Will Bill O’Reilly or anyone else who saw the hand of God in the safe landing of US Airways Flight 1549 this January please explain why God chose not to save Continental Connection Flight 3407, which plunged into a house outside of Buffalo last night, killing all 49 people on board and a resident on the ground?
Among the explanations which will not be accepted: “humans cannot possibly fathom God’s mysterious ways.” Oh yes they can, apparently—when something good happens. Having found proof of God’s love in the safe conclusion of US Airways Flight 1549, believers cannot now turn around and claim that God’s ways are veiled just because something disastrous happens. If it’s legitimate to infer beneficence from a happy outcome, it is equally plausible to infer malice or at least indifference from a negative outcome. You can’t pick and choose the actions in which you find God’s will transparent.
First of all, in the eyes of God, death is neither a good thing nor a bad thing. It is merely a portal between this life and the next. It is we finite mortals that have made death a bad thing. We do not fully comprehend what is on the other side, so we dread it.
Think of death in terms of graduating from high school. Many people look forward to graduation. Others dread it. It involves moving on into the unknown. That can be frightening, especially for those who are not prepared for life after high school. One thing is for certain, however. Once through the portal of graduation, few people ever want to return.
Second, no, we don’t fully know the mind of an all-knowing, all-loving God. Why does a bullet take one soldier, but not his buddy standing right next to him? I could offer a hundred possible reasons why God permitted one flight to crash and the other to survive, but only God knows for sure.
Which brings me to my third point: if you really, really want to understand the difference between the fates of the two flights and why one was saved and the other was allowed to perished, ask God about it. He is very good at answering prayers. If you are sincere in your desire to know, he will tell you. If you’re not sincere, he probably won’t — though he just might. You’ll never know until you try.
Ice brought that plane down. Listen to the tapes. There was another plane, exactly like this one that went down in NW Indiana years ago due to icing. God had no role in this crash. God is perfect, he can do no wrong.
#1 up there, it is not Obama’s stimulus, it is Pelosi’s. Obama does not have the intelligence to grasp economics. He only has the intelligence to run a campaign, which he is doing again.
As a Christian … I too cringe when people claim that the “Hand of God” helped avert a tragedy. God is love when tragedy strikes AND when tragedy is averted. I don’t pretend to have the reasons why some people are spared and others die. I also take offense at some of the postings using the ill-advised comments of people to show that either God doesn’t exist or God doesn’t care. God’s existence or His compassion has absolutely nothing to do with life’s circumstances.
“If it’s legitimate to infer beneficence from a happy outcome, it is equally plausible to infer malice or at least indifference from a negative outcome.”
Not necessarily. Some acts–whether divine or human–are supererogatory, that is, not required by duty. If I perform such an act for X but not for Y, it doesn’t follow than I’m indifferent or malicious towards Y. For example, I may give to one charity and not another. That doesn’t mean that I’m demonstrating malice or indifference to the other, even if I have the resources to give to the other charity.
Heather,
Why are there no atheists in fox holes?
The argument works exactly the same way in reverse. If something good happens, it’s only a random blip in the evidence. If something bad happens, it’s conclusive proof there is no God.
If meaning cannot validly be inferred from joyful events, lack of meaning cannot be validly inferred from painful ones.
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I only read the first half of the comments, so for all I know there was a great response in the latter half somewhere. But if there wasn’t, I’d like to point out how mindboggling stupid this line of thought is. I will allow that many theists are a bit too quick with the hand of God stuff–if anything at all good happens, they assume it must be the direct result of divine intervention.
But it’s not unreasonable to think (assuming you believe in God) that Flight 1549 was saved with at least a bit of help from God. After all, when airplanes crash, there are usually at least some serious injuries. But to use the fact that God didn’t save Flight 3407 as justification to throw doubt on the existence of God, or divine intervention is absurd. Considering all the unknowable variables in the two situations, can anyone possibly guess why God would save one or the other? And, of course, even the most ardent theist wouldn’t claim to know for sure whether divine intervention took place.
