theodicy in the news
In the wake of the tsunami in Asia, there have been a number of articles looking at the faith questions which are raised by such large scale destruction. An article by Rowan Williams appears in today’s Age:
… the reaction of faith is, or should be, always one of passionate engagement with the lives that are left, a response that asks not for understanding but for ways of changing the situation in whatever perhaps very small ways that are open to us. The odd thing is that those who are most deeply involved - both as sufferers and as helpers - are so often the ones who spend least energy in raging over the lack of explanation. They are likely to shrug off, awkwardly and not very articulately, the great philosophical or religious questions we might want to press. Somehow, they are most aware of two things: a kind of strength and vision just to go on; and a sense of the imperative for practical service and love. Somehow in all of this, God simply emerges for them as a faithful presence. Arguments “for and against” have to be put in the context of that awkward, stubborn persistence
Paul Valent writes essentially that religion and God have nothing to do with natural disasters, and represent futile instinctive strategies to create meaning from chaos:
Religion and God play no part during survival activity. Only when no survival strategy is available is God evoked in fantasy as an omnipotent parental helper, who in exchange for being good will help. “If you get me out of this, I’ll go to church.” On the whole, though, people are realistic enough to hope for Hercules planes, not angels.
Barney Zwartz comments that the question of theodicy is essentially an exercise in missing the point
Theodicy discusses suffering as a theoretical abstraction to be justified by logical inference from an abstract philosophical deity who is reduced to a set of attributes: perfect goodness, perfect knowledge, perfect power. This philosopher’s god is a metaphysical creation of the Enlightenment for purposes of argument - the person and teaching of Jesus, for example, does not enter the discussion.
But, as Christian philosopher Stanley Hauerwas shows, for the early Christians, suffering was not a metaphysical problem needing a solution but a practical challenge needing a response of faith. Apparently it never occurred to them to question their belief in God or His goodness because they were unjustly suffering. Rather, their faith gave them direction in the face of persecution and general misfortune.
(Once again reminding me why I often find Zwartz to be bland and inoffensive in matters of faith, even while I agree with his thoughts). This article suggests that prominent Christians do not believe in an omnipotent or interventionist God
Tim Costello, the Baptist minister and chief of World Vision Australia, pondered the question amid bodies and wreckage in Sri Lanka a few days ago. He, too, nixed the idea of omnipotence. “Nature and creation have their own inexorable laws and they keep functioning apart from miraculous intervention,” he said.
“The idea that God is some divine clockmaker who can change the time and avert a crisis is not one I share. Only if you are deeply embedded with the idea of an interventionist supernatural god would you believe that God should have pulled the plug on the tsunami.”
Ken Nguyen warns that there are many who may place a different reading on the role of God in this tragedy:
We should not necessarily expect all other Judeo-Christian leaders and commentators to be so reticent or tactful. In the aftermath to last year’s Bam earthquakes, which killed more than 20,000 (mostly Muslim) Iranians, conservative American rabbi Daniel Lapin argued in the Chicago Jewish News that God dispatches natural disasters to punish those who have not embraced Judeo-Christian traditions. Noting that the US had been relatively untouched by natural disasters, Lapin wrote: “We ought to acknowledge that each day, every American derives enormous benefit from the faith of our founders and of their heirs.” So goes the pungent logic of one who believes in an interventionist God.
I recall when studying introductory theology, the question of God and evil was the one that really sent people running in circles tearing their hair out. If god is omnipotent, then the evidence of his intervention or lack of it demonstrates that he cannot be just. If God is just, then the world shows that he cannot be omnipotent.
I am considering building a discussion around this issue for our congregation next week. If anyone knows of any good material that might assist, let me know in the comments. I may post more on this as my thoughts continue.
UPDATE - See also this article in the Australian on the same issue
THE French existentialist philosopher Gabriel Marcel noted that the mysteries of suffering and evil are often used as arguments against the existence of a loving God. However, more people, he says, are turned towards God by suffering than away from him.
He also comments for the benefit of those of us who live in the so-called First World, that if there is one single conclusion forced on us by the history of mankind, it is that the growth of faith in God is not hindered by misfortune and suffering, but by satisfaction.
January 4th, 2005 at 1:27 pm
Alvin Plantinga has a recent theodicy that has caused a stir among the philosophically minded. Also, the wikipedia has some info about his argument, among others: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodicy
January 4th, 2005 at 1:39 pm
This has problems because there is no answer.
