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Rationally Speaking: February 2005
This column can be posted for free on any appropriate web site and reprinted
in hard copy by permission. If you are interested in receiving the html
code or the text, please send an email.
God did it, or did He?
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In 1755 a great earthquake struck the city of Lisbon, in Portugal. As a
result, roughly 100,000 people died, in the process sparking a new
debate about an old and deep theological dilemma: if (the
Christian) God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good, how could
this happen? The answer, such as it is, has always been that we simply
can’t understand how such calamities fit into God’s plan, but they do,
so we should simply have faith in the supreme being and not be as
“arrogant” as constantly questioning His plans.
Of course, any human being who deliberately causes the death of
thousands, regardless of the stated motive or “higher” purpose, is
branded as a horrible criminal, hunted down and prosecuted to the full
extent of human law. Rational people feel rather frustrated by this
sort of nonsensical double standard, and one defense against the
irrationality of the world is, as Mel Brooks once said, a good sense of
humor. If anything good came out of the Lisbon earthquake was that it
inspired the French philosopher Voltaire to write what became a
classical masterpiece of world literature, Candide. In it, Voltaire
makes fun of the simplistic attitude that we live “in the best of all
possible worlds,” as affirmed by one of the main characters, Dr.
Pangloss (loosely based on the philosophy of Leibniz), and clearly
implied by theological “explanations” of natural disasters.
Recently, I have witnessed two more examples of “Pangloss’ syndrome,”
one in response to an event publicized throughout the world, the other
while attending a religious gathering celebrating a rite of passage.
The scopes of the two episodes are wildly different, and yet they
reflect the same irrational, and highly dangerous, attitude about what
happens in the world and why.
The largest event was, of course, the tsunami that caused two hundred
thousand people to die in southeast Asia. For several days after the
tragedy there was a serious debate in the media, eerily similar to the
one that moved Voltaire’s pen: how could God allow such a tragedy to
occur? Christian theologians, Jewish rabbis, and Muslim clerics all
gave the same answer: we don’t know, but it must have been for a higher
good. Some of these self-appointed experts about nothing went so far as
to claim that perhaps the people who died were in fact somehow
undeserving, and that the tsunami was God’s punishment for their sins.
A colossal and outrageously insulting instance of blaming the victim,
if ever there was one! It is hard for me to imagine the degree of
mental gymnastics that one must perform in these cases to save one’s
cherished pet religious views. This sort of events must cause an almost
unbearable degree of cognitive dissonance, and one has to be
particularly skilled at fooling oneself in order not to perceive the
sheer absurdity of the whole plot. And yet, it seems to work for
hundreds of millions of people the world over. This attitude
“explained” Lisbon, the tsunami, the 9/11 attacks on the US, and
essentially anything else bad that happens in the world: it is either
our own fault, or it is for the pursuit of God’s inscrutable (but
certainly supremely good) plan.
The same bizarre logic applies in reverse, of course: just in the same
way as God is never responsible for anything bad happening to us, He
takes all (or most) of the credit whenever something good happens. A
good gig if you can get it! The second example I witnessed falls into
the category of “God did it (because it’s good).” I was at a religious
ceremony celebrating an important rite of passage for a young girl,
followed by a feast at which everybody was having a jolly good time. At
one point, the father of the girl took the microphone and told us a
very poignant story: his daughter had actually been born very
prematurely, and both her and her mother had barely survived the
ordeal. Moreover, the girl had been in desperate conditions in the
hospital after birth, and the doctors had little hope that she would
make it. However, some doctor had the daring and brilliant idea of
trying a new experimental drug, after having asked the parents’
permission. It worked, and the result was the beautiful young woman
that we were now celebrating.
Had the story ended there it would have been a wonderful and moving
tale of human compassion and ingenuity. But of course the father had to
go on and add that, although he was sure the doctors had some merit for
the final outcome, really this was a clear example of a miracle, a
direct intervention of God to save his child. There are so many things
that are simply wrong with all of this that it is, again, hard to
imagine how perfectly normal, functional, people can sincerely embrace
this sort of “reasoning.” To begin with, why does God get the credit
for solving the problem, but not for creating it in the first place?
Second, isn’t such an unwarranted shift of credit insulting for the
doctors who did the actual hard work and took on a huge responsibility
in case of failure? More generally, if we all (including doctors)
adopted such attitude, wouldn’t that spell the end of any attempt to
better humanity’s condition? If it’s all in God’s hands (why does He
need hands, anyway?), then why bother? Which is, of course, exactly the
attitude of so-called Christian scientists (an oxymoron of grotesque
proportions), who leave their children to die because they think that
all disease is the result of poor faith and can be cured only by
restoring the latter.
I am no Voltaire, and this essay is no Candide. Therefore, I will leave
it to the great French Enlightenment writer to make a final comment:
“Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.” We would
find ourselves in a much better world if more of us lived by such words.
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Massimo's other ramblings can be found at his Skeptic
Web.
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