A critic might say:
  The sheer amount of pain and suffering in the world makes it extremely difficult to believe that all of it is justified. When I consider how intense it can sometimes be (fire or some kinds of cancer, for instance), or how nearly universal it is in the animal kingdom, where almost every animal dies in agony in order to alleviate the hunger pangs of some carnivore, I ask, “Is all this really necessary? Could God really not have devised a better world than this?” As one write puts it (in substance),

Animals generally cause pain by being born; they live, some of them, by inflicting pain on others; and in pain mostly they die. [01]

To this I reply as follows:
  I would not presume to talk about pain and suffering in terms of my own experience. I have been spared much. But the testimony of those whose experience does give them the right to speak suggests that we who are more fortunate may sometimes imagine a particular pain to be greater than it is.

For example, we tend to assume that a mouse in the jaws of a cat is suffering extreme agonies. But men who have had the experience of being mauled by a carnivore report otherwise, [02] and those who have studied terminal pain, [03] and those who have studied the behavior of carnivores, [04] have some encouraging things to say.

Again, we tend to assume that pain will be more or less directly proportional to injury, and so extrapolating from our own experience, say, of accidentally burning a finger on a hot stove, we assume that the pain of being burned all over must be thousands of times as excruciating. However, there is some evidence that it is not. Some years ago, a number of biologists undertook to set up a scale for measuring pain. [05] By devising a kind Ferris Persuader, complete with dials and gauges, and using it on themselves, they reached two unexpected conclusions: (1) that pain is not additive — meaning that given two distinct pains (say a stubbed toe and a burned finger) encountered simultaneously, the experience is no worse than encountering the severer pain by itself; and (2) that there is a well-defined upper limit (7.5 dos on the scale that they set up) above which no further increases in intensity of pain are felt, and that this upper limit is (as John Galt would say) “bad but bearable.” [06]

Of course, the experimenters were not subject to other stresses that usually affect people in pain, such as fear of death, mutilation, or permanent injury; a sense of helplessness; the prospect of continued pain for an indefinite time; and so on. Accordingly, the pessimist might object that the experimenters, even though they were standing up to the maximum possible in the way of purely physical pain, were not facing suffering at its worst. The point is made in a book by a torture victim, and in the review’s comments:

We follow him through the main gate down “damp cellarlike corridors,” past prison cells into a “windowless vault in which various iron implements lie about. From there no scream penetrated to the outside. There I experienced it: torture.”
  Contemplating such brute particulars, Amery opens a window on universal issues. What makes torture so terrifying? Not only the pain, he thinks — but also the sinking sense that no one in the world can help. “The expectation of help is as much a constitutional element as is the struggle for existence. Just a moment, the mother says to her child who is moaning from pain, a hot-water bottle, a cup of tea is coming right away, we won’t let you suffer so! ... Even on the battlefield, the Red Cross ambulances find their way to the wounded man.... But with the first blow from a policeman’s fist, against which there can be no defense and which no helping hand will ward off, a part of our life ends and it can never again be revived.” [07]

Undoubtedly Amery’s experience was a dreadful one, and nothing is further from my intent than to minimize it. But it must be noted that what makes it horrible, on his own showing, is precisely that it invites the victim (and for that matter, the compassionate reader) to say, “This is it! This is what the universe is really like. When the mask of comforting, pleasant illusion is stripped from the face of reality, this is what lies behind it. Deceive yourself no longer.” In a sense, the most important thing that happens in a torture chamber is not that the victim is in pain, but that he is being invited to accept a false metaphysic, a bad philosophy. If he accepts it, then indeed he is in the grip of ultimate horror, but the horror is, in a sense, of his own choosing. The pain is not that horror, or the cause of that horror, though it provided the raw material from which he made it. If he chooses, instead, to stand by the truth that pain is not men’s normal mode of consciousness, [08] the pain, for him as for John Galt, will be “bad but bearable,” and he will purchase, with that pain, a benevolent sense of life that is a conscious, rational affirmation, as opposed, say, to the attitude of a spoiled child whose wealthy parents have never refused him anything he shrieked for and who has accordingly never questioned that the universe is (in one sense) friendly to him.

References
[Editor’s notes are in blue. Readers who prefer to ignore the links in the text, which go to the bottom of the page, and follow the notes on a separate page, may open a separate page with the references here.]

* In the dot-matrix printout, this section begins with the unexplained notation “(p7) 8 May 81.” Since the discussion of disasters and pain occupies quite a large number of pages of the printout, and are listed as “Section 7” in James’s table of contents, it is entirely possible that this section was completed nearly a year later than the rest of the printout.]

