Tuesday, January 11, 2005

God and the Suffering of the Innocents

It's frustrating to see the how glibly, and on what shallow grounds, otherwise intelligent people are rejecting belief in God in the wake of the terrible tsunami deaths. A typical example is this column in The New Republic by Leon Wieseltier, the magazine's literary editor. Here is the key quote:

I do not see how a theistic view of the world cannot be embarrassed, or damaged, by such an event. If it is not possible to venerate nature for its goodness, then it is not possible to venerate the alleged author of nature for His goodness.

I understand that religion long ago learned how to argue its way around cosmic cruelty, but it is the absence of protest, the intellectual efficiency, that is so repugnant. Those who smugly intone that they have no explanation, that it is all a mystery, that the ways of the universe and its Creator exceed the capacities of the mind: they are over-ready for tragedy. They should more candidly admit that they choose not to reflect upon the spiritual implications of natural destruction, because they wish to protect what they believe. In the aftermath of such a disaster, religious people have more mental work to do than irreligious people, because they are the ones who teach the benevolent government of the world.


Does Wieseltier believe that religious people have never considered the problem of undeserved suffering? He talks as if the deaths of innocents in South Asia were the first such deaths in human history. In reality, the numbers of those destroyed by flood and disease in the past two weeks are dwarfed by the routine, annual death totals from starvation and preventable illnesses like malaria. Cast your eye backward over the past century and you encounter the world wars, the Holocaust, the famines engineered by Stalin, and millions of other deaths of innocents from all manner of disasters, both natural and induced by humans. And the twentieth century was obviously not unique in this regard. Similar tragedies have occurred throughout history.

The simple truth is that tragic death is an everyday occurrence, and everyone over the age of five is aware of this fact. It's the height of naivete to imagine that our view of the human condition should be dramatically altered by the latest tragedy--as if somehow the ten thousand tragedies that preceded it never really happened.

Wieseltier remarks, "If it is not possible to venerate nature for its goodness, then it is not possible to venerate the alleged author of nature for His goodness." This would be a telling blow if Christianity were a form of nature-worship. It isn't.

Human beings are animals living in a universe governed by physical and biological laws. Consequently, we must work and struggle to survive, are subject to illness and suffering, and will ultimately die. Nothing in Christianity or in the Bible denies any of these obvious truths. In fact, the Christian faith insists on these truths to the extent of describing a God who willingly becomes human in order to live with us under the same conditions, including suffering a painful, lonely, premature, and humiliating death.

The painful facts of life lead some people to conclude that God is evil; otherwise, why would he permit such suffering and death in the world he created?

Well, what's the alternative? Can we imagine a natural world that is devoid of suffering and death? It would have to be a world in which the laws of nature are constantly being revoked--in which God's hand reaches down to prop up every falling tree, to quell every storm, to end every drought, to cure every disease.

God would also have to be constantly intervening to obviate human freedom of action--slowing down speeding cars, preventing guns from firing and bombs from exploding, holding back the hands of parents who try to abuse their children. The foreman of a chemical plant who plans to dump toxic waste into a nearby river would somehow have to be stopped; would God's hand shut the valve, or would he miraculously transform the toxins into pure water?

It would be a strange world, a world where nothing bad could ever happen. But since one could never be sure how or where God would next intervene (even gravity would be subject to revocation to protect people from falling to their deaths), one could scarcely make or carry out any plan of one's own. As a result, humans would have no ability to shape their own lives (for good or evil), but would simply be sheep-like creatures herded from one harmless activity to the next.

Would this be a better world than the one in which we actually live? Maybe--but it doesn't sound particularly attractive to me.

You may want to protest that I'm being silly--that no one expects God to create a world completely devoid of suffering, but simply one in which massive tragedies like the South Asia tsunami don't occur.

I don't think the distinction is as clear as you might assume. If a benevolent God would prevent the tsunami and its 150,000 deaths, would he allow the attacks on the World Trade Center (3,000 deaths)? The Oklahoma City bombing (158 deaths)? The Heavens Gate cult suicides (39 deaths)? The murder of Laci Peterson? The death of anyone's favorite aunt or uncle from cancer or heart disease? If you are designing a universe, where and on what logical basis do you draw the line between permissible suffering and the impermissible? How do you distinguish the merely unfortunate from the tragic?

Obviously I haven't invented these arguments. They're familiar from the age-long debate on "theodicy," which deals with the apparent conflict between the nature of God and the existence of evil and suffering in the world. The fact that, over the centuries, such arguments have become familiar also bothers Wieseltier. As he says, "I understand that religion long ago learned how to argue its way around cosmic cruelty, but it is the absence of protest, the intellectual efficiency, that is so repugnant."

But Wieseltier is wrong to say that religious people are characteristically complacent or smug about human suffering. He should reread the Bible. He could start with Job (a book-length meditation on undeserved suffering), then turn to the Psalms and the Prophets (which are filled with lamentations over the sufferings experienced by the people of Israel), and then consider the Gospels (which culminate, of course, in the most famous unjust execution in history).

Of course there are religious people who are smug, self-righteous, and callous about human suffering. There are secular people like that, too. To criticize "religion" for trying to paint a smiley-face on the nature of human existence is just plain wrong. Christianity is, among other things, an intellectually serious effort to grapple with the fundmental problems of life. It deserves a more serious and knowledgeable critique.





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