So basically, the question before believers is: “if any divine intervention took place, why would only one airplane be affected? Oh, and you know virtually nothing about the circumstances regarding each flight.”
Just a stupid question. And it deserves all the stupid answers it’s gotten.
He lets us do what we want including make airplanes which occasionally fall out of the sky. He did not twist anyone’s arm to build it or get on it.
Straw men.
It’s nice and all that you all are so kind as to educate poor little believers like me and my ilk about such modern miracles as statistics and double-blind studies.
Why is God (and religion in general) responsible for the foolish errors of those who love him? Just because someone’s overjoyed family member credits God’s intervention for a wonderful and skilled landing doesn’t mean that that landing was a direct intervention by His hand. Likewise, the comment that the dead in this recent disaster (cute word, that, etymologically speaking) were perhaps not in God’s favor is likewise farcical.
Death is not the worst thing that can happen to a person, both from a humanist and theological point of view. From neither point of view is death even “evil” — though people like to make that assignment through fear. From a truly secular point of view, death is just the cessation of metabolic function. Inevitable. For a religionist, death is not a sign of divine displeasure — it’s part of the plan of God. Just because people make a fuss about it doesn’t make it “unjust” or “unmerciful”.
“That’s not why I pray… It doesn’t change God; it changes me.” (Shadowlands)
You’re asking the wrong question. If you ask ‘Is God just and loving?’ the Christian answer would be yes, although bad things happen to good people all the time: innocents die horribly in plane crashes, babies starve to death or suffer terrible abuse, and lightning strikes down the coach of the high school volleyball team. It comes down, I think, to Václav Havel’s comment on the nature of hope. According to him, a man who spent much of his adult life in Soviet prisons and mental hospitals, hope isn’t the childish belief all will turn out all right in the end. We know it usually doesn’t. Hope, according to Havel, is the belief there is a point and purpose to our lives and work. Thus, in my opinion, anyway, as a believer, we live by faith and hope. There is a reason for tragedy, although it may not be within our means to see it.
Sweet. That better than I have been saying it. Meaning is the Achilles’ heel for the atheist. They ask for objective proof for a God, but forget that, in a universe that they believe was an accident, they have no proof for there having any meaning for their existence. Accidents by definition, in the Darwinian world they live in, by definition have no purpose or meaning so neither do they. Ask for object proof for that they have meaning and they have no answer.
If theists think God had a hand in either, then logically, wouldn’t they direct you to ask God about this?
Who linked to this post? I see a lot of not-the-usual-suspects here in the comments.
And Re#102 who asked, “Heather,
Why are there no atheists in fox holes?”
I’m not Heather, so I hope that you’ll do the good Christian thing and forgive me, but I was in fox holes a few years back in Iraq and was just as much a non-believer as I am now. Whoever said that there are no atheists in fox holes was an f’ing ‘tard. I would, however, wager that there are no atheists during the playoffs.
I’m a catholic but I also reject the standard public reaction to terrible acts of God (even among believers): “How could God let this happen?” I agree with the statement that ‘humans cannot possibly fathom God’s mysterious ways’, and I want to explain why.
It’s a pretty spelled-out tenet of Christianity that God saves sinners (i.e., there may have been people on 1549 that, if he could, man would judge as ‘not worth saving’, yet were saved). God also allows the innocent to suffer death (keyword allow) (e.g., Christ, the saints, and maybe even the 9-11 widow on the flight to Buffalo).
That said, it is impossible to know God’s ultimate rationale behind any ‘Act of God’, whether it involve amazing rescues, or devasting death. This is because we cannot judge as God judges, unless we know everything he knows.
Bill O’Reilly seeing the hand of God in one event doesn’t prove God’s love to others. The whole point of faith is not to prove God, it’s to prove that someone believes. The point stated above that God allows good people to suffer death, and forgives sinners takes proof out of the equation, because both concepts are illogical to man, and logic reigns supreme in the rational mind of man.