† The title refers to Nathaniel Branden’s lecture “The Concept of God,” from his lecture series “The Basic Principles of Objectivism.” That lecture is fully transcribed in his book The Vision of Ayn Rand, chapter 4. Partial and perhaps complete audios seem to be available throughout the Internet. See also R.A. Childs, “The Epistemological Basis of Anarchism,” Note 19.

[01] C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1962; page 14; [page 2 in the hardback edition]).

[02] David Livingstone, A Popular Account of Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa (London: Murray, 1875; page 10).
[Note: This is the “Dr. Livingstone, I presume” man.]
  He [a lion] caught me by the shoulder, and we both came to the ground together. Growling horribly close to my ear, he shook me as a terrier dog does a rat. The shock produced a stupor similar to that which seems to be felt by a mouse after the first shake of the cat. It caused a sort of dreaminess, in which there was no sense of pain nor feeling of terror, though quite conscious of all that was happening.... Besides crunching the bone into splinters, he left eleven teeth wounds on the upper part of my arm. [James often quotes passages from memory (his was prodigious). When I can find the original text, I have made the quotation conform to it rather than to the text in James’s printout. The differences are always minor.]

  Sir Lyon Playfair, British Medical Journal (March 2, 1889; page 489.)
  I have known three friends who were partially devoured by wild beasts, under apparently hopeless circumstances.... The first was Livingstone.... He assured me that he felt no fear or pain, and that his only feeling was one of intense curiosity as to which part of his body the lion would take next....
  The next was Rustem Pasha, now Turkish Ambassador in London. A bear attacked him and tore off part of his hand and part of his arm and shoulder. He also assured me that he had neither pain nor fear, but that he felt excessively angry because the bear grunted with so much satisfaction in munching him. The third case is that of Sir Edward Bradford, an Indian officer, now occupying a high position in the India Office.
  He was seized by a tiger ... which deliberately devoured the whole of his arm, beginning at the hand and ending at the shoulder. He was positive that he had no sensation of fear, and thinks that he felt a little pain when the fangs when through his hand, but is certain that he felt none during the munching of his arm.

  John Taylor, Pondoro: Last of the Ivory Hunters (London: Frederick Muller Limited, 1956; pages 22, 24).
  His [the leopard’s] weight brought me down and the back of my head made contact with a stone or something which scattered my wits. I can just dimly remember moving my head slightly to one side so that he would not chew my ear off, as his jaws were clashing immediately beside it. I could feel his claws busy on chest and thigh, but curiously felt no pain.... [All] the ribs down the right side of my chest were exposed and my left thigh was in ribbons....
  I have described this incident in some detail because I have heard so many discussions about the amount of pain a man must suffer when being mauled by a beast. Apart from my own experience I know, personally some seven or eight others who have been mauled by lion, tiger, or leopard, in addition to the many others I have read or heard about, and they all say the same thing: that they felt no pain at all during the actual mauling. I myself had the curious detached feeling, quite impersonal, as though I were withdrawn and watching the predicament in which some other fellow found himself. (It was exactly the same years later, under a wounded and very angry elephant.) It is true that I was somewhat dazed by the leopard’s sudden attack. However, I was quite conscious and could definitely feel his claws busy. But there was no pain.

  William Stanley Sykes, “Natural Anaesthesia” in Essays on the First Hundred Years of Anaesthesia (Edinburgh: E. & S. Livingstone Ltd., 1961; pages 73–79).
  [The preceding material of this footnote is quoted in Sykes’s article. A remark of his own follows:]
  During and after the war I asked many men whether they felt pain at the moment when they were wounded. As far as I can remember, not one of them did, however badly they were injured. The pain came on later, of course. We must conclude, therefore, that natural anaesthesia exists, whether we explain it by nervous shock, by self-hypnosis, or whether we accept Livingstone’s simple explanation that it is a merciful provision of the Creator.

[03] Lewis Thomas, The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher (Viking, 1979); “On Natural Death,” pages 102–105.
  [Dr. Thomas is president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. The entire four-page essay is relevant and recommended. In one place he is speaking of two men in an auto accident, crushed from the chest down.]
  We had a conversation while people with the right tools were prying them free. Sorry about the accident, they said. No, they said, they felt fine. Is everyone else okay, one of them said. Well, the other one said, no hurry now. And then they died.
  Pain is useful for avoidance, for getting away when there’s time to get away, but when it’s end game, and no way back, pain is likely to be turned off, and the mechanisms for this are wonderfully precise and quick. If I had to design an ecosystem in which creatures had to live off each other and in which dying was an indispensable part of living, I could not think of a better way to manage.