Ehy does god allow Job to suffer? We don’t know.
Jesus tells us in Luke 13:1 that people aren’t killed because they are more sinful however the episode behoves people to repent.
It does seem that people want not only a God that is a puppet master but also free will. This is contradictory.
January 4th, 2005 at 2:22 pm
Thanks for that Bryan, I had a read of some of the entry and will try to digest it a bit further.
Homer, I am not entirely sure what you are saying. I don’t think the idea of good as omnipotent is the same as a the idea of God as a puppet master. A long time ago (on Phil’s recommendation) I read Terry Lane’s “God: The Interview” (a local media identity). It devotes a great deal of attention to this question (as it basically was the reason why Lane says that he left the ministry and the church).
The problem is that the church liturgy and language has proceeded and incorporated these assumptions (that God is just and that God is omnipotent) in much of our theology and worship, so this “contradiction” becomes part of the foundation of our faith.
January 4th, 2005 at 3:01 pm
One (possibly overly simple) illustration has helped me understand how seemingly contradictory ideas can co-exist… “The ocean is a peaceful, safe place for children to play, yet it can also be devastatingly violent.” Someone who does not know the ocean may struggle to see these as truths and instead see contradictions.
January 4th, 2005 at 3:09 pm
Okay, I am going to disagree with the analogy. The statements about the ocean work because they are not absolutes. It would not work if we said that the ocean is always peaceful and safe for children but it is always dangerous.
Similarly there would be no contradiction if we said that God was only just some of the time, or that he was only omnipotent some of the time or to some extent.
In fact many of the discussions of theodicy attempt to use this distinction in some way or other - that there is some limit to the way in which God can or should intervene.
January 4th, 2005 at 7:12 pm
Hi
It’s not strictly on topic - but I wonder if This post from Graham might be relevent.
Steve
January 5th, 2005 at 10:30 pm
Mark has a good thought-provoking post (with some discussion and usual suspects) in comments at Troppo.
I agree the questions put peoples head in a spin. I agree too with your assessment of Zwartz and like you, I agree with him!
January 6th, 2005 at 9:06 am
Like so many of these arguments, is not the whole speculation underpinned by an assumption that God has the same, or similar, emotions, motivations, perspectives and psychological weaknesses as human beings? This seems a tad presumptuous to me.
If we assume that a God exists in the manner in which is accepted by the Christian, Jewish and Islamic faiths then, whilst it may be able to understand our emotions and perspectives, we are, by definition, incapable of understanding God’s. (I refrained from using the word “he” since that is a gender construct from the physical world)
To say that God either “caused” or “failed to prevent” the Tsunami is to place a human perspective on the event. If you are to accept God as omnipotent then the natural conclusion is only that God exists and the tsunami happened. ipso facto it was Gods will and that it is beyond the capacity for the human brain to comprehend why.
Surely the essence of faith is accepting that you cannot know why God chooses to act. To drift into a physical analogy, when I take the dog to the vets for an infection in it’s toenail, it cannot understand why I am taking it there and watching whilst it has pain inflicted upon it but it trusts me and trusts that it is for the good in the long run. That is what faith is all about.
January 7th, 2005 at 7:58 pm
this was in today’s Australian - it’s long, but worth reading, from Gerard Baker, entitled “For God’s sake, stop this drivel”
NATURAL disasters bring out the best philanthropic instincts in the human soul. Unfortunately, they also seem to bring out the most insufferable theological drivel from the human brain. There have been almost as many words written and spoken about God since the tsunami in the Indian Ocean as there have been dollars, pounds, euros and yen contributed to the relief effort. Unlike the money, however, the verbiage is doing little to advance the human condition.
In a state of grief and suffering I can understand that anyone’s faith will be tested. I can only guess at the anger and pain that the bereaved feel and I could not blame one of them for directing it like a guided missile at the very foundation of whatever beliefs they have.
What is harder to take is the smug way the ubiquitous “God is dead” crowd in the media has seized on the tragedy as some sort of vindication of its creed. It is unedifying, to say the least, to behold scientists and philosophers on both sides of the Atlantic waving the shrouds of hundreds of thousands of victims as a debating trophy.
