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Notes -
What reason can you divine for the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami? If God does indeed work in mysterious ways, this one has to be the most mysterious of them all. Unlike many calamities which can be said to have a proximate cause rooted in human activity, this one was pure Nature’s Wrath. The only part any person played in it was having had the misfortune to live in, or even to have visited, the vicinity. Nearly 230,000 people dead in the course of a single day. Many of them Christians, no doubt, whose prayers appear not to have availed them.
These are all basically the problem of theodicy written over and over. Nature's Wrath has a long history in Jewish lore of being God's wrath. God created nature, remember.
As to the reason - I don't know! Nobody truly knows the answer to theodicy. Some say it's because the devil is still at work in the world with his demons, implying God isn't fully omnipotent as we might understand it. Others say evil exists to help teach us to become good. Still others say that we couldn't have free will without evil existing in the world.
There are many answers. All I know is that I believe that God allows evil in the world for a reason.
Yes, I know what theodicy is. I’ve thought a lot about it too, and I’ve looked into many of the various answers which sincere Christians have offered as solutions. Maybe, though, the fact that over the course of 2,000+ years of Christianity (and, of course, centuries of Judaism before that) so many people have had to come up with so many different answers points to something: None of their answers have been very good! None of them have made much sense, or satisfactorily answered the problem at hand without highlighting important contradictions within the logic of the faith.
The core dilemma here is that Christianity is very explicitly dedicated to, among others, two key claims about God: 1. He is benevolent, loving, and invested not only in the future of humanity as a whole, but in the well-being and spiritual life of each individual living human. 2. He intervenes, at least subtly, in the lives of individuals, to effectuate positive life outcomes for them.Those two claims are what make theodicy so incredibly difficult for Christianity specifically to deal with.
Paganism has no problem explaining why something like a natural disaster happens. The various gods and supernatural entities are capricious, they’re in competition with each other, they frequently act wrathful or even tyrannical, and humans’ primary relationship with them is transactional. We propitiate the gods by offering them praise and things of value, so that we can remain in their favor and persuade them to intervene helpfully on our behalf, and to not curse us or slaughter us. This view of the order of the world leaves much to be desired emotionally; it offers little in the way of a message of hope, love, inspiration, and salvation. But if nothing else, it makes it very easy to explain the wanton suffering which so many humans experience — and not always at the hands of each other — without producing any cracks at the heart of the religion.
Judaism, too, famously has a certain fatalism and moral ambivalence about God. The Old Testament, as you note, features many episodes in which God acts wrathfully and in a way which, if a human ruler acted the same way, we would recognize as tyrannical or even monstrous. (Of course, Judaism also offers an explanation: We deserved it then, and we’ll probably deserve it again in the future. God doesn’t especially love the Jews, even if they are his chosen people, and he’ll gladly throw any individual Jews into a shredder if they disappoint him — and that’s to say nothing of what he will do, or instruct the Jews to do on his behalf, to the gentiles!)
In contrast, I think Christianity is really at a loss when dealing with natural disasters of this nature, though. Theodicy is uniquely corrosive to the doctrines of Christianity, which is why so many of its theologians have obsessed about it, and why they’ve reached for such contradictory answers. Of the three explanations you put forward, at least two of them are wildly insufficient to deal with a problem of the magnitude of the example I offered. In fact, one of them —
— doesn’t address natural disasters at all! Sure, I can totally understand and appreciate the idea that a world in which humans have free will is necessarily a world in which humans have the power to murder each other, to make war on each other, to firebomb each other’s cities, etc. That has nothing to do with a natural disaster, though. Whether or not humans have free will would have made no difference in the outcome of an earthquake or tsunami; again, the only “free will” any human exercised was the “choice” to happen to be in its path. (Not a choice at all, of course, since nobody could have predicted it nor seen it coming.) It isn’t even a “problem of evil”, since “evil” implies intention, and a tsunami has none. Any supernatural entity which did intentionally send that tsunami toward blameless human habitation would indeed be evil, and any supposedly benevolent supernatural entity which could have prevented it but chose otherwise is, at best, ineffectual.
As for one of your other proposed explanations —
— you must recognize why non-Christians find this answer so exasperating. Suppose I’m a child, and I break some sort of rule. To punish me and to teach me a lesson, my father strangles one of my siblings to death in front of me. Obviously if a human father did this, we would universally recognize it as psychopathic. No benevolent person acting out of love would do so. So, if the Christian God did indeed intentionally make the tsunami happen, in order to teach people a lesson, what does it actually mean to say that this same God “loves us”?
