Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
Over at the website Pictoral Theology, reader Pliny the In Between offers one theological explanation for natural evils” (deaths not involving human “free will,” including natural disasters, childhood cancers, and so on):
This kind of story is now so common that it hardly merits mention. Still, it’s one of the best ways to drive home the insanity of faith.
As Right Wing Watch reports, Pastor Kevin Swanson, director of the “Generation with Vision Ministry” (a pro-homeschooling group), has sussed out the reason for the recent disastrous flooding in Colorado. The proximal cause, of course, is the physical configuration of the Earth’s atmosphere, but the ultimate cause was God’s abhorrence of dope, gays, and abortion. Here’s Swanson talking with a fellow loon, Generations Radio co-host Dave Buehner (you can hear the original at the first link above):
Swanson: Let me ask you this: is it a coincidence that this was the worst year politically in the history of Colorado, at least if you use God’s law as a means of determining human ethics, our legislators did the worst possible things this year than I have ever witnessed in the twenty years I’ve been in Colorado. Our legislators committed homosexual acts on the front page of the Denver Post, do you remember that? [JAC: Really, they did that on pieces of newspaper? Couldn’t they have used a bed?] So here we have the very worst year in Colorado’s year in terms of let’s kill as many babies as possible, let’s make sure we encourage as much decadent homosexual activity as possible, let’s break God’s law with impudence at every single level, at every single level let’s make sure that we offend whoever wrote the Bible, so we have the worst year possible politically in the state of Colorado and it happens to be the worst year ever in terms of flood and fire damage in Colorado’s history. That is a weird coincidence; interesting to say the least.
Buehner: It is. Allow me a little freedom here with 1 Peter. In Colorado this last year we walked in lewdness, lust, drunkenness, revelries, drinking parties—
Swanson: Marijuana.
Buehner: And abominable idolatries and they think it’s strange down at that Gold Dome that we are not running with them in the same flood of dissipation. Sometimes when you’re in a flood of dissipation, God might bring a real flood to show you the consequences of the flood of your dissipation.
Sometimes I wonder if people like Swanson and Buehner really believe what they say. For surely they realize that there are many disasters that don’t follow on the heels of sodomy and weed, and that many innocent people have to die when God visits his wrath on a sinful land. Is that a benevolent God? And can they always find a reason why God does this kind of stuff?
Maybe the latter is the case, for here’s an earlier audio clip of Swanson blaming Hurricane Sandy on gay. He seems to be the Christian expert at identifying the sins that bring disasters.
I should add that this is a testable hypothesis: weather patterns should track legislation involving Christian “morality” (i.e., things dealing with sex, drugs, and abortion). Clearly, Scandinavia should be the most disaster-afflicted region on the planet.
h/t: Lori and Cameron, who, after sending me this link, added this bit with a picture of their cat:
(After this news, Peanut has gone back to bed…)
Apropos of this morning’s post, we should remember that many religious people really do believe in dualistic free will. In fact, it’s often their only justification for evil in the world, at least the kind of “moral evil” committed by human beings.
I’ve been reading a fairly new book by Karl Giberson and Francis Collins, The Language of Science and Faith (InterVarsity Press, 2011), which is basically an explanation of the BioLogos position that science and evangelical Christianity can be reconciled. The book apparently grew out of the “frequently asked questions” portion of the BioLogos website, leading Collins and Giberson (then a vice-president of BioLogos) to package all the answers in a book.
The book contains the usual apologetics about how evolution is really God’s best way of creating, how science and scripture can be reconciled, and so on. It even adduces two bits of “evidence” for God: the “fine-tuning” of the universe and the “moral law” (our instinctive moral feelings). Collins used the “Moral Law Proves God” argument often, but he and Giberson have apparently backed off a bit from that, saying (see below) that instinctive morality is “consistent with God” or “a pointer to God.” Nevertheless, it’s still using god as a finger in the dike of science.
In the chapter on theodicy (explaining evil), Giberson and Collins offer the usual explanation for moral evils like the Holocaust as an unavoidable result of God’s having given humans free will, and of course with that comes the ability to choose evil paths. (This is, of course, dualistic free will.) In other words, the Holocaust was the result of God wanting to give the Nazis free will, and it’s better to have free will than to not have 10 million people killed in the camps.
Of course, God could have given people the ability to choose, but choose only good actions, but that level of sophistication eludes the authors.
It’s harder, though, for theologians to explain natural evils: leukemia in children, bubonic plague, tsunamis and such. Why couldn’t God prevent those if he’s loving and omnipotent? I’ll let Giberson and Collins answer in their own words, invoking the fact that God gives nature freedom in the same way he gives humans freedom:
“Likewise, the same forces that produced a life-sustaining planet, including the laws of physics, chemistry, weather and tectonics, can also produce natural disasters. As with the free will of humans, God cannot constantly intervene in these areas without disrupting the inherent freedom of the creation and disrupting his consistent sustaining of all the matter and energy in the universe. Without this consistency, science would be impossible, moral choices would be subverted, and the world would not be as rich with meaning and opportunity.