Even the Archbishop of Canterbury says the disaster understandably caused people to doubt the existence of God. Since the leadership of the Church of England has generally acted for most of the past 20 years as though it did not really believe in God, perhaps we should not be too disappointed. I am reminded of Benjamin Jowett, the 19th-century master of Balliol College, Oxford, who once instructed a pupil: “My child, you must believe in God, despite what the clergy tell you.”
But for those of us who consider ourselves theists of a slightly less flaccid sort, this emerging consensus that “God doesn’t exist because if he did there would be no disasters” is rather lame. The tsunami cannot, in reason, have any possible bearing, by itself, on the question of whether or not there is a God. It cannot amount to a revelation, or even a confirmation, that God does not exist. In logic, the poor suffering Muslims in Indonesia who think it was a sign of God’s wrath are less evidently wrong than those who insist that it disproves God’s existence.
We ask: why would God allow such suffering? A perfectly legitimate question, of course. But it seems to suppose there is an uniquely belief-undermining quality about a human calamity on such a massive scale. Why on earth should that be? We know all too well that undeserved pain, injury, disease, and loss of life are daily facts of life for hundreds of millions of people on the planet. Indeed, presumably in the course of human history, billions of people, rich and poor, weak and strong, have suffered and died not from causes of their own making but as a result of a terrible accident.
We tend to see natural disasters as especially faith-threatening, I suppose, partly because of their scale, but partly also because for most of the first few thousand centuries of human history such events were ascribed to some divine force. It is as though, somewhere in our genes, there is a tendency to take a little too literally the insurance company terminology that describes earthquakes and hurricanes as “acts of God”.
If, then, what the atheists are attacking is the notion of an all-seeing, all-powerful benign deity, constantly engaged in and altering the tide of human events, they do not need a tsunami to prove their point. The knowledge that just one child somewhere was dying of cancer would bring the whole fantasy crumbling down.
We can stipulate then, as American lawyers like to say, that the tsunami, tragic and horrific as it is, is simply irrelevant, or at least supernumerary, to the question of whether a benign God exists.
This not some idle tilt at the atheists. Putting a natural disaster such as this in the context of the anonymous enormity of human suffering helps us to understand a little more clearly what it is that believers believe about humanity and the complex nature of its relationship with life and God.
Put it this way: imagine for a moment that there were not only no earthquakes, floods and storms, but that there was no innocent suffering and never had been in the history of the earth. Imagine if every time a faulty gene was on its way to being transmitted to an unborn child, the hand of God dipped in and the gene was corrected. Imagine a God frantically circling the globe redirecting every train headed for a faulty bridge, reprogramming every failed computer in a hospital operating theatre and printing money every time some undeserving chap was down on his luck.
Imagine, in other words, if everyone since the beginning of time lived to a ripe old age and died in their bed, or at least died a death precisely commensurate with their moral contribution to the earth’s happiness.
Such a fair, challengeless world might be a wonderful place to live. But I don’t think it would be recognisably human. If we have reason to doubt the point of our existence in this world, surely we would understand it even less in that one. And if I were God, and had created man, I am not quite sure that I would see the point either.
January 7th, 2005 at 8:02 pm
and as a contrast, see this from the Westboro Baptist Church (in the US, I presume)
http://rawstory.rawprint.com/1204/westboro_tsunami_statement_1230.php
January 10th, 2005 at 11:08 am
I wanted to walk away from the article posted by Luke but could not. At this time I can think of nothing less appropriate than an article published by a hate group masquerading as a christian church to talk about. All I can say is I pray that those who seek to add insult to this tragedy will somehow realise what they are doing.
As far as God’s actions in the world. Rarely has there been such an overwhelming display of Godly acts by all sectors of society as we have seen since this disaster.
January 10th, 2005 at 1:53 pm
If that story is correct then we can say:
1) Westboro church is NO church of God
2) It is lead by an Anti-christ
3) the people there should read Luke 13:1
4) we need to pray for them
not nessarily in that order
January 21st, 2005 at 6:50 pm
Of all the profound, heartfelt and greiving letters to the editor about this stuff, this one made me smile the most:
My name is Andrew Ortland, 43, from Melbourne. You have incorrectly listed me twice as being one of the tsunami victims missing in Thailand (once 4/1/05 and again today). Please be advised that I am alive and well in hua Hin, Thailand. I am not, nor never have been, a victim of a natural disaster, man-made melee or a supernatural event.
Andrew Ortland
http://www.theage.com.au/yoursay1/index.html