{"id":1264,"date":"2009-01-14T13:32:10","date_gmt":"2009-01-14T21:32:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secularright.org\/wordpress\/?p=1264"},"modified":"2009-01-15T10:29:06","modified_gmt":"2009-01-15T18:29:06","slug":"gods-problem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/gods-problem\/","title":{"rendered":"God’s Problem"},"content":{"rendered":"

Several friends have recommended Martin Gardner\u2019s review<\/a> of Bart Ehrman\u2019s God\u2019s Problem in the New Criterion<\/a>, the\u00a0brilliant \u00a0journal of principled culture criticism.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 \u201cIf 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,\u201d writes Gardner.\u00a0
\n\u00a0
\nPerhaps this argument is a compelling answer to Ehrman\u2019s argument for the irreconcilability of a benevolent God and human suffering (I haven\u2019t read Ehrman\u2019s book), but it strikes me almost irrelevant to actual religious practice and belief.\u00a0 The vast majority of Christians, guided by their priests and pastors, assume a loving God who intervenes regularly in human affairs.\u00a0 Christians pray to God to cure them from cancer or protect them from a plane crash.\u00a0 (Intermediaries are also useful: A soon-to-be closed Catholic school in Brooklyn <\/a>is called Our Lady of Perpetual Help, presumably because She does provide perpetual help, but not in this case.)\u00a0 A politician and Baptist minister in Kentucky is promoting a law <\/a>requiring the state\u2019s office of homeland security to display a plaque that reads: \u201cThe safety and security of the Commonwealth cannot be achieved apart from reliance upon Almighty God.\u201d\u00a0 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 <\/a>solicitude for the country.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Gardner argues that were God to start preventing some deadly accidents, he would have to prevent all such accidents, resulting in chaos.\u00a0 The reality is far worse than that.\u00a0\u00a0 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\u2019s prayers, why he saved these children from a tsunami and not those other children.\u00a0 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 <\/a>on Sunday.\u00a0 Such an explanation requires either extraordinary narcissism on the believer\u2019s part or positing capricious injustice on the part of God.\u00a0<\/p>\n

While I am more sympathetic to Gardner\u2019s 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\u2019s intentions and actions by the use of reason strikes me as questionable, whatever its august pedigree.\u00a0 The gulf that surely yawns between a being that is self-created and that created all of reality (even if <\/em>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.\u00a0\u00a0 And why even posit as starting concepts goodness and justice?\u00a0 Those are human desires and values.\u00a0 They may be wholly irrelevant to something as massive and impenetrable as God.\u00a0\u00a0 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:<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0 1. God is unable to provide an afterlife, in which case his power seems unduly limited.
\n\u00a0\u00a0 2. God can provide an afterlife but chooses not to, in which case his goodness is tarnished.
\n\u00a0\u00a0 3. God is both able and willing to provide an afterlife.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If we\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Several friends have recommended Martin Gardner\u2019s review of Bart Ehrman\u2019s God\u2019s Problem in the New Criterion, the\u00a0brilliant \u00a0journal of principled culture criticism.\u00a0 Gardner, a math and science writer, lays out a Leibnizian explanation for life-destroying natural disasters: Any human-supportive universe … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":50,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[169,170],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1264"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/50"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1264"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1264\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1273,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1264\/revisions\/1273"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1264"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1264"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1264"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}