The Pope announced during his Angelus broadcast last Sunday that he was “imploring God to relieve the pain” of the survivors of a recent flood in Sicily and of the recent earthquake in Indonesia, according to RAI International. Such an expression of sympathy after a tragedy by appealing to divine solace is a vital and noble function of religion.
But the paradox of religious belief, it seems to me, is that the need to believe in a loving, sheltering God is strongest at precisely the moment when such a belief is most counterfactual: after a particularly devastating tragedy that a loving, sheltering God could have averted. This paradox does not much trouble believers: after a collective disaster, they troop off to church to worship and request assistance from the God who has allowed the devastation to occur.
A heaven stocked with at least two deities would help solve the logical contradiction, however. The good god could always finger the bad god to explain particularly egregious human loss. The philosophical problems attendant on polytheism or Manichaeism do not strike me as any graver than those attendant on monotheism.
But a simpler solution to the still unresolved challenge of reconciling divine omnipotence with the idea of a loving God would be to recognize that both before and after collective tragedy, humans are all we’ve got. We try to relieve the sorrow of survivors by sharing their grief. We apply our dazzling and ever-improving technological resources to alleviating their physical loss, but more importantly we work daily to prevent large-scale tragedies through engineering prowess and medical research. The Pope is expressing human sympathy, tricked out in divine trappings. Remove the divine garb, and the sentiments are just as valuable.
Of course you don’t need polytheism to resolve the paradox. You can go back to our monotheistic roots:
–Isaiah 45:7, KJV.
“Evil” of course includes floods, earthquakes, etc.
But here’s the most important observation in Heather Mac Donald’s post: “This paradox does not much trouble believers…”. Exactly. Undeserved suffering has been considered a theological problem in the Judeo-Christian tradition for almost three thousand years. You’re not bringing up anything new. If you anti-religious folks want to talk to religious people and maybe even persuade them, then you’re not going to get very far with this kind of shallow discourse. If you all ever decide you want to talk to these people, you’ll have to think harder.
If it is true that God creates evil, then that is a rather good reason not to worship It. I think there is a decent chance that there is a God, but someone is going to have a much harder time convincing me that God is good.
the need to believe in a loving, sheltering God is strongest at precisely the moment when such a belief is most counterfactual: after a particularly devastating tragedy
I must agree with Aaron that you really don’t get it. Truly religious people are religious 24/7, not just when disaster strikes. The need the truly religious do have at such a time is for an intelligible explanation of why such things occur. Whether it is Free Will and Original Sin among Christians, the Will of Allah among Muslims, or Action [karma], cause, and result among Buddhists, religious people really do have explanations for why.
These explanations, by and large, are about the moral structure of the world. They require some beliefs of greater or lesser “faith” about things no one can directly show. But the fact of disaster itself generally lends more credence to these beliefs not less, because they do account for why.
In my case, as a Buddhist, the primary thing you must take on trust is former and future lives. From this we deduce that it is not possible for us in any given life to fully know the underlying causal relations for such things because they proceed from past lives.
Now this might be a wrong explanation. But it is not an irrational one. In fact, it is far more rational than anyone can be when they have no such faith, whether Buddhist or not. Given the assumed belief, the explanation follows quite logically.
Seculars are simply left with either pure materialistic determinism or pure chance, depending on which component of the disaster you are looking at. An earthquake in San Francisco can be explained by pure physical determinism. The fact that I happen to be on vacation for two weeks there, and it kills me, can only be explained by pure chance. Nothing in the cause and effect relationships of earthquakes can be sensibly linked to any explanations of me and my vacation.
The problem with these is not the presence or absence of God, the problem is that they contradict one another. In a purely material and deterministic world, how is “chance” possible? And in a world where chance is possible, how can you have relations that are truly causal if “chance” effects can emerge ex nihilo? The reasons “why” that the various religions have for such disasters easily resolve this contradiction.
If “chance” results can emerge ex nihilo, then God or Karma or whatever “faiths” a given believer must start from are not self-evidently “counterfactual”. At most they are simply indeterminate, like “chance” events. Though the beliefs themselves are unprovable, the mere fact that they are truly explanatory, where the secular view is not, is one of the most powerful reasons that people become religious if they aren’t already.
