[Vision2020] The Tennesee Tornadoes and the Wrath of God

[nickgier at adelphia.net]

Greetings:

I'm reposting a column that I revised for the Los Cabos Daily News and the Idaho State Journal for this week.  It's in keeping with the thread "God's Problem."

My philosophy of religion class will be meeting every Wednesday night 7:30-9:00 at the Yellow House, just west of the UU Church at 2nd & Van Buren.  We will discuss all the basic issue related to religious belief.  All are welcome to attend.

Nick Gier

THE GOOD LORD JUST DONE GAVE US A WHUPPIN’!
NATURAL DISASTERS AS THE WRATH OF GOD?

Why do bad things happen to good people? Why do the wicked get away with murder and the innocent die in disasters such as the Tennessee tornadoes, Katrina, and September 11?  

After Katrina hit, a Mississippian interviewed on NPR gave this explanation: "The Good Lord just done gave us a whuppin'’." This is the Falwell-Robertson answer: all of us are being punished for the sins of homosexuals, abortionists, and their liberal supporters.  Most of us, however, are repulsed by such an outrageous and poisonous diagnosis.

In Agatha Christie’s "Then There Were None," one of the characters opines that those who had been murdered were “struck down of the wrath of God.” Justice Wargrave was not convinced: “Providence leaves the work of conviction and chastisement to us mortals.”  

Justice Wargrave is a good Confucian or Stoic in holding a doctrine of General Providence.  In this view, held also by Presidents Washington and Lincoln, God presides over a world that operates by natural laws and in which humans govern their own affairs.  

On the other hand, the Abrahamic religions--Judaism, Christianity, and Islam-- believe in Special Providence.  This means that God chooses particular prophets or saviors that embody divine authority, and God then intervenes in history as an expression of divine will and judgment.

There is a difference between moral evils and natural evils.  The first is the result of humans choosing to do good or evil.  For orthodox Christians the prototypical moral evil was Adam and Eve’s choice to disobey God in the Garden of Eden.  

Natural or physical evil is defined as that which is not the result of any human will: disease (both physical and mental) and natural disasters.  In a theology in which God is all powerful, it must be God who wills these conditions and events to happen. 

Even though some Christian legislators in Oklahoma tried to change the language of their insurance law, calling natural disasters “acts of God” is correct orthodox theology.  The Oklahoma law makers, however, recognized the logical implication of such a view: it made God responsible for what all of us would call evil acts.

I suspect that the Oklahoma legislators really wanted to say that Satan causes natural evils.  But this is the heresy of Manicheanism, a view that compromises God’s power by holding that there is another cosmic power that is the source of evil.  

Following the Book of Job, where it is clear that Satan operates only with the permission and delegated power of God, Christian theologians have consistently declared that even Satan is empowered by God. Martin Luther expressed the point most clearly: "Since God moves and does all, we must take it that he moves and acts even in Satan and the godless; . . . evil things are done with God himself setting them in motion."

How do Christian theologians justify God doing evil?  Here is one rationale: God cannot abide the moral evils committed by humans, so God must show that justice must prevail.  Natural disasters are simply dramatic previews of the Last Judgment, when divine justice will finally be done.  If God is performing justice, then God is doing good, not evil.  We would call a judge who let all criminals off the hook a bad judge, wouldn’t we?

Let’s take a closer look at this solution to the problem of evil.  There is something important that has been forgotten.  When St. Augustine discussed the Fall of Adam and Eve, he made a very interesting concession: “Our first parents fell into disobedience because they were already secretly corrupted.” 
Adam and Eve were already corrupted because they had “deficient wills.”  But who was responsible for their deficient wills?  They could be only if they had created themselves.  The only answer is that God created them finite, fragile, and corruptible.  

I submit that General Providence is a much more coherent view if people are going to continue their belief in God.  The Confucians and Stoics also believed that God is not a Creator.  Rather, God is coeternal with a universe that operates according to natural laws and contains rational beings that freely choose their own destinies.

Following Justice Wargrave, we are solely responsible for our own “convictions and chastisements.” Louisiana and New Orleans government officials are responsible for not being prepared for the big storm they knew was coming.  And God had nothing to do with it.