Faith, however, cannot to be proved, and therefore imposed on non-believers through logic. If it were, we could argue people into believing, because logic is irrefutable. It takes freedom and choice out of the equation. Faith (and love) is chosen by one person, freely in his own heart. That’s why logic and rationality ends where faith begins.
By the way, your columns and books are outstanding. I’m glad I found this blog!
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Did I miss something? Did O’Reilly explain why God spared the passengers on Flight 1549?
“I would, however, wager that there are no atheists during the playoffs.”
That would make you a Theist would it not. If there are “NO” atheists during the playoffs. Great Roger Hallman admits, at least during playoffs, that there is a God. Only a part time atheist I guess.
Why, all of a sudden, are we suffering an infestation of religious commentators? (Including people citing the book of the evil god Yahweh/Jahovah…)
Heather – Read “The Invisible Hand” by R.C. Sproul and your question where your question is addressed. And God Bless.
True, theists need to look at the world the way it really is.
“Yet though He slay me, still I will trust Him.”
Mercy and Grace are difficult to understand. Sometimes we don’t get what we deserve, other times we get what we don’t deserve. His ways are higher than our ways.
(1) There is asymmetry in how the Hebrew and Christian sacred texts treat human suffering and flourishing. While God’s covenant with Israel in the Pentateuch promises blessing for faithfulness and ruin for unfaithfulness, that often is not the case. Job, Jesus, and Jesus’ apostles, suffer. However, the relevant texts deny their suffering is due to their wrongdoing. Sometimes that suffering obtains a great good (Jesus) but not always (Job). What the examples do suggest is: (i) God does not owe people a life without great suffering; (ii) the rationality of serving and worshiping God are not a simple function of whether we avoid suffering in this life. (2) Until modern times, the ‘Calvinist’ idea to which Jon Rowe refers would have been intelligible to most Christians: human sin and its consequences (e.g., death, ignorance, weakness of will, subjection to the devil) have corrupted the created order. To the extent that humans are given a reprieve from those consequences, that is a gift. It is not something that God owes humans. (3) The death of others is painful and sorrowful, but death is not the worst thing that can happen to people. Arguably, living a good life even if it is cut short is preferable to living a corrupt life for a long time. This is why conservatives lauded the movies 300 and Flight 93. A decent theology should instruct parishioners about the fragility of life and prepare them for death through practical teachings that enable them to live good lives now. The significance of Flight 3407 (and Flight 1549) is more than whether the passengers died.
The answer to the problem of evil:
What do you care?
This post is a bit of a silly rant. I’m not really religious (haven’t been to church in over 30 years, haven’t read the Bible in at least that long, etc. etc) – but I do believe there is a God. I see him everytime I look at the beauty of this planet or gaze into the night sky … Or ponder the infiniteness of space and time …
So … I can’t explain why God chose to let the one perish any more than he let the other live. But I DO KNOW that it was his hand responsible for both.
Sorry if you don’t accept this explanation – even sorrier that the wonder of this world doesn’t impress you enough to be convinced that only God could have created it.
We are simple mortals. How can we understand what God may be thinking? It was simply their time.
It’s OK to ask questions concerning the mysteries of the universe and its Creator, but those questions should be couched in terms of respect and humility. We are the finite seeking to understand the infinite, and as a result we will never fully understand God–any more than a baby can wrap its arms around the earth. But through humility, prayer, and steeping ourselves in the Word of God, truth becomes clearer on the fundamental questions.
Christian theology accepts death as part of life. Many feel their faith challenged when faced with death, but the Bible is clear on this question. Psalm 116:15 tells us, “Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints.” Death is not an end for the believer, merely a transition. In the next life, we will be perfect, sinless, with new bodies. More importantly, we will be closer to God. In that sense, it is not surprising he is happy to welcome us home.
