The BBC – sometimes fairly, and sometimes unfairly accused of anti-Christian bias – gives some more ammunition to those who think it is biased against Christians. It commissions a non-religious philosopher to write a piece on “Why does God allow natural disasters?” Unsurprisingly he wraps his rhetoric by asking:
But, as for those who believe in an all-good, all-powerful agent-God, we’ve seen that they face a question that remains pressing after all these centuries, and which is now horribly underscored by the horrors in Haiti. If a deity exists, why didn’t he prevent this?
I can’t quite hide my distaste for those who think a natural disaster is a great opportunity for point scoring, whether it is the appalling Pat Robertson (the best response to whom was a letter from Satan), the astonishingly insensitive Richard Dawkins, or this kind of opportunistic argument.
It seems to me, however, that some points need making in response. I will keep them brief. I have no wish to collude in adding the insult of turning Haitians’ suffering into a debating point to the injuries they are suffering under.
Bain starts by saying:
Evil has always been a thorn in the side of those – of whatever faith – who believe in an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good God.
I’m sure this is true for leisurely philosophers, and those with the education and time to ponder it. Most people, it seems to me have got on with the business of coping with suffering and at their best offering compassionate help to the sufferer, and for most of history people have in one way or another used their faith to help them cope with their suffering and the effects of evil. I might think their conceptions of God naïve, mistaken or dangerously wrong, but I’m not going to pretend that they sat round questioning whether God existed. They have not, in fact, believed in the kind of philosophical deity Bain postulates, but something altogether less sophisticated. Conflating a fairly deist philosophy with the views of religious people down the ages doesn’t really do much more than set up a fairly abstract question about unpleasantly concrete experiences.
Again, Bain joins the freewill argument in terms of fairly abstract ethics.
St Augustine, author CS Lewis and others have argued God allows our bad actions since preventing them would undermine our freewill, the value of which outweighs its ill effects. But there’s a counter-argument. Thoroughly good people aren’t robots, so why couldn’t God have created only people like them, people who quite freely live good lives?
Leaving aside the question as to what exactly a “throughly good” person is, and, indeed, how many of them exist, I actually think most of us experience human life not in terms of individual ethics, but as a series of negotiated relationships within which we discover how to do good or evil. It is, in that sense, goodness-in-love that has to be free to be itself, rather than goodness as some kind of abstract quality.
According to his own site, David Bain puts “freewill” at the top of his list of philosophical issues. He frames the argument in terms of a continuous chain of cause and effect, and seemingly minimises the role of randomness. yet the significant meaning bearing patterns that we still like to think of as Laws of Nature are underpinned by randomness at the most fundamental level of the universe’s being. Is the kind of causal chain Bain works with, that leaves this deist God of cause and effect squirming on the hook of direct responsibility for tsunamis and earthquakes, one that does justice to the complexity of the cosmos, where randomness underlies an ordered universe? Is there rather more freedom inscribed in the universe than this description allows?
Bain sums up what he calls the “soul-making view” of the universe thusly:
A central point of philosopher Immanuel Kant’s was that we mustn’t exploit people – we mustn’t use them as mere means to our ends. But it can seem that on the soul-making view God does precisely this. He inflicts horrible deaths on innocent earthquake victims so that the rest of us can be morally benefitted.
We need to challenge the rhetorical move which makes the earthquake an act of God, and every death a direct victimisation of an individual by God. Apart from my problems with Bain’s view of causation, that conveniently ignores all the sorts of issues raised by David Brooks in the NYT:
On Oct. 17, 1989, a major earthquake with a magnitude of 7.0 struck the Bay Area in Northern California. Sixty-three people were killed. This week, a major earthquake, also measuring a magnitude of 7.0, struck near Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The Red Cross estimates that between 45,000 and 50,000 people have died.
This is not a natural disaster story. This is a poverty story. It’s a story about poorly constructed buildings, bad infrastructure and terrible public services.
While Brooks may exaggerate his rhetoric in pursuit of his point, there is nonetheless something very important in what he says. Natural disasters are not simply “acts of God”. Rather more lives might be saved in the future by asking how our politics have led to this than by pondering whether earthquakes disprove the existence of God.
I, however, would again challenge that soul-making view as entirely too abstract. At every stage of Bain’s argument he relies on a direct chain of causation that I simply don’t accept. It doesn’t seem to me to do justice to the processes by which the universe formed, the quantum nature of the cosmos at the lowest level, or – and this is the most significant, my own experience of my actions and the actions of those around me as free actions in a world of human existence where life is never entirely predictable, or the consequences of actions easily foreseen.
The world may be patterned, but it grows its patterns on top of the swaying foundations of quantum randomness. In short, shit happens. I find out how to be human living in that kind of a world.
