Most likely, this has happened to you: You and some other folks are gazing at the snow-capped Rocky Mountains or witnessing a gorgeous sunset on the rugged Oregon coast when someone says, “When I see beauty like this, I know there’s a God.”
The more-diplomatic of us respond with silence, a forced grin, or even feigned agreement. I, on the other hand, have had enough of this back-porch theobabble. Equally awestruck as I might be by this natural splendor, I respond by saying something like, “When I hear of a tsunami that kills 230,000 people — a third of them children — I know that either there isn’t a God, or he’s a real prick.” Why on earth would the existence of beauty in the world lead one to conclude that there is a God when there is so much ugly, evil and tragedy to offset it?
On May 20, 2013, a class-5 tornado struck Moore, Oklahoma, killing 24 people, including 10 children, and injuring 377 others, and causing some $2 billion in property damage. Before the tornado arrived, Rebecca Vitsmun scooped up her toddler and left for safer ground. She returned to find CNN’s Wolf Blitzer standing in front of her demolished home with a microphone and a camera crew.
After declaring that Rebecca, her son and her husband were “blessed,” Blitzer demanded, “You’ve gotta thank the Lord, right? Do you thank the Lord for that split-second decision?” Vitsmun replied, “I’m actually an atheist.” Then, rather than admonishing Blitzer for his presumptuousness, Vitsmun graciously added, “We are here, and I don’t blame anyone for thanking the Lord.” One has to wonder whether — as Blitzer would have it — the parents and other loved ones of those 10 dead children thanked the Lord for their own survival and all the other events of that day.1
Making inane comments about the hand of a supposed omniscient, omnipotent and ever-loving supreme being is part of our Judeo-Christian heritage. People feel obliged to attribute good things to the hand of God, ignoring the countless examples of bad things that refute that conclusion. This is the abiding problem of theodicy: the defense of God’s alleged goodness and omnipotence in the face of evil.
Philosopher Antony Flew addressed this issue directly in his seminal 1950 essay “Theology and Falsification”:
Let us begin with a parable. ... Once upon a time two explorers came upon a clearing in the jungle. In the clearing were growing many flowers and many weeds. One explorer says, “Some gardener must tend this plot.” The other disagrees, “There is no gardener.” So they pitch their tents and set a watch. No gardener is ever seen. “But perhaps he is an invisible gardener.” So they set up a barbed-wire fence. They electrify it. They patrol with bloodhounds. ... But no shrieks ever suggest that some intruder has received a shock. No movements of the wire ever betray an invisible climber. The bloodhounds never give cry. Yet still the Believer is not convinced. “But there is a gardener, invisible, intangible, insensible to electric shocks, a gardener who has no scent and makes no sound, a gardener who comes secretly to look after the garden which he loves.” At last the Skeptic despairs, “But what remains of your original assertion? Just how does what you call an invisible, intangible, eternally elusive gardener differ from an imaginary gardener or even from no gardener at all?”2
Flew makes two major points in this essay: The existence of evil (the metaphorical weeds in God’s garden) belies the belief that there is an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loving God looking over us. And statements that are continually reformulated to accommodate contrary empirical evidence are in principle irrefutable, and therefore not statements at all. Flew refers to this process as “the death of a thousand qualifications.”
Some pathological believers take this kind of theobabble a step further by attributing tragic events to a vengeful God who is punishing us for our transgressions against his law. After the 2004 Asian tsunami, Muslim survivors were asking what they had done to incur the wrath of Allah. The Christian version of this nonsense was Jerry Falwell’s assertion on Pat Robertson’s “700 Club” on September 13, 2001, that the September 11 terrorist attacks were God’s warning to America about our slide into faithless secularism:
I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say “you helped this happen.”3
This is patently absurd: 9/11 was an act of men — devoutly religious Muslims — who were motivated by the teachings of the prophet Mohammad and the interpretation of them by Osama bin Laden and company, and whatever political influences and social conditions that caused these factors to coalesce into homicidal/suicidal behavior. If, as Falwell says, this attack was instigated by God for our secularist transgressions, why didn’t the hijackers crash those airplanes into abortion clinics, pagan temples, or a gay-pride parade?
Falwell died in 2007 at the age of 73, apparently having worn himself out by hating so many people. But his legacy is alive and thriving in the world of evangelical Christianity.
There is no doubt that many of those who lost loved ones or who otherwise had their lives torn asunder by the Asian tsunami, the Oklahoma tornado, and even the religiously motivated September 11 terrorist attacks consoled themselves with the belief that these calamities were part of the Grand Plan of a Higher Power. But “acts of God” are natural events with natural causes. And acts of war or terrorism are perpetrated by people. Why would an all-loving, all-powerful God permit innocent people to be killed indiscriminately?
In the words of Woody Allen: “If God exists, I hope he has a good excuse.”
Richard E. Wackrow is the author of the book Beginner’s Guide to Blasphemy.
References
1. A Google search for “Rebecca Vitsmun” will take you to her interview with Wolf Blitzer, her accounts of that day in Moore, Oklahoma, and some surprises.
2. “Theology and Falsification” by Antony Flew can be found in its entirety on the Internet with a Google search.
3. The Falwell-Robertson exchange is on YouTube. If you think you can stomach it, Google “Jerry Falwell 700 Club.”