None of us know when He will call us home. Jesus spoke of his return as being akin to “a thief in the night,” and “no one knows the day or the hour.” Accept him as Lord, live for him, and be at peace with another hundred years of this world, or to go be with him in 5 minutes.
As for “good” and “bad” things happening, wisdom requires a great deal of humility. Rev. 16:7 says, “Just and true are all your judgments . . .” Paul writes to the Philippians (4:4) “Rejoice always. Again, I say, ‘Rejoice.’ ” Our proper response to both events, the saved plane and the lost planes, is to humbly accept God’s will, and to praise him–yes, even when it seems something bad has happened. Remember our humble place next to an eternal omniscience and total love, a being with all knowledge and perfect goodness.
Shorter Heather:
“I am an atheist who thinks she is the first to ask the question of why bad things happen to good people, or at least people who are probably not statistically worse than others.”
For bonus points, she appoints Bill O’Reilly the spokeman for all Christians. Um, I don’t even follow the pope or Billy Graham, let alone O’Reilly.
The real question of this thread is not why did those people die and the others did not. We are all already dead, we are just waiting for the coroner to determine our cause of death.
The real question of this thread is why do people die instead of not die? Why is their death? Why is their suffering?
I do not see how the existance of death, suffering and evil is incompatible with the existance of any diety whether they be merely very powerful or all-powerful.
After thinking on this, the answer could be very, very simple.
Anyone remember the movie, “Spirit of St Louis”, with Jimmy Stewart as Lindbergh? Throughout the movie Lindbergh shrugged off references to God’s oversight.
Then, as he’s coming in to Orly, he’s exhausted, he has nothing left, he says, “Oh, God, please help me.”
Then he lands the plane.
Maybe Sully asked for help in the last few moments of his flight, and the gal didn’t.
To quote Al Pacino in “The Devil’s Advocate”… “Free will… it is a b**h.”
People look for the hand of God in anything they can’t explain. “It’s God’s Will” is always an acceptable explanation of the unexplainable. I don’t see anything wrong with that.
@Grant Canyon
HotAir linked us here, you lucky atheists! I’m pleased to see people have been quite polite and mostly well-spoken in their disagreements.
Interesting that you refer to the Bible as “the book of the evil god Yahweh/Jahovah[sic]”. If I infer your meaning correctly it is not that you believe YHWH exists, but that you consider him to be an evil fiction, as presented in his book. I’d be interested (really) as to how you can construe the Bible — in its totality — as the story of an evil God. For example, to point to his destruction of Sodom and Gemorrah, without taking into account that every man in the cities was trying to commit rape, would be a disingenuous argument. God is clear from the time of man’s fall from grace that life on earth will be hard, but that we will be released from it through physical death; and that a way of salvation and eternal, blissful life will be provided (Old Testament) / has been provided (New Testament) — and furthermore that we don’t even have to do anything to deserve that salvation! If that’s your idea of evil, I’m a little flummoxed.
Christians believe that God created the world. God is good. He chose to create us & gave us a beautiful world in which to live. He gave us the ability to make decisions. He only had one stipulation: do not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good & evil or you will surely die. From that time on we all get what we deserve: death and the world was also cursed as a result of sin (hence all the imperfections in our world). Our bodies will all die (some of natural old age, others prematurely in plane, car, bike crashes etc.). Our souls, however, will live forever. Christians believe that we have a second chance at life the way it was meant to be due to Christ’s perfection and atonement for our imperfections on the cross. Everyone’s body will die, and everyone’s soul will live on. Where will your soul live? Heaven or hell? If you seek deep down inside, you will realize that God would be just to let us all die, as we mess everything up. The question should be not why is there bad, but why is there any good?
@Chey
Absolutely. Check out my #98
I wonder if these three guys think God exists:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,492385,00.html
Heather Mac Donald: Your assumption is totally absurd.