That leaves your third explanation — the one you put first, which may be seen as implying you lean toward it:
I mean, isn’t this getting pretty dangerously close to paganism, or at best Henotheism? There are many powerful supernatural entities at work in the world, and God is, at best, only arguably the strongest? He can intervene in people’s lives sometimes, to help with relatively quotidian issues — you can pray to him before an important job interview, and maybe he’ll subtly help that interview go well for you — but he can’t reliably do anything about the really big stuff if there’s some other entity, like Satan, who’s directly working against him. This is, again, satisfactory to me as a plausible explanation for how the world actually works, but it seems to be in contradiction with some of Christianity’s stronger claims about God’s omnipotence.
I want to be clear that I’m not saying any of this because I hate Christianity. I’m not some fire-breathing atheist like I was when I was younger. I would like very much if Christianity were true, and if someone could provide to me an answer to these questions which I could psychologically wrap my head around. I’ve prayed to God myself, and even explicitly to Jesus Christ. I’ve no idea if any of these prayers produced a tangible effect on the world, although I do know that they produced some level of internal comfort within me.
Still, though, the 2004 tsunami, and then Hurricane Katrina the very next year, made a very profound effect on me. Seeing that level of wanton suffering (some of the footage of people being swallowed by the floods is still seared into my brain) delivered to people who had done nothing particularly wrong, while so many individuals who were so much more blameworthy continued to prosper unharmed, put theodicy at the very front of my mind at the very point in my life in which I was first starting to ponder these religious questions. Christians seem two-faced about the issue. When confronted directly about it they’ll claim that God isn’t as omnipotent as we think, and therefore he simply can’t be expected to step in and save people from things like this; in their own lives, though, they routinely pray for God to intervene on their behalf in issues which have, comparatively, so much less importance.
@FCfromSSC claimed below that Christians do not expect God to make any changes to anyone’s appointed hour of death, but this is directly belied by Christians’ actions. God can help you get a raise at work, but he can’t help you not get hit by a car? Christians pray for each others’ safety and health all the time. They pray before surgeries, before flights, before risky endeavors, etc. If they don’t expect these prayers to do anything, then is God no more than a therapist? Just there to be a sounding board for whatever’s making us anxious, to help us order our internal lives and soothe ourselves? This seems highly unsatisfactory compared to the loftier claims which the Bible seems, to me, to make about God’s capabilities.
What do you make of Scott's answer in God's Answer To Job, out of curiosity? It's the only one that's ever really convinced me, though it hasn't made me a believer.
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@FCfromSSC claimed below that Christians do not expect God to make any changes to anyone’s appointed hour of death...
I claimed that prayer doesn't make one's hour of death predictable, and I think the difference between the two formulations is substantive.
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First off, I’m not worried about getting “dangerously close” to Henotheism or other issues. I’m Orthodox, we have a pretty relaxed view about the omnipotence of God compared to Catholics, or really the ability for us to know much about God beyond what Christ directly told us at all.
In regards to a God of love allowing evil - yes! That’s the fundamental paradox of the world! The thing is, this idea that God is love comes from direct mystical experience, and of course the revelation of Christ & the apostles.
It’s not even limited to Christianity. Many sects of Buddhism also posit a sort of “loving kindness” quality inherent to the Tao, or the Ground of Being. Yes it’s confusing as to why a God of Love would allow evil.
My personal answer is something like - suffering is inherently voluntary, whether we understand that or not. With the right mindset or view, this world would be Paradise, despite all the limitations. You see this in the great mystics and Saints who take the worst outcomes like torture, martyrdom, etc with a smile on their faces.
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Even this interpretation implies that bad things don't happen for "a reason" in a cosmic sense, but just because demons want to fuck shit up out of sheer bloody-mindedness.
To a widow, I can't imagine that "the reason your husband died is because demons were fucking shit up in the south Pacific for their own amusement and God was powerless too intervene" would be much warmer comfort than "the reason your husband died is because he got shot by a mugger and the EMTs didn't get there in time to save him".
It is indeed a reason, there are active agents in the world that are evil, and want to hurt us. That's a reason even if you don't think it's a good, or comforting one.