If God blocked the consequences of human moral choices (e.g., committing murder) and natural events (e.g., tsunamis) every time they led to evil results, moral responsibility would disappear and the natural world would become incoherent. Imagine a world where we could feel totally free to lose our temper and, in a fit of road rage, run down jaywalking teenagers, confident that God would whisk them away at the last minute so we couldn’t actually harm them.” (p. 140)
Wrong. The natural world would not become incoherent if God just stopped plague in its tracks, or prevented a tsunami. We wouldn’t know about those things! And why is it so important that the natural world be coherent, anyway? It wasn’t when Jesus came back to life, or when a virgin gave birth to Giberson and Collins’s savior. Why not one more miracle: kill Hitler by giving him cancer in his teens?
Everything gets God off the hook, for there’s nothing apologetics can’t explain:
“In exactly the same way, outside of the moral dimension, when nature’s freedom leads to the evolution of a pernicious killing machine like black plague, God is off the hook. Unless God micromanages nature so as to destroy autonomy, such things are going to occur. Likewise, unless God coercively micromanages human decision making, we will often abuse our freedom.” (p. 137)
So natural evil is no problem; it’s consistent with God. And so is the ubiquity of moral standards:
What we would suggest, based on present understandings, is that the prevalence and universality of moral standards is entirely consistent with the existence of God and may even be a pointer to that God.” (p. 144)
After pondering all this, I wonder exactly what in our world would be inconsistent with the Christian God. What couldn‘t they explain away as consistent with his loving and omnipotent nature? If they can explain away the Holocaust, they can explain away anything. But they gave the whole game away on p. 127, when they began the chapter on “Science and God’s existence” with this quote:
“We begin this chapter with a different argument often used against the existence of God. This is the argument that the world is so evil and purposeless that there cannot be a creator like the Christian God behind it. Our job will be to undermine this powerful and enduring argument against the existence of God.”
Such is apologetics. What better evidence for the incompatibility of science and faith than for a religious person to nakedly state that their job is not to take the evidence on board, but to refute every bit of it that undermines what they want to be true?
I challenge Giberson and Collins to give me one horrible thing that could happen to this world that they couldn’t explain away as consistent with their God. And I wonder if, when they construct these ludicrous apologetics, people like Collins and Giberson don’t feel at least a smidgen of shame. How dishonorable to spend one’s life this way!
Combining HuffPo with the new, wooish reincarnation of TED is likely to prove a toxic combination. Sure enough, HuffPo has begun featuring essays based on TED talks. The latest one, “Why do evil and suffering exist?” by Jeffrey Small (based on a nonreligious talk by Phil Zimbardo), is dire. It’s garden-variety theodicy dressed up for HuffPo readers. As Small puts it:
But theologians continue to struggle with a fundamental question: How can a purported loving, yet all-powerful, God permit evil and suffering, especially when they strike saint and sinner alike? Witnessing the reality of the human condition leads many to ask whether God is truly omnipotent, omniscient, or loving, or to conclude that maybe God simply does not exist at all. Why wouldn’t God prevent a young child from being struck by cancer, killed by a deranged shooter, or drowned in a tsunami? The common retorts that God’s ways are “mysterious” or that God has an overarching plan that we cannot know are unsatisfying both emotionally and logically.
To any thinking person not brainwashed by upbringing or desire, the answer is clear: there isn’t any God. (The less parsimonious theory is either that God is malicious or that, as John Haught posits, He’s relaxing on his celestial throne with popcorn and a Big Gulp, enjoying the show.)
The “evils” of the world, both manmade and natural, are simply a result of evolved animals living in a dynamic and unstable world. There is predation, parasitism, and disease. Humans hurt others to advance themselves. The tectonic plates move, and multitudes die in earthquakes and floods. This is precisely what you’d expect if there is no God.
But of course that conclusion is unacceptable to the faithful. Small, who is religious, offers a version of the “free will” explanation—presumably involving dualistic free will, or a ghost in the machine:
Evolution only works because of freedom in the natural world: a freedom of genetic mutation, a freedom of natural selection, and a freedom of randomness. This freedom led to the existence of conscious humans, but by necessity the same freedom also causes cancer, disease, natural catastrophes, and even extinctions. The paradox of existence is that death and destruction bring forth new life. Spring follows winter.