Flight 1549 = Good God; but Flight 3407 = Bad God, because you accept the misguided opinion of those who do not understand the philosophy??
Accidents happen. Period. They don’t negate God. But many misguided fools can apparently keep you from understanding Him.
Thanks for playin’!
Hiraghm:
That reminds me of a story of a fighter pilot in ‘Nam. His plane got hit and he was going down. He was fighting the controls and pleaded to God to help and then he was quickly able to control the plane. Then he thought God did not do this, I did this. Then the plane went out of control again and the pilot thought he was sorry and the plane was back in ‘his’ control.
too busy now, but catch me after church on Sunday and I’ll run it down for you.
Come prepared with your mind open.
God’s hand was not in either of those events. I believe in God, but just because Bill O’Rielly say God was involved, doesn’t make it true. Both events, as with 99.99999999% of all such events are a playing out of cause and effect. Mr. O’Reilly, along with many others, claimed flight 1549 was a “miracle”. Anyone who understands the biblical view (and Bill O’Reilly does not) would understand that God uses miracle in very specific situations, and as fantastic as the landing of a huge plane in a river is, it is not a miracle by the biblical standard.
Simple: God does not direct anything, anytime, anywhere. If you believe in a God, then you believe he created everything. Fine. But, we have free will and that means he may have created everything, but he also was good enough to allow us to be ourselves. Therefore, the first pilot is to blame for saving everyone; the second for killing everyone.
Btw, what a silly question anyway. there is a reason why it is said that God works in mysterious ways. and that is because if you are omniscient you could have a million good reasons to do something one way rather than another. When one understands why stepping on a bug in prehistoric times could change history forever, you might be smart, and even deep enough to grasp the infinite possibilities as to why God might save one plane and not another, all assuming of course that the hand of God was present in either case. Even O’Reilly didn’t pretend to know WHY the one plane was spared, he simply claimed it was spared by God.
Atheists love to pretend they are deeper, smarter, than regular people. But most of the time i find them remarkably shallow and unimaginative.
Let me shorten it for all of you. Faith is nonfalsifiable. That means there is no way to disprove faith. Period. There is no logical argument, no mathematical proof, no science than can ever disprove the possibility of a omniscient and omnipotent God. Indeed, you can’t even prove him to be bad, as is often the obsession with atheists. And if you can only make peace with that undeniable reality, you can do the “getting on with your life” that atheists always claim that their lack of faith allows them to do.
So to abuse the phraseology on your silly bus ads: “You can’t prove there is no God. So accept it and move on.”
The Lord gives and the Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.
Most of us would agree that if someone slices another person’s belly open that it is a horrible deed. Most of us would further agree that if the person doing the slicing happens to be a surgeon removing a tumor then it is an act of kindness.
God’s responsibility spans all of us that have ever existed, do exist or will exist and much more. To attempt to assign motives based on our finite perspective is the height of arrogance and foolishness.
Some of God’s goals can be achieved with the gentleness of a feather. Others require the seeming violence of a scalpel. Just like we learn to respect fire by burning our tender little hands, and the old quote “he who made kittens put snakes in the grass”, we learn some things from kindness and others from pain. God teaches us all the lessons we need to learn, whether we understand his methods or not. In all things his will is done regardless of how we choose to accept, deny or chatter on about it.
Many blessings
-G
I would consider to both to be miracles. One instance a plane beats the odds; the other a plane also beats the odds, but the outcomes are diametrically opposed. Because I don’t necessarily understand the larger context of an event does not mean that one is bad and the other is good. Perhaps the small commute plane had folks in it who were in fact done with thepurpose of their lives (whether they knew it or not). I don’t know nor would I try and pretend that I do. What I do know is that one plane crash had everyone on board live and the other had everyone on board die. Any other attribution is the sign of human folly.
“Why, all of a sudden, are we suffering an infestation of religious commentators?”