The kind of God Bain dismisses seems to have little to do with that. But I don’t see God like that. I see God as one who knows what an innocent death is like from the inside. I see God as one who has found out the hard way that “Shit happens”. In a universe that is not entirely predictable in itself, and where people are free to mess up, a crucified God is what helps us direct our lives towards resurrection, bringing good out of evil, help to the helpless, and hope from despair.
Aid and practical help, and not comparatively rich Westerners conducting abstract arguments about God, are what Haiti needs right now.
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” I might think their conceptions of God naïve, mistaken or dangerously wrong, but I’m not going to pretend that they sat round questioning whether God existed.”
You mean you have never come across people who used to have a comforting belief in the God their churches tell them about and then started to question his existence or his character when tragedy hit their own lives?
It’s certainly been one of the most common conversations I have with people about God. “How can you believe in him when your daughter has leukaemia” was a frequent opening question for 3 years, “my son’s brain tumor has destroyed my faith” is a common cry. Earthquake, brain tumor – same thing. Sudden suffering that is experienced as undeserved, unavoidable and where we are restricted to managing the consequences.
I would say that it is the most fundamental question people have about God, and whether they end up having faith or not depends on the answer they find.
My own daughter has certainly lost all her faith over this question. And I’ve always believed that to be entirely natural – it is one of the most challenging questions people ask, one that has the potential to help towards a mature faith. But if it hits people before they’re mature enough to move away from Sunday school faith, it destroys the beginnings of faith they had.
Erika, that comment you cite was prefaced by the qualifier “for most of history”. I was not talking about the present. It is only the post-Enlightenment context that makes “Is there really a God” a more natural response than “what have we done wrong?” or “we’re going to need a bigger goat”.
Yes there have always been intellectual exceptions to this in the past, and there are still people today who will wonder what X has done to deserve Y, but I suggest that the broad point stands about the difference between past and present ways of responding to bad things.
Doug, sorry, I missed the qualifier. Clearly, I should stop commenting while my brain is going through an unhelpful phase:-)
I’m still not sure why you believe that “We need to challenge the rhetorical move which makes the earthquake an act of God, and every death a direct victimisation of an individual by God.”
This is not merely a poverty story. A similar earthquake 9 miles outside Tokyo would also have resulted in considerable damage. And earthquakes destroyed people’s environment and their lives for millennia before they became something we can manage to a certain extent.
Yes, the scale of the devastation highlights poverty issues and the responsibility we all have here.
But people use these disasters as a starting point for their questions. The scale of this disaster has meant that it has become the starting point for many more and in a more public way, but it’s not materially different from the one parent with a brain tumour child.
As for “Rather more lives might be saved in the future by asking how our politics have led to this than by pondering whether earthquakes disprove the existence of God.” – you appear to be drawing a picture where some responsible people help and other irresponsible people just go into a dark corner and start philosophising. Why should one exclude the other? Why can we not help while asking questions?
“In short, shit happens” and God has experienced that with us from the inside, is clearly your answer to the question.
Most people are being told that God is omnipotent and all loving, indeed, Love itself. So they start out by saying “if he created this world, why did he not create a kinder framework for creation? And if he couldn’t do that for some reason, why doesn’t he at least do something now?”
It’s actually a very touching cry because it so wants to cling on to the idea of a loving God and is desperately trying to find a way despite the evidence.
I hope mature Christians will come to the same conclusion as you.
But they won’t if they’re not allowed to ask the questions whenever they arise and become burning. You’re absolutely right, Haiti needs help. That doesn’t mean that Westerners should not be allowed to ask the church for answers while they’re giving their money or going out there to help re-build the place.
The real problem here is not the question but the appallingly shallow answers many church leaders give.
By talking about “challenging the rhetorical move” what I mean is challenging a way of speaking that makes God the direct cause for a natural disaster – this is often done by atheists who insist that this is what Christians must believe about the relation of God to the world. They frame the problem in their terms, and insist only their terms are valid.
Please note that my responses in this post were not to a person genuinely agonising over the existence or goodness of God, but to a detached philosopher using the earthquake to argue that it proved the folly of Christian belief.
A point I’ve been puzzling over for some time is what it is what sophisticated Christians really believe.
Presumably there is a single deity who was responsible for the creation of the universe at the beginning and it’s laws, fundamental constants, quantum effects etc – but not for the way it then evolved. And the same deity remains always present and available. But if it can’t intervene to make something happen that is different from the natural outcome of those laws etc, then why pray? Is the answer that the deity provides a powerful comfort for suffering, a valuable device for internal dialogue and a source of hope? As an atheist I can see the emotional attraction – even the evolutionary value – of such a belief. The trouble is that it’s a very small step between that and the comfort of an imaginary friend or parent. On the other hand, the kindness and comfort of fellow human beings is real.
Of course, if the deity can intervene and is good, then why are there earthquakes that bring agony and death without warning to impoverished communities? Worse, what sort of omnipotent deity has allowed creation to evolve such that a significant proportion of sentient creatures on the Earth – including humans (apart from some in the developed world), die in fear and pain?