But what advantage does this worldview have over a secular one? You're just adding in extra epicycles that have zero impact on the bottom line.
Secularists: "Your child died of cancer because the universe is random and indifferent to our suffering."
Religionists: "Your child died of cancer because there are demons out there trying to fuck shit up for their own amusement. There is a God who cares very deeply about your child's welfare, but even though he definitely exists, is benevolent and is powerful enough that 'omnipotent' might be a reasonable characterisation - he nevertheless allowed the demons to cause your child to develop terminal cancer, or was unable to prevent them from doing so. I appreciate that, in practical terms, this looks indistinguishable from a universe which is cold, uncaring and absent of God."
I really, really do not understand why "your child died of cancer because there are demons out there who want to hurt you for no reason" is meant to be comforting (in the "everything happens for a reason" sense), but "your child died of cancer because the universe is cold and indifferent and sometimes bad things happen to innocent people for literally no reason" isn't. The former just sounds like a poetic framing of the latter.
Epicycles are good, actually.
There have always been atheists. There has never been a long-lasting atheist society. Maybe some of us are able to productively deal with a cold, uncaring universe that grinds us to dust for having the temerity to exist, but it seems that most can't, and epicycles give their minds something useful to work with; help them function.
You could use that to justify anything.
I think models with epicycles are strictly inferior to models which don’t need them.
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I guess this is that "postmodern religion" thing I've heard so much about. "Religion is a pack of lies - believe it anyway"?
No worse a lie than equality, representative democracy, trans-anything, blank-slatism, pacifism, deindustrialization, fiat currency...
In what sense are equality before the law and fiat currency lies?
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All humans die. None know the day or the hour when death will arrive for them. Christian prayer does not change this, and Christians do not expect it to.
I’m very confident that Christians pray that, for example, their children with leukemia are delivered from it, or that their child survives an impending major/risky surgery. This seems flatly incompatible with the claim that Christians don’t expect prayer to change the hour when death will arrive.
They do.
I disagree. Most of the responses I'm getting seem to be modeling (petitionary) Christian prayer as a way to gain leverage over the material world. Is that correct? If they pray for their child to survive and the child dies, should they interpret this as evidence against the validity of their faith? Under this model, presumably Christians are simply leaning on cognitive biases to fail to notice that prayer doesn't actually work?
My kids are healthy. I routinely pray that they will stay healthy. If they don't stay healthy, and in fact if they were to die of a sudden illness, I would not expect this to damage my faith, because I do not "expect" my prayer to ensure their health. I do not view my prayers as a way to gain leverage over the material world, and I don't think doing so is the correct way to practice Christian prayer. Observably, in some times and places, communities of Christians have seen everyone they know and love die in eruptions of horror and agony. I do not think this happened because they did not pray hard enough.
In short, it seems to me that Christians, generally speaking, have all the same data you do. Speaking generally, we draw different conclusions because we are operating off different axioms, not because we are ignorant of the facts in evidence. No doubt there are individual exceptions, even numerous ones. I don't think that changes the analysis of the central case: The more seriously a person takes their Christianity, the less your argument is going to persuade them, because it will not be new information to them. Even if you think Christians are fundamentally deluded, it probably should still matter to you if your model of them results in less-accurate predictions.
Then what are prayers for? What do you expect them to “do”? Do you expect them to produce any outcome, either in this life or the next, that’s more tangible than simply a lessening of your own internal anxiety? Is my accusation of “God as Therapist” more or less accurate here?
Yes, but I think that one of the “axioms” on which you’re operating — the one people call “faith” — is that none of the potential arguments which could potentially prove fatal to your continued adherence to Christianity can possibly be true. Such arguments are necessarily false, because your religion is necessarily true. Therefore everything else is an argument backwards from that — a series of post-hoc epicycles designed to lessen the impact of various arguments which seem to reveal contradictions within the doctrines and claims of your religion. Some of those epicycles are fairly persuasive and do a pretty good job of repelling certain criticisms — clearly there are many poor arguments against Christianity, and against other religions as well — but some of the epicycles (and again, I think the ones dealing with theodicy are the chief example here) are genuinely pretty unpersuasive in the eyes of those who have not already taken to heart the centra faith-based axiom that Christianity, despite its myriad apparent contradictions, is true.
