Story from BBC NEWS:
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Published: 2010/01/19 13:11:52 GMT
© BBC MMX
Why does God allow natural disasters?
At the heart of Haiti's humanitarian crisis is an age old question for
many religious people - how can God allow such terrible things to
happen? Philosopher David Bain examines the arguments.
Evil has always been a thorn in the side of those - of whatever faith
- who believe in an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good God.
As the philosopher David Hume (echoing Epicurus) put it in 1776: "Is
God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he
able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and
willing? Whence then is evil?"
Faced with this question, Archbishop of York John Sentamu said he had
"nothing to say to make sense of this horror", while another senior
clergyman Canon Giles Fraser preferred to respond "not with clever
argument but with prayer".
Perhaps their stance is understandable. The Old Testament is also not
clear to the layman on such matters. When Job complains about the
injuries God has allowed him to suffer, and claims "they are tricked
that trusted", God says nothing to rebut the charges.
Less reticent is the American evangelist Pat Robertson. He has
suggested Haiti has been cursed ever since the population swore a pact
with the Devil to gain their freedom from the French at the beginning
of the 19th Century. Robertson's claim will strike many as ludicrous,
if not offensive.
And even were it true, it wouldn't obviously meet the challenge.
Why would a loving deity allow such a pact to seem necessary? Why
wouldn't he have freed the Haitians from slavery himself, or prevented
them from being enslaved in the first place? And why, in particular,
would he punish today's Haitians for something their forbears
putatively did more than two centuries before?
So what should believers say? To make progress, we might distinguish
two kinds of evil:
the awful things people do, such as murder, and
the awful things that just happen, such as earthquakes
St Augustine, author CS Lewis and others have argued God allows our
bad actions since preventing them would undermine our freewill, the
value of which outweighs its ill effects.
But there's a counter-argument. Thoroughly good people aren't robots,
so why couldn't God have created only people like them, people who
quite freely live good lives?
However that debate turns out, it's quite unclear how freewill is
supposed to explain the other kind of evil - the death and suffering
of the victims of natural disasters.
Perhaps it would if all the victims - even the newborn - were so bad
that they deserved their agonising deaths, but it's impossible to
believe that is the case.
Or perhaps freewill would be relevant if human negligence always
played a role. There will be some who say the scale of the tragedy in
natural disasters is partly attributable to humans. The world has the
choice to help its poorer parts build earthquake-resistan
and tsunami warning systems.
But the technology has not always existed. Was prehistoric man, with
his sticks and stones, somehow negligent in failing to build early
warning systems for the tsunamis that were as deadly back then as they
are today?
The second century saint, Irenaeus, and the 20th Century philosopher,
John Hick, appeal instead to what is sometimes called soul-making. God
created a