with those figures in the history of philosophy to the extent I would need to to understand that statement, I'm not an accomplished theologian who has had the excellent training in philosophy that you need to be a good theologian (I doubt that most PhDs in Philosophy in my generation or the next ones in the United States could follow that line without serious research) one of the earliest things I noticed in reading Marx and Marxists was that they seemed to me to be little more than a heretical form of Christianity gone seriously sideways.  

In modern times the abundantly gifted and diversely occupied philosopher and theologian Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz attempted in a systematic-philosophical way to answer rationally the difficulties which result from the existence of evil and wickedness opposed to God's dominion over the world.  this he did, sustained by an unshakable trust in the good God, in a Justification of God or Theodicy (1710).  But the optimism of the Enlightenment was followed in 1755 by the Lisbon earthquake and in 1789 the human upheaval of the French Revolution.  In 1791 Immanuel Kant wrote "On the failure of all philosophical attempts in theodicy."  Then Hegel in his Philosophy of World History again made the great attempt at a justification of God.  He translated Leibniz's ontological-static theodicy into a historical-dialectic and tried to explain the contradictions of world history as the evolution of the divine world spirit itself: "True theodicy, the justification of God in history, lies in the fact that world history is this evolutionary course and the real coming-to-be of the spirit, under the changing spectacles of its histories."  World history as God's justification and therefore as world judgement. 

But can such rational or speculative arguments, such metaphysical systems or visions of the philosophy of history, can all the shrewd reasoning really give new heart to man, almost overwhelmed by suffering?  Is it any help when someone he loves is taken from him through death or infidelity or when he himself becomes incurably ill or is faced with immanent death?  To explain all this existential suffering all that is offered is merely cerebral argumentation or speculation, about as helpful to the sufferer as a lecture on the chemistry of foodstuffs to a starving man.  And can such rational argument or speculation do anything to change the suffering world,  to transform oppressive and repressive structures and, if not to abolish suffering, at any rate to reduce it to a tolerable scale?  

In defense of what I said here the other day, that any answer to the questions of suffering, evil, pain that works it will have to work on an individual basis, all of these schemes of philosophy address something that is experienced as an intensely personal matter - pain is experienced by individuals in a way that touches and cuts to their most personal level of existence - it is not like the abstractions of mathematics or science which can be assented to on a cooler and more impersonal level.   I think the refusal of Western intellectualism, obsessed with finding "universals" since the time of Socrates, its insistence that nothing that doesn't have that "universal" character is of ultimate importance goes a long way to explaining why these philosophical attempts have been a flop.   It's using tools to do something that they not only don't do well, they can't do it at all.  

The religious explanations in the beginning of this passage, the Zoroastrian type of two-fold reality explanation, its similar though not directly related story in Genesis about the revolt of Lucifer and the angels who are driven into hell and allowed free reign in the world (and in Eden, Adam and Eve eating the forbidden fruit under the devil's influence), seem to me to be related to the philosophical attempts to explain the existence of evil through abstraction.  Those are bound to lead to nothing very useful for the same reasons. 

As Kung says, those stories either demote God from being the Creator of all that is to either being only a big thing within existence (matched with the polar opposite in the evil entity such a scheme needs) or someone who brought evil into the universe through what to God must have been a complete act of knowing, creating the angels who would revolt against him,  God having had to be all knowing about the future, as well.   

It is bound to be unsatisfying in the way that can be had from a mathematical proof or the good guy in a crime drama coming up with the rock solid evidence that clinches the case, whether for innocence or guilt (admit it, the only "experience" of logical rigor that most TV-fiction addled modern people experience) but I think there is a very real possibility, one which I increasingly find convincing, that the solution to "the problem of pain, evil, suffering" has no answer that human beings are capable of comprehending.  I think to look for an "evolutionary" answer in "history" (which, in that philosophical treatment is as artificial an artifact of human culture treated as a  natural phenomenon as any other aspect of human culture) is seriously wrong headed.  

I think in questions of pain, evil, suffering, no answer which is not the product of a person seriously and long and non-pathologically thinking of their own experience will ever satisfy anyone.  In many cases there won't be the chance to do that in this life, people who die as a result of their pain may not have an answer in this life.  In many cases people who are so damaged by pain continue it in a totally understandable and innocent self-victimization of obsessively damaging themselves with fruitless recapitulations of that experience.  I think that's something that Freudian analysis encourages people to do for the profit of the "therapist," in a notably unsuccessful "treatment" in most cases.  Many modern "scientific" therapies are as bad if not worse.   Fiction, novels, TV scripts, movies, etc. encourage that kind of thing.  It is a rare novel that will lead out of that maze of self-damage, especially those written under the influence of Freudian and other psychological theories.  

For those who have the chance, I think there is a possibility to come to some understanding of our pain,the pain of those we love,those who we may not know but whose witnessed or heard of suffering moves us in Christianity of the kind that Hans Kung advocates.  I certainly think it's more likely to have that effect than any of the philosophical, pseudo-scientific explanations or methods.  I would say that I think it is almost matched by some other traditions,  the Jewish tradition certainly contains the same substance that fed the Christian religion, there are many aspects of Buddhism that come close and the Buddhists' enormous research and practice of meditation *is extremely useful.  I have found that mixing the method of walking and movement meditation with Jewish-Christian content has worked for me.  

*  BY WHICH I DON'T MEAN THE HOLLYWOOD-WALL STREET SCHOOL OF "MINDFULNESS" THAT IS, THANKFULLY, GOING OUT OF FASHION.  Meditation practice divorced from the radical Jewish tradition of justice and the Christian ethic of universal love is as dangerous as indifference and evil.  And by those I do not mean the sentimental view of those words which demote them to whims and notions.  If they don't radically move you to change and action, they are meaningless.  While many real Buddhists might speak meaningfully of "mindfulness" they don't mean the same thing as the as-seen-on-TV or heard on NPR huckster means by it.  I may have rejected Buddhism on the basis of their lack of the Jewish tradition of justice, that doesn't mean I don't respect Buddhists, especially engaged Buddhism.