Seculars are simply left with either pure materialistic determinism or pure chance, depending on which component of the disaster you are looking at. The problem with these is not the presence or absence of God, the problem is that they contradict one another.
They aren’t contradictory. It is the difference between objective and subjective probability. If I flip a coin, and it lands on the floor, and I don’t see it right away, the subjective probability of it being heads is 50%. If I call heads, I have a 50% chance of being right. However, since the coin has already landed, the objective probability of it being heads is either 100% or 0% depending on whichever side it landed on.
If the universe is deterministic, then it is already predetermined whether or not there will be an earthquake in San Francisco on November 17. However, since I’m not a Laplacian demon (or God), I don’t know if there will be an earthquake in San Francisco on November 17. If I visit San Francisco on that day, I am taking a chance that there will be an earthquake.
Joseph says, “Seculars are simply left with either pure materialistic determinism or pure chance, depending on which component of the disaster you are looking at. An earthquake in San Francisco can be explained by pure physical determinism.”
I am not familiar with the term “material determinism.” Are there atheists who believe in material determinism? If there are, I wonder who or what they think is the cause of material determinism.
Joseph, you said that an earthquake in San Francisco can be explained by pure physical determinism. But I think all natural phenomena, including earthquakes, are chance effects. I think the formation and movement of tectonic plates were/are not predetermined. I do not think the cracks of the earth crust and folds occur according to any predetermined plan(?). Physicists say about the principle of uncertainty. They say the movements of sub-atomic particles are not predetermined. Scientists (and even God, if any) cannot predict the exact place of a specific particle at a specific time.
I think we are all the products of chance. The meeting of a specific sperm with a specific egg at a specific time seems to be a chance. Buddha explained all the happenings in human lives and the world with Karma. Karma is a different name of determinism. Buddha borrowed the term and concept of Karma from Hinduism. Hindi used Karma to explain and perpetuate the Caste system. (“People of lower caste are so born because they have sinned in the previous lives. But if they serve the people of upper caste and submit to them loyally, they would be reborn as higher caste in the next life.”)
I think Buddhism is as much irrational and misleading as Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. The good point of Buddhism is known as that Buddhism is a peace-seeking philosophy and thus it bans war and force. But I think we cannot earn peace by advocating peace. I believe peace comes when one is strong enough to drive out rouges. If a nation is weak, rouge nations never leave the weak alone no matter how ardently the weak believe in peace. I think strong leadership and strong power are the essential for peace. I believe that pacifists bring wars, not peace.
Buddha was against private ownership. Buddha taught his followers homeless life. Buddha and his followers were mendicants—begging monks. Buddha taught his followers not to purse the happiness of this world for the eternal nirvana in the afterlife. Buddhism resonates with socialism or communism in the point it bans private ownership. So many Buddhists are socialists. Buddha taught his disciples to discard (give up) all sort of secular happiness and desire (especially sex) for eternal happiness. So Buddha was a fundamental anti-secularist. I wonder what part of Buddhism is appealed to many Western secularists. I hope to hear the reason from Joseph.
I think equality is not the principle of existence of things. Leftists are obsessed by the idea that all people should be equal especially in the income or social status (in spite of the various different abilities and characteristics of individuals). Socialism based on the presumption that humans can give up egoism or personal greed. I hope SR discusses more about capitalism and socialism.
Buddha explained all the happenings in human lives and the world with Karma. Karma is a different name of determinism.
Buddhist teachers do not explain it that way. The specific terms are action [karma], cause, and result. Any action we take sets off a chain of causes, short and long term, that eventually bring forth results for the individual that took the action, but when, where, what results will accrue for the individual is indeterminate.
We are not always talking here about the immediate results you can see. Many actions, good or ill, simply cannot “ripen” on that time frame. Thus world leaders who can wage war largely do not see the personal results of their responsibility for thousands of deaths in the short term. This is so even if they fall from power or get convicted of war crimes because no one lifetime can process all the results of such powerful actions.
