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<font face="Times New Roman, Times"><b>Hail to the Vision:<br><br>
This column will be submitted to <i>The Sandpoint Reader</i> and <i>New
West</i> on-line, but I wanted you to be the first to read it, that is,
if you are interested. It is, in part, an answer to Ed Iverson's
last column, which appeared to reduce human responsibility to almost
zero. Nick Gier<br><br>
<div align="center">THE GOOD LORD JUST DONE GAVE US A WHUPPIN’!<br>
KATRINA AS THE WRATH OF GOD?<br><br>
</b></div>
<x-tab> </x-tab>Protestors
outside the national headquarters of the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and
Transgendered Alliance held signs such as “Thank God for Katrina” and
“New Orleans: City of Sinners and Sodomites.”<br>
<x-tab> </x-tab>A
Mississippian interviewed on NPR just after Katrina hit exclaimed that
“The Good Lord just done gave us a whuppin’,” but the Governor of Texas
declared that “By the grace of God we were saved.” What, for God’s
sake, is going on here?<br>
<x-tab> </x-tab>Why do bad
things happen to good people? Why do the wicked get away with murder and
the innocent die in disasters such as Katrina and September 11?
<br>
Following Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, the protestors above claim to
have a pat answer: all of us are being punished for the sins of a
few. Most of us, however, are repulsed by such an outrageous and
poisonous diagnosis.<br>
<x-tab> </x-tab>My first
philosophy of religion textbook contained a footnote that showed a long
term study of tornado damage in the Bible Belt. Far more churches
were hit than bars and houses of prostitution. If these are “acts
of God,” what on earth is God trying to tell us?<br>
<x-tab> </x-tab>The
problem of evil has bedeviled philosophers and theologians for at least
three millennia. It is most cited reason by those who do not
believe in God. But even most believers are not willing to admit
that God judges us with such horrendous violence. This makes God a
moral monster. <br>
<x-tab> </x-tab>In Agatha
Christie’s <i>Then There Were None</i>, 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.” Ironically, it was
Wargrave who planned all the murders!<br>
<x-tab> </x-tab>Let us see
if we can actually reconcile belief in God with the existence of
unmitigated evils. The first thing to note is that Justice Wargrave is a
good Confucian or Stoic in holding the doctrine of General
Providence. In this view God presides over a world that operates by
natural laws and in which humans govern their own affairs. Most
people don’t realize that this is the view that Darwin held in the first
edition of the <i>Origin of Species</i>.<br>
<x-tab> </x-tab>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.<br>
<x-tab> </x-tab>Philosophers
and theologians make a distinction 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. All the
other evil in the world started with this fatal decision.<br>
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 can only
be God who wills these conditions and events to happen. <br>
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.<br>
I suspect that the Oklahoma legislators really wanted to say that Satan
causes all the evil in the world. 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. <br>
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.<br>
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.”<br>
How do Christian theologians justify God doing evil? Here is the
rationale: God cannot abide the moral evils committed by humans, so God
must show that justice must prevail. Causing 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?<br>
Let’s take a closer look at this solution to the problem of evil.
There is something important that has been forgotten. When the
theologian 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.”<br>
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. <br>
An engineer friend of mine was once hired by an auto insurance company to
analyze the steel in a broken drive shaft. He discovered that it was some
of the cheapest steel that Chrysler could have bought for this crucial
part of the chassis. Now it would have been absurd for Chrysler's
attorneys to state that the company was responsible for the positive
elements of the steel but not its deficiencies. <br>
At the same time it would be unfair to demand that the steel manufacturer
make sure that there were no deficiencies at all. This we could demand
solely of an omnipotent Creator. As the exclusive manufacturer of all
natural things, the orthodox God is fully responsible for the
deficiencies in his products.<br>
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.<br>
Following Justice Wargrave, we are solely responsible for our own
“convictions and chastisements.” Instead of blaming God, we can focus on
a president who refuses to admit to global warming, who appoints
unqualified people to important offices, and who gives tax cuts to people
who don’t need them. <br>
Blame must also be laid at the feet of a Congress that has for years
refused to fund necessary infrastructure repairs and maintenance.
Finally, 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.<br>
Nick Gier taught religion and philosophy at the University of Idaho for
31 years. For more on these issues see
<a href="http://www.class.uidaho.edu/ngier/305/home.htm" eudora="autourl">www.class.uidaho.edu/ngier/305/home.htm</a>.<br><br>
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