They are for building a relationship with God. The relationship is built on gratitude and trust; gratitude for the many good things he provides for us, and trust that he will care for and preserve us, to a limited but significant extent in this life, and to the maximal extent in the next.
Only to the extent that Therapy is, in its essence, a relationship, but perhaps that's close enough from your perspective.
That's one way to frame it, sure. It's also an isolated demand for rigor.
It is routinely argued here that humans are deterministic machines. All forms of this argument that resulted in falsifiable predictions resulted in those predictions being consistently falsified over more than a century of dedicated testing across the globe, and the current popular form of the argument is very clearly unfalsifiable. Likewise for bedrock Materialist claims about the Material being all that exists: by their own standards, it is very clear that things definitely exist that we cannot observe or interact with even in principle; to the extent that we can in principle observe the chain of cause and effect, we arrive at an effect with no observable cause. And yet even those materialists who recognize this fact are not disturbed by it, because their Materialism is axiomatic, the origin of their reasoning rather than its destination. And that is perfectly appropriate, because this is the only way anyone can reason in any way at all.
Axioms that make bad predictions are selected against. Axioms that fit as much of the available evidence as possible are selected for. It should not be surprising that a set of axioms that have lasted thousands of years fit the available evidence pretty well, and both Christianity and Atheism have existed for thousands of years.
Our disagreement, it seems to me, is not over the facts, but over their interpretation, and specifically over the moral significance of pain and death. You seem to argue as though death were avoidable, but it evidently is not, and everyone does in fact die. You seem to argue as though suffering is much more real and more significant than I understand it to be. I observe that death and pain do not necessitate some uniform amount of suffering, that suffering expands and contracts by orders of magnitude based on a variety of factors, the state of one's own mind being predominant among them.
From a previous discussion:
...And indeed, a cursory examination of Christianity or the Bible will reveal the belief that some suffering, pain and death, even extreme forms of these, are a positive good, admirable, desirable even, with no shortage of examples of Christians acting on this belief and other Christians admiring them for it.
We observe the same pain and death, and draw different conclusions, because our axioms are different, and because axioms drive interpretation of evidence much more than evidence drives adoption of axioms. Reason is fundamentally an act of the Will; neither of us is being "forced" by evidence anywhere we do not want to go. But it is not clear to me why I should consider your axioms better than mine; your moral anguish over evident pain and death does not actually serve to reduce the pain and death more than my moral accommodation of it, and arguably has resulted in worse pain and death in the long-term as attempts at Utopia collapse into harsh reality. My accommodation of pain and death prevents neither buckling seat-belts nor attempting cancer cures; I am all for preventing pain and death, and even paying significant costs to do so. It's not even obvious to me that our metric for what costs are unacceptably high is too terribly different.
What's your assessment of voluntary human extinction? That's one way to solve pain for good, right?
I want to interrogate what the word trust means in this sentence. When we talk about “trust” in the context of human relationships, we recognize that trust is something which can be broken. We recognize that there are degrees of trust — that some people are more trustworthy than others, and that when determining how much trust to extend to another person, one consideration is usually a probabilistic determination of how likely that person is to behave in the way I’m trusting him or her to behave. As I gather more data about that person’s actions, I can decide to upgrade or downgrade my level of trust in that person. Obviously a healthy marriage, for example, necessarily involves a great degree of trust; however, if one spouse commits proven adultery, that necessarily alters the level of trust the other spouse can extend to that person moving forward. Trust isn’t independent of evidence and observation, in other words.
If I pray to God every day to keep me and my family safe and healthy, and then one of my children contracts leukemia and dies, I’m struggling to understand what you think that event should do for my level of “trust” in the proposition that God will “care for us and preserve us”. If leukemia was just something that happened to people all the time, like stubbing a toe, then I agree that it would make little sense to downgrade one’s trust in God based on that occurrence. But since so few children die of leukemia, the fact that it happened to my child specifically, despite my daily prayers to God for the opposite outcome, may very well have some import.
And particularly, if the children of devout Christians who pray daily for their family’s health are, upon observation of data, no less likely to die of leukemia than the children of atheists, then an outsider may begin to wonder what the “relationship” is actually for. What level of “trust” can there be in a relationship if one party is committed to total indifference about whether the other party fails at doing what that party has been “entrusted” to do? It’s an idiosyncratic definition of “trust” indeed if one commits to loving another party with the exact same level of devotion whether that other party behaves well or badly. “Trust” divorced from any expectation of outcomes, and any judgment on those outcomes, seems not to be trust at all.
