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Rationally Speaking.
N. 58, February 2005
God did it, or did He?
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. |
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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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