[04] Farley Mowat, Never Cry Wolf (Little, 1963; Dell, 1977; Bantam, 1979).
  [Mowat, who spent most of a year on the Canadian Arctic tundra observing wolves for the Canadian government, maintains that a healthy caribou can outrun a wolf from the time that it is a few days old, and that the only caribou killed by wolves are those that could not live much longer anyway. He bases this conclusion partly on Eskimo testimony and partly on his own observation of the hunt and on microscopic examination of the tissues of caribou killed by wolves. (How, you ask, did he obtain meat from a caribou after the wolves had killed and before they had eaten it? He walked up to the kill, waving his arms and shouting, “Shoo! Shoo!” and the wolves stepped aside.) Invariably he found that the caribou was crippled, infirm, old, or terminally infected with parasites. Admittedly this merely shifts the question from “Why did God make wolves?” to “Why did God make parasitic worms?” However, if we have conjectured that wolves are a bane to the caribou and find them to be a blessing instead, this ought to reduce our confidence in our next conjecture, that worms are a bane to the caribou.]

[05] ??? Saturday Evening Post, late 1940s.
  ??? Inquire around NIH [where Kiefer worked].

[06] [Atlas Shrugged], 1072q (paperback;) (1155y, hardback).

[07] Review by Jim Miller in Newsweek, March 9, 1981, of Jean Amery, At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor at Auschwitz and Its Realities (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981).

[08] N. Branden, The Vision of Ayn Rand (Gilbert, Ariz.: Cobden Press, 2009); pages 117–18.
  Disasters are the exception, not the rule, in man’s existence. Most of them are man-made, and man-caused. And as to the purely physical dangers and calamities, well, if it were true that physical nature was basically set against main, that the chances of catastrophe were greater than the chances of success, insurance companies would go broke, instead of making the fortunes which they do make.

AS 973a-b, m-q (paperback) (1048o-q, bb-ee hardback).
  I saw that evil was impotent — that evil was the irrational, the blind, the anti-real — and that the only weapon of its triumph was the willingness of the good to serve it.... I saw that there comes a point, in the defeat of any man of virtue, when his own consent is needed for evil to win — and that no manner of injury done to him by others can succeed if he chooses to withhold his consent.

WIAR 37–38 [N. & B. Branden, Who Is Ayn Rand? (New York: Paperback Library, Inc., 1964); (New York: Random House, 1962; page 41. [hb])]
  If theologians, philosophers and moralists were less eager to damn existence, man’s nature and his life on earth, if the were less willing to conclude that suffering is man’s inevitable fate — they would perhaps notice that the predominant cause of such suffering as they do observe is not any sort of metaphysical necessity, but the philosophies men have been offered as a guide by which to live.

A. Rand, “The Ethics of Emergencies” 2/2/6ii [References of this form refer to The Objectivist Newsletter, so that volume 2, number 2 would be February 1963. After volume 4, the name of the publication was The Objectivist. The page numbers for the latter are those of the original format, not those in the bound volume. In this case, the page numbers are correct; the meaning of the line numbering is not clear.] and VOS 48–49 [The Virtue of Selfishness (New York: New American Library, 1964)].
  Every code of ethics is based on and derived from a metaphysics, that is: from a theory about the fundamental nature of the universe in which man lives and acts. The altruist ethics is based on a “malevolent universe” metaphysics, on the theory that man, by his very nature, is helpless and doomed — and that success, happiness, achievement are impossible to him — that emergencies, disasters, catastrophes are the norm of his life and that his primary goal is to combat them.
  As the simplest empirical refutation of that metaphysics — as evidence of the fact that the material universe is not inimical to man and that catastrophes are the exception, not the rule of his existence — observe the fortunes made by insurance companies.

A. Rand, “The Ethics of Emergencies” and VOS 49.
... disasters are marginal and incidental in the course of human existence....

A. Rand, “The Psycho-Epistemology of Art” 4/4/8 [April 1965] and RM 23–24 [The Romantic Manifesto: A Philosophy of Literature (Revised Edition) (New York: A Signet Book, 1975)]. ... one type of art tells him that disasters are transient, that grandeur, beauty, strength, self-confidence are his proper-natural state.

[NOTE: See MB and LN for material on pain. MB works with pain augmenters and reducers. BS suggested them.] [This note occurs at the end of this section of references. It suggests that James was not finished with this section. I have given the initials of employees at NIH whom James named.]