It’s a specific type of relationship, though. It’s a relationship in which the purpose of the therapist is, ultimately, to just be a sounding board to which one can vent one’s problems. The therapist has no power to materially affect the situations about which you’re complaining to him. At best, he can offer helpful advice on how you should psychologically frame those situations. He’s just there to help you better order one’s internal life. Not to actually change it, except to the extent that one’s outlook and emotional state can change one’s problem-solving approach. A valuable contribution, to be sure, but one very different from what one would expect from a God to whom many great miracles and divine interventions are attributed.
In the sense that a Christian martyr’s death might serve as a useful example to other Christians, sure. “That man bore his persecution with dignity and stuck to his principles. There’s a lesson in that for all of us.” I just really struggle to understand what positive message or example you expect us to glean from the instantaneous, terrifying death of several hundred thousand people from a freak natural disaster. Those people didn’t have the option to choose otherwise, as, for example, a Christian martyr might choose to recant his faith to avoid suffering. They didn’t even have time, in the fleeting moments between normalcy and calamity, to reflect on Goodness and to make peace with it. It just doesn’t seem to carry within it any positive, hopeful, or moral message. Maybe there’s just some fundamental psychologically dismally between you and me — either cultivated or innate — which explains why I cannot glean a message of hope, and of a confirmation of trust in God as my shepherd, in the way you can.
This seems directly in contradiction to your statement that the Bible teaches that suffering and death are admirable “and desirable even.” If the message of the Bible is that one should be indifferent to one’s suffering, then why bother to buckle your children’s seatbelts, let alone your own? God wills what he wills, and your child’s death could be desirable per God’s plan! I don’t really understand the purpose here of taking actions to forestall the potentially grisly fate God may — for reasons which you’re content to allow to remain inscrutable — have in store for you and/or your loved ones. If God wills it, it will be, and an ostensibly “bad” outcome actually isn’t any worse than an ostensibly “good” outcome! It’s all a matter of outlook!
“If we can’t entirely eradicate pain, then we should actually be fine with infinite pain, and actually a God who causes us infinite pain is no worse than a God who causes us no pain at all.”
There are obviously degrees of pain and suffering. If I stub my toe, or have a mildly unpleasant interaction with a stranger, it does not produce within me an existential crisis or cause me to curse God. But if I developed a terribly painful disease, through no fault or action of my own, which led me to suffer daily, and a Christian told me that this is good, actually, and that the God who either willed this or failed to prevent it is benevolent and that his actions toward me are rooted in love — that I should trust such a God — then, again, I have to wonder what the words “love” and “trust” mean in this worldview. I would like to be able to “trust” that a God of immense power and benevolence could proffer to his adherents — those with whom he has a “relationship” — at least some degree less suffering and pain than that which is meted out to those with whom he doesn’t have a relationship. Otherwise God really is nothing more than a therapist — valuable, but not the King of Kings.
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I guess all those Christians who always pray to be delivered from this or that kind of trouble/danger on any given day are just not true Christians, then.
Humans want good things and don’t want bad things, there’s no point blaming them (us) for that. But the correct prayer is ‘thy will be done’. One hopes that deliverance from a particular tribulation is God’s will but doesn’t demand that it be so.
Being a Christian requires believing that the grand plan on this world and the other is good, regardless of whether one happens to enjoy the role that we are given to play right here and now.
Sounds like a strict downgrade from the pagan gods whose favor could actually be won.
So thought (and think) many pagans.
One could make arguments around more complex society leading to less agentic beliefs perhaps (implying Christianity is a religion for bureaucrats and managers?) or just that while medieval Christian societies tended to be pretty brutal they were a lot less brutal than the pagans. I have no idea really.
One point that might be relevant is that it was really easy to lose the favour of pagan gods. Maybe you were stingy with the sacrifices, or the other side were more generous, or you get fucked despite doing nothing wrong because Zeus fucked his milkmaid and now Hera hates you.
If anything, that seems like it's easier to believe in. The idea that the intelligences behind your weal and woe are multiple, capricious and far from omnibenevolent has more explaining, and dare I say coping power to me than "I promise God loves loves loves you very much, but he's taking that baby away now because God's plans etc etc".
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Well, some and some.
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