The “problem of suffering” seems only to be a problem for those encumbered with a deity. What’s the “non-shallow” answer?
The irony is that the “problem of suffering” seems more often to be a problem for those who have ceased to believe, or those who never have.
There may be sophisticated Christians who believe that God doesn’t intervene. Or I may be entirely unsophisticated, but the question for me is how does God intervene, and what sort of interventions are possible to God that do not overturn the kind of creation in which people can be free agents. The most obvious way is through human beings who are open to God, which you could also explain psychologically.
I sometimes find myself speculating whether the level of quantum indeterminacy and concomitant complexity theory leaves the universe more open to being acted upon by God than we think, but in ways which probably remain necessarily a matter of either faith or speculation and neither provable nor falsifiable.
Jeremy,
to add to Doug’s comment, the difference between an imaginary friend and God is that an imaginary friend comes from within you and is therefore really only an extension of you. A real human friend can be a charismatic mentor, but he, too, is as human as we are, sharing the same basic conceits and limitations. Whereas God is a real force not bound up with our egos, our power struggles, our self deceptions.
I rather hope that Doug is wrong with his speculation that God might intervene directly in the universe at quantum level, unless that intervention was “global” and not specific. A selectively intervening God would be the most hateful thing. But a God who continuously reaches out to everyone in the same way, can be a tremendous source of change.
Don’t you think Jesus is a specific intervention?
You can, of course, count Jesus as a specific intervention if you like. But it is not a selective one but one that is aimed at all human beings and open equally to all. My problem is with the idea that God should intervene directly in our individual lives, for example through healing some (but not others).
Doug
“By talking about “challenging the rhetorical move” what I mean is challenging a way of speaking that makes God the direct cause for a natural disaster”
I agree that framing the discussion in limiting terms and not allowing any other frame of references is a huge problem. It’s also one we have in church! There seems to be a fundamentalist mind that is equally limited and restricted whether it ends up in a church or as an atheist.
But it was Pat Robertson who spoke about the Haitian’s pact with the devil, we’ve had home grown bishops who have blamed floods on God’s wrath against homosexualists and other sinners.
I have no idea to what extent these people represent or exaggerate already present views or fears of the average person the streets.
I suspect the large number of agnostics suggests that the unease about God is shared by many.
So when any idiot anywhere makes religious-political statements like that, our response should be to take the question seriously and give it an intelligent answer, knowing that the fundamentalists will never accept it, but that our answers will be heard also by those who genuinely question.
Clayboy, I feel myself compelled to respond to your philosopher-bashing. I find it surprising that you criticise Bain for raising some of these age old questions in the face of this disaster, when they are clearly questions in which you yourself have some interest.
Bain is not the first to have raised the problem of evil in the media this week but the first (to my knowledge) to have paid careful attention to some of the key responses to this problem offered by theists over the centuries. This is not a question of “point-scoring” but one of taking the problem seriously.
You say that you feel “that some points need making in response” to Bain. Are philosophical arguments concerning the question of evil only “distasteful” at this time when they’re someone else’s, but not when they’re your own?
Still more curious is your your apparent assumption that “Aid and practical help” and “arguments about God” are mutually-exclusive. Finding the problem of evil a profound and important theological dilemma, worthy of much intellectual attention, does not necessarily make one a person incapable of profound empathy and generosity.
I think that while people are still dragging dead bodies out of rubble, running an abstract discussion about the problem of evil, as an exercise in cool philosophical logic, is a pretty poor thing to do.
Why did I respond? Because he began his article by snidely implying that the Archbishop of York’s refusal to give a trite answer meant that there was no Christian thinking to be had on the topic, so the field was free for him to put the questions and answers in his own abstract philosophical terms, with no hint ways of responding to suffering with compassion and generosity. I do not, as you suggest, oppose philosophy and practical help, but he excluded any practical responses from his arid abstractions.
My point was that you are currently participating in a philosophical discussion. If you think this is not the thing to be doing while they are dragging bodies out of the rubble, by all means desist!
Bain clearly does not take the Archbishop’s response as evidence that there is no Christian thinking on the topic. Indeed, the rest of the article is devoted to carefully examining thoughtful responses which have been offered by *Christian* thinkers. He did not invent the positions he discusses!
As for his failure to discuss practical responses, why don’t we leave that to those in pastoral roles and those involved themselves in aid work, and leave philosophers to get on with their jobs?
As Marx said “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.” (Theses on Feuerbach)
In defence of Bain, the BBC probably hit him up for the editorial. Id be suprised if, on hearing of the E-Quake, he decided to write a quick opinion piece and mail it to the Beeb.
Yep, I suspect that’s so
And following the logic of doing something and not philosophising, this comments thread is now closed.
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