Um, maybe because the post itself called out for Christians to explain…???
An odd explanation of the problem of evil through free will.
Relatively simple when it is man’s inhumanity to man… a little more complicated when it is nature’s inhumanity to man.
The Ruler of this World = Satan. (this World = the Cosmos = the Universe) (Jesus calls Satan the Ruler of this World in John). Also, the Ruler of this World is synomynous with death, since all things die. God gave all his angels free will in the beginning. Lucifer was the grandest of them all in Heaven. Then, when he set foot (of his own free will) outside the Gates of Heaven, there was a really “Big Bang.” Conclusion: Satan kills and, of his own free will, inflicts evil, not God. It is beneath God’s dignity to get in a fist fight with Satan, so He is waiting patiently for Satan to learn his lesson. Satan’s action is its own reward (the Universe will either end in a Big Crunch, or a Cold Death). Christ was sent to save us from Satan (David and Goliath)–he stood up to him, even though it meant being crucified and descending into the fires of Hell (Sign of Jonah).
By the way, I already know that is not a traditional view of Christianity, so don’t bother pointing that out.
Relative to the flights, please note that both flights had “bad things” happen. Only one had a good outcome due to circumstance of a river nearby and skill of the pilots and crew. Rarely does God either directly prevent or cause a tragedy.
It is clear from the beginning of time bad things happen in this world and to all people. We should not look at events from the standpoint of whether God is angry with this person or another and therefore chooses to punish or reward in life’s circumstances. Bad things happen because God is not here as he would prefer but is hidden from mankind and deals with people initially in a very limited and focused way. His focus is on Man’s sin and his evil nature that rejects God and other authority, chooses self interest, and wants to live independent of God. As a result of this nature of sin and our rejection of God, the world is lost and in a fallen state where many evil and bad things happen.
God deals with mankind first and foremost concerning the sin nature and whether the person will believe & trust God or reject God’s call and live independent from God. Jesus Christ provided the way for any individual to be reconciled to God. You will only see and understand God working as He deals with your sin.
For His Glory. Without bad, you can not recognize good.
@Kevin
How does an atheist define evil? He can’t. Time, matter and chance cannot make something evil. If you define it according to you that may work for you. Unfortunately some ‘groups’ thought 911 was good. Who decides? The atheist? The non atheist? The Muslim? The Christian? It’s the great ‘says who?’ Atheist have no answer. Hitler is not going to bow his atheistic knee to a good atheist. And the good atheist has no ground to tell him he’s wrong. After all Hitler was just doing what he believed in his heart was right. If there is evil there has to be good and if there is good and evil there must be something more than just what the individual believes is good and evil. We have to say Hitler was wrong even if he would have ruled the world. But if there is good and evil there must be a moral law deciding between the two. If that is so there must be a moral lawgiver. But if there is no moral lawgiver there is no moral law and if there is no moral law there is no good and if there is no good there is no evil. What is the atheist question?
Each of you douchebags will fall on your knees and pray (to someone or something, e.g. “God, if you’re up there…”)when the s%*t hits the fan in your life. You talk a big talk, but will be quick to go against every conviction you profess here when disaster strikes. Just like the same pu$$ies like Dukakis that say “I’m against the death penalty” but know that if some scumbag raped and killed their wife/daughter, then he would personally find the scumbag and put a cap in him. Losers, all of you who act like belief in a God is stupid, and that prayer is stupid.
Who cares about the two flights? Why not compare the Hudson flight with a building collapse in Nigeria? There’s no reason to compare the two. The are millions of people dying and being saved every day all over the world. And there is no good logical reason why we cannot see a disastrous outcome as “God’s mysterious ways” while praising a positive outcome. The existence of God precedes the interpretation of the event, and in that case there is no logical problem. If one does not believe in God, one cannot criticize it either since you must engage with the proposition on its own terms. It’s like criticizing a scene in Lord of the Rings as “unrealistic”.