What is commonly called “karma” in the West is only the result part of the process. When, where, and what the results will be is indeterminate because they must interact with other causes and conditions throughout the entire process of “ripening”.
Because of this, if we are aware of the process, we can take further actions that will change the results for us, even to the point of “purifying” the prior actions and preventing them from ripening, if that ripening is not about to occur immediately. Since we are constantly acting, we are constantly adding new causal chains to the process, and our actions are not totally determined by the causes that surround us–we do have choice in the matter.
Buddha was against private ownership. Buddha taught his followers homeless life. Buddha and his followers were mendicants—begging monks. Buddha taught his followers not to purse the happiness of this world for the eternal nirvana in the afterlife. Buddhism resonates with socialism or communism in the point it bans private ownership.
Nonsense. He placed no such strictures on Buddhist “householders” who were also his followers. Monks and nuns are full time “professionals” whose situation allows them to devote more of their actions to purifying karma and achieving “realization” [which does have stages in all Buddhist traditions and its depth must usually be cultivated over several lifetimes].
But monks and nuns must eat, and householders can do far more about their own karmic processes by giving alms than they can through their personal actions alone, because they are linking the results of their actions in this life to “professionals” whose own actions are considerably more powerful, causally. This is due to the concentrated time and effort monks and nuns can devote to the problem.
Monks and nuns take several hundred “vows” to aid this concentrated effort and increase the casual power of their acts. Laypeople can take the first five of these [which are the most important and do not include vows of either poverty or total celebacy] and they are encouraged to take at least one vow of their own choice from among those five. By doing so, they increase the causal power of their actions and speed up their own process of realization to some degree.
Buddhist practicioners have political views, of course, and–since they are shaped by the understanding of action, cause, and result–they generally do not favor violence or obsessive wealth accumulation beyond our really very modest needs. But the political views are beside the point and have far more variety than you assert.
It is the difference between objective and subjective probability…If I visit San Francisco on that day, I am taking a chance that there will be an earthquake.
This is a distinction without a difference and an example [coin flipping] that does not match the problem, as your last statement shows. In the example I am responsible for both flips of the coin, but I’m not responsible for the earthquake and the causes of the earthquake have no direct impact on my personal choices.
This is a distinction without a difference and an example [coin flipping] that does not match the problem, as your last statement shows. In the example I am responsible for both flips of the coin, but I’m not responsible for the earthquake and the causes of the earthquake have no direct impact on my personal choices.
You’re missing the point. The point is that determinism is compatible with the idea of subjective probability based on incomplete knowledge. You can still take chances in a deterministic universe.
You can take a chance, but you cannot make any causal link between my decision to go to San Francisco and the earthquake there. And in a deterministic universe at some point they must link. Where does that decision come from in deterministic universe, and if there is a deterministic causal chain for my decision where and when does it connect to the causal chain for the earthquake? If this is not the case then there must by an infinite number of causal chains, one for every event.
In the Christian tradition, the natural world is itself affected by the Fall, and hence is disordered. Catastrophes aren’t part, in the Christian view, of God’s original plan for the world. Just as human evil is ultimately the result of the corruption of human nature that occurred at the Fall of Adam, so too disasters and the harm they cause are a result of the Fall as well. We live in a fallen world — according to the Christian tradition. As St. Paul puts it in the New Testament, “all creation groans” in expectation of redemption.
Now, it is possible that the Christian tradition is full of hooey on this. It could be wrong. But it isn’t incoherent. Christians understand that they don’t live in the world as God intended it — they live in a world marred by sin. Sometimes that marring manifests in human beings doing very bad things to each other — the downside of human beings having freewill is that they get to do things that God doesn’t want them to do. Sometimes that marring manifests itself in catastrophes and storms and disease.
There is a very interesting story in the New Testament where the Apostles basically ask Jesus a variation on the question that Heather MacDonald keeps posing on this blog. A tower fell in the Judean town of Silaom. The Apostles asked Jesus why the tower fell on those people — were they particularly sinful? And Jesus says, no, they weren’t any more sinful than the apostles were. Sometimes bad just just happens. The proper response to that bad stuff is to remember that each person’s day of judgment (the day when they will face death) may come much sooner than each of us thinks, as a result of forces we can’t control or predict.
