God is not on the Ballot

It has been a while since my last post, and I am working on a piece.

In the interim a great post by Jim Wallis (author of God's Politics) on his blog, that I would like to share with you.

http://www.sojo.net/blog/godspolitics/?p=3166

As a preivew Jim writes:

"In 2008, the kingdom of God is not on the ballot in any of the 50 states as far as I can see...

With more than 2,000 verses in the Bible about how we treat the poor and oppressed, I will examine the record, plans, policies, and promises made by the candidates on what they will do to overcome the scandal of extreme global poverty and the shame of such unnecessary domestic poverty in the richest nation in the world"

The rest is in a similar tone... if only more US preachers were like Jim and less like those that preach a message of intolerance and literal interpretation of a text that was never meant to be read literally... (and for most of its history was never read literally).

Why Do Terrible Things Happen?

The folly of a man spoils his ways; but he blames God in his heart. (Proverbs 19:3)


I do voluntary work for a help line and this morning I answered from an Alf Garnett (Miserable old right-wing git) type that begun, “Why does God let shit things happen?”. Of course the nature of the help line means that I was not able to mount a defence of God but it got me thinking nonetheless. I would have liked to have answered “Why do you want to blame God for bad things?”, or “Why do you think that God should intervene to make all well in the world?”

Similarly about a year ago my wife's mother asked me a variation on this when she said, “If God is good why does He let such terrible things happen”. Of course this is a question that has plagued priests, popes, philosophers and theologians since the beginning of the Judaeo-Christian faith and I am far less capable of answering this question than they... but here goes.


On the one hand there is the apparent logical contradiction that if God is omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent (all knowing, all present and all powerful) then He is somehow complicit in any tragedy, disaster, war, famine etc because He allowed it to happen. Similarly for those who believe in a devil then the very fact that the devil exists and has the power to seduce Man into sin and evil also implies a degree of complicity. How can God punish us for a sin that he knew we would commit? Or worse that he allowed the Lord of Evil to tempt us into committing?


Of course the classic way out has been the doctrine of Free Will. God did not create robots but instead gave human beings the freedom to choose to accept or reject God. However this is also logically flawed since, if God is omniscient (all knowing) then He already knows if you will accept Him or Reject Him. In other words your fate has effectively been pre-determined.


The problem is known as theological fatalism and it goes like this:

1. God is omniscient
2. Since God is omniscient, God has infallible knowledge
3. If God has infallible knowledge that tomorrow you will for example murder someone, then you must murder someone
4. You invariably murder someone
   

Hence one of the schisms in Christianity between the doctrine of Free Will and the Calvinist doctrine of predestination (the belief that only the righteous are saved).

One way theologians have sought to find a way round this is by arguing that because God has created us with Free Will, because he wants man to accept or reject Him voluntarily, he chooses to somehow limit his omniscience freely to preserve man's freedom to choose.

Another was first put forward by Thomas Aquinas in the 16th Century. Aquinas argued that because God stands outside time he knows both when any act will occur in the future, and what the consequences of that decision were in the past – He can see the big picture that man as contingent linear beings cannot. What to us appears as a tragedy or a tragic waste may have ramifications and repercussions that we cannot anticipate or indeed ever know (for a good take on this read the excellent little novel: “The 5 People You Meet in Heaven” by Mitch Albom)

However remember this is not just a theological problem. Genetically what we look like, how tall we will be and many millions of other features of our complex life form will be determined by our DNA . However how we live and what we choose to do (Free Will, nature vs. nurture) combined with random chance (Chaos) will determine how and when we die. Plenty of philosophy and political theory has been deterministic: Hobbes, Hume, Hegel, Marx , Fukuyama.

Of course this argument and these questions will continue to be asked because the answer is not simple or straightforward, and because on a simple level we often cannot face that perhaps the real reason Shit happens may be that it is the consequence of our decision or of the collective decisions and effects of the society we live in.

I will end with an extract from a conversation between the Chief Rabbi in England Jonathan Sacks with the veteran BBC Radio 4 journalist John Humphrys in a famous series of 3 interviews Humphreys did in 2006 called 'Humphrys in Search of God'.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/programmes/misc/insearchofgod.shtml

Jonathan Sacks: I am sometimes asked where was God in Auschwitz.

John Humphrys: And you say where was man in Auschwitz?

Jonathan Sacks: And I answer as follows: God was in Auschwitz in the command "thou shalt
not murder", in the words "you shall not oppress the stranger", in the words "your brother's blood cries to me from the ground". God was saying those things to the German people and they didn't listen. I cannot let human beings off the hook by blaming things on God; if I do then I'm betraying the mission that he sent me and sent all of us. We cannot escape from responsibility..