As unpleasant as the physical and emotional sensations of pain and suffering may be, they are neurological adaptive responses necessary to protect us from harm. Similarly, human freewill, in conjunction with a biological self-interest for preservation, are programmed into our natures to ensure our survival. But these same qualities when unchecked can also lead people to commit atrocities. [JAC: Couldn’t God check them?]
“Freedom” of genetic mutation? Is that the unpredictability of mutations that might rest on quantum phenomena? Well, God could have stopped that had He wanted. In contrast, there’s no “freedom” in natural selection and other sorts of randomness, which is determined at bottom. And even if we have “choices”, God could made our choices ones that didn’t produce evil.
If you accept compatibilist free will, things become worse, for that’s not the kind of free will posited by the faithful. To them, at each point we must be able to choose between good or evil. In the end, Small must conclude that his God could have tinkered with the world—and with evolution—to prevent suffering, but chose not to do so.
But Small wants something more—meaning. He’s already provided it from a naturalistic perspective, but needs to explain why God permits preventable suffering.
While science can explain the cold-hearted mechanics of the human condition, it leaves us wanting something more: meaning. Can we combine the insights from religion and science in making sense of death and suffering?
What a rhetorical question! Does one expect the faithful to answer this in anything but the affirmative? (My answer is “Yes, you can make sense of anything—including Auschwitz—using the theological sausage grinder.”) Small gets in deeper:
What if instead of viewing God as a cosmic judge punishing us for our misdeeds or as a capricious chess master toying with our lives according to some mysterious plan, we think of God as the power of being itself — a power that supports all existence as its creative ground but does not make a choice as to which unfortunate events to change? Thus, the problem of evil is ultimately one of perspective: from a micro view we lament the sufferings of humanity, but from a macro view we can understand that this suffering is part of the very fabric of existence itself — an existence that on balance is good.
The nature of existence is such that humankind must be free. To be free, we have the ability to do evil, to turn away from God, the true ground of who we are. Thus, the reality of evil and suffering is built into the very fabric of life as a requirement for life to be.
“Power of being.” “Ground of being.” Those are the weasel words of theologians who don’t know what they’re saying, and so emit fancy phrases to cover their ignorance like a blanket of snow. What, exactly, is a “power of being”? Is it benevolent and omnipotent? If so, the question remains.
And what about all that evil and suffering not caused by human choice: children getting leukemia, thousands wiped out by natural disasters like tsunamis, and all those animals whose suffering is as painful as ours? Why is that a “requirement for life to be?” Why couldn’t an omnipotent god prevent tsunamis and kill those cancer cells? How do these things play into the “greater good”? Small doesn’t tell us.
If the fabric of existence is good “on balance,” well, it could be even better on balance if the Power of Being could turn our choices to the good, or could tinker with geology. If the P.O.B really is omnipotent, he could do stuff like that.
It’s never been clear to me why God supposedly gives us free will, knowing that we’ll “choose” bad actions, and then punishes us for making the wrong choices. He even knows what wrong choices we’ll make! What is gained in all this?
In the end, Small finds meaning in a kind of powerless, watered-down deity who would not be recognizable to most religious folks as God:
Our individual lives are short, inconsequential in a universe that is 13.7 billion years old. We are finite. We suffer. Yet the faiths of the world also teach us that we can transcend suffering and death because we are part of something bigger than us. Behind our everyday realities lies an Ultimate Reality, what we might call God, Allah, Elohim, Nirvana, Brahman. By transcending our individual egos, our wants and desires, and connecting on a deeper and broader level with this Ultimate Reality, we can find true peace.
Yes, some religions, like Buddhism, can give us tips for dealing with suffering, but their lessons are secular, for Buddhism is more akin to philosophy than religion. But dealing with pain still gives us no evidence for an “Ultimate Reality.” The Ultimate Reality is pain, and some joy along with it. For most animals, it’s a joyless search for noms and an eternal avoidance of predators.
If after reading Small’s piece you want more pain, peruse the readers’ comments, many of them pure religious nonsense. But one smart commenter reprises the argument of Epicurus:
Of course he’s not God—he’s the Power of Being? Get the difference?
Small’s HuffPo biography gives these details:
Jeffrey graduated summa cum laude from Yale University and magna cum laude from Harvard Law School. He earned a Masters in the Study of Religions from Oxford University in England where he was a member of Oriel College.
So how can such a smart guy spout such nonsense? The next line in the biography tells the tale:
Jeffrey is active in the Episcopal church, but he has also studied Yoga in India and practiced Buddhist meditation in Bhutan.
To paraphrase Steve Weinberg: “With or without religion, there are some people who say smart things and some people who say dumb things. But for a smart person to say dumb things—that takes religion.”
Finally, my advice to atheists: your best chance to change the minds of religious people is to make them justify evils—both manmade and natural.