Pretty good advice, I’d say.
Of course, God could come and do what Ms. MacDonald evidently thinkks he should do if he does in fact exist: intervene dramatically in the world and remove the effects of the marring of creation. The standard Christian answer to that expectation is: wait for it. It is coming. Jesus began the breakthrough through his life and ministry and death and resurrection. He will complete it at this return. Until then, Christians are left in a world that still waits for the full consumation of the Kingdom of God — a world where people have free will and are thus empowered to do good or evil, a world where natural disasters and plagues and all sorts of unpleasant things occur. And a world where Christians are called to work to love our neighbors, to help them when disaster strikes, to grieve with them when tragedy falls and to rejoice with them in the hope that the Kingdom is coming (“thy Kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven,” as the Lord’s prayer puts it).
Again, Christianity may just be full of hooey about all this. But it isn’t incoherent, it isn’t stupid. Some of the best minds in Western civilization have written on this — both in words and in musical composition. It boggles my mind that Ms. MacDonald hasn’t run across this before.
Joseph, you seem to be a devout Buddhist.
So you believe in karma, previous life, future life, transmigration, paradise, and hell? At least you seem to be a karma specialist. Can you please explain the San Francisco earthquake victims and 9-11 victims with your karma theory? Can you explain the victims of child abuse, rape, traffic accident, airplane crash, etc. with karma? Have you sold your reason for karma?
Buddha thought he could save all people from all kinds of sin and pain and agony. Buddha thought that he “should” save all humanity from this secular world of sin and agony and lead them to a perfect world where there is only utmost happiness with no pain or agony at all. Buddha thought that the way to the perfect world is to discard secular happiness and desire of this world. But I criticize the “way” of Buddha because I think life itself consists of all kinds of happiness and unhappiness.
Life is precious because we live just once. If humans never die (according to the transmigration), Buddhists should thank murderers because they help people evade the opportunity to commit sin in this world. The earlier a person dies or be killed, the better. If a person is murdered, Buddhists should conclude that he/she was murdered because of his/her sin of previous life.
We need to be good to others (as long as they do not intend to harm us). This is the secular principle of live and let live in this world. We do not do good to others for paradise or because a third person in the sky watches us 24/7.
Joseph, do you think life can be all happiness and success without sadness or failure? Do you believe in Buddha’s paradise? If you do, you are indoctrinated by another irrational utopianism. Utopia just does not exist. I define religion as any irrational utopianism. Socialism, communism, and Buddhism are utopianism and thus religons. But I do not object that you pursue Buddhist Utopia. Good luck.
Broadly speaking the issue is one of When Bad Things Happen to Good People. I mentioned before about the interaction of your own action with other causes and conditions through time. The way the causal chain from an action works resembles compound interest. If it is significantly delayed by other causes and conditions through past lives, even a small evil action can have a huge result, as can a small good action.
The lesson to be drawn from this is that however good our behavior is in this life, we do not know what is on our books from the past lives. Because of them, we might easily die a sudden vioent death that has no immediate explanation in this life. Therefore, life is precious and we have no time to waste working toward the development of “realization”.
The important point is that the suffering of good people is simply inexplicable by a secular view. All such things are arbitrary in the absence of a religious explanation of one kind or another. Besides my believing the Buddhist explanations to be true, I think they are, objectively, the most systematic such explanations.
One thing that is important to consider: several thousand people died in a few hours on 9/11. Several thousand more have died since as a result of our response to 9/11. Are these deaths any less “tragic”? I don’t think so. The 9/11 deaths were shocking to the living because of their suddenness, like an earthquake or a tsunami, but just as many are violently dead, from the same chain of contemporary events in the interval since. We simply don’t notice because it hasn’t happened all at once.
Dont’t waste your time arguing with Joseph, his buddhism is just a pretense, a gimmick in the toolbox of the professional troll he is, likely from the pharm industry or somesuch.