Several friends have recommended Martin Gardner’s review of Bart Ehrman’s God’s Problem in the New Criterion, the brilliant journal of principled culture criticism. Gardner, a math and science writer, lays out a Leibnizian explanation for life-destroying natural disasters: Any human-supportive universe which God created must obey physical laws in order to continue functioning; those laws cannot be suspended, even to prevent mass slaughter by earthquake or individual loss by car accident. “If God were obliged to prevent all accidents that kill or injure, he would have to be constantly poking his fingers into millions of events around the globe. History would turn into a chaos of endless miracles,” writes Gardner.
Perhaps this argument is a compelling answer to Ehrman’s argument for the irreconcilability of a benevolent God and human suffering (I haven’t read Ehrman’s book), but it strikes me almost irrelevant to actual religious practice and belief. The vast majority of Christians, guided by their priests and pastors, assume a loving God who intervenes regularly in human affairs. Christians pray to God to cure them from cancer or protect them from a plane crash. (Intermediaries are also useful: A soon-to-be closed Catholic school in Brooklyn is called Our Lady of Perpetual Help, presumably because She does provide perpetual help, but not in this case.) A politician and Baptist minister in Kentucky is promoting a law requiring the state’s office of homeland security to display a plaque that reads: “The safety and security of the Commonwealth cannot be achieved apart from reliance upon Almighty God.” Apparently God is not just a co-founder of the United States but also a federalist, honoring state boundaries in his on again, off again solicitude for the country.
Gardner argues that were God to start preventing some deadly accidents, he would have to prevent all such accidents, resulting in chaos. The reality is far worse than that. Since believers give credit to God for answering their prayers when they are saved from catastrophe or illness, they have to explain why he answered their prayers and not those other people’s prayers, why he saved these children from a tsunami and not those other children. Any believer who today thanks God for making sure that his coronary bypass operation was successful has to explain why God allowed at least 37 peasants to be buried in a Guatemalan landslide on Sunday. Such an explanation requires either extraordinary narcissism on the believer’s part or positing capricious injustice on the part of God.
While I am more sympathetic to Gardner’s semi-stripped-down theism than to the full-blown Christian account of a loving, personal, prayer-answering God, the enterprise of trying to logically determine God’s intentions and actions by the use of reason strikes me as questionable, whatever its august pedigree. The gulf that surely yawns between a being that is self-created and that created all of reality (even if such causal concepts apply to God) and our feeble mentation precludes any confidence that what we deem as logically necessary and thus binding on God actually does bind him or has the slightest relevance to him. And why even posit as starting concepts goodness and justice? Those are human desires and values. They may be wholly irrelevant to something as massive and impenetrable as God. Gardner seems to embrace a logical argument for the afterlife (proposition three below), since it is more consistent with a good, omnipotent God than several alternative propositions:
1. God is unable to provide an afterlife, in which case his power seems unduly limited.
2. God can provide an afterlife but chooses not to, in which case his goodness is tarnished.
3. God is both able and willing to provide an afterlife.
If we’re going this far and attributing both will and ability to God, I see no reason why Gardner should not specify whether we get free will and justice in that afterlife, which he abjures doing.
All that for one frickin’ apple, eaten by some chick a few thousand years ago? That’s why tens of thousands died in Indonesia from a tsunami? That why New Orleans was destroyed? That’s why thousands die in earthquakes, floods, fires, droughts — because of the decision of one person thousands of years ago? How is that just?
Well, Tulse, that’s a whole different can of worms.
It seems to me that is the can of worms — certainly that is one of the central problems of theodicy.
I fear that the thread is dying, if not dead, but I don’t think that that’s what Original Sin is understood to be. It’s not that we have to live in a world full of injustice, but that (at least some of) the suffering and death in the world is not unjust. There’s a big difference. No one I’ve ever met who believes in Original Sin thinks that God is unjust. Of course, if you do, then most in this thread don’t really disagree with you regarding the problem of evil – my point all along has merely been that it seems that God must be behaving unjustly.
And as I pointed out, with the understanding that, while the world may have evil in it, it can never be unjust when under a just God, you can’t get out of the problem of evil by saying that we have it coming. If you kill two people, you may still have acted justly if they committed horrible crimes. However, if you kill one person and do everything you can to help another lead a very comfortable life, while both have committed the same set of horrible crimes, you’re acting unjustly. In short – if Original Sin makes us all deserving of God’s punishment, then it’s unjust of him to only punish some of us while rewarding others.
It’s probably the case that ‘the problem of evil’ is a misnomer in your case – it ought to be ‘the problem of good’ – but the point remains the same. God appears to be acting unjustly. He doesn’t seem to treat like cases in the same way. And if he is – if there are ‘hidden variables’ of moral desert that only God has access to – then we can’t judge good or evil in actions.
It seems to me that is the can of worms — certainly that is one of the central problems of theodicy.
Forgive the dodge, Tulse, but I was trying to answer a question about believers. I just don’t feel like dealing with theodicy writ large right now.
It’s not that we have to live in a world full of injustice, but that (at least some of) the suffering and death in the world is not unjust.
Gotchaye, my wording is less than precise, but I still think I’ve gotten it right. If you’re living in an imperfect world, then by definition it will be a world with injustice. It cannot be any other way. The doctrine of Original Sin simply says that our being here is just.
However, if you kill one person and do everything you can to help another lead a very comfortable life, while both have committed the same set of horrible crimes, you’re acting unjustly.
If I see a child short a quarter for a soda and give it to him, I commit no injustice if I don’t give the next child a quarter. Gifts are not subject to a strict standard of fairness.
In short – if Original Sin makes us all deserving of God’s punishment, then it’s unjust of him to only punish some of us while rewarding others.
You still live in the imperfect world; you will still die. In offering a hand here and there, all God does is offer a stay of execution, not pardon (unless, of course, you accept Christ and blah, blah, blah…you know the rest, I’m sure. 🙂
I agree that gifts aren’t subject to the same strict standard of fairness, but we still do hold them to a reasonably strong standard. This is what I was talking about earlier with flying to Africa to hand-deliver a feast to a single starving child. With your example, it’s easy to see a quarter as the smallest quanta of aid, so we can understand your act as one of the fairest ways to distribute aid to the several children. However, what if you were willing to part with two quarters, saw both thirsty children, and then gave one of them both quarters so that he could buy two sodas? I imagine that most would see that as somewhat dickish, at least.
I’ll agree that there can be injustice in the world, but the way you phrased it made it sound to me like Original Sin allowed God to behave unjustly towards us. I may have misunderstood.
I understand the reason for this discussion, but some fundamental assumptions about the nature of God and the cosmic factuality of “good” and “evil” are compromising the worth of it.
It’s foolish and vain to try to attempt to guess at God’s horoscope. God doesn’t behave this way or that, or carefully distribute justice and injustice like fertilizer.
And some sort of good/evil, right/wrong duality cannot be found to permeate any of the laws of physics, as far as I know. Creation is an ebb and flow of energy, not morality. At what point between chimp and man did violent sexuality and economy become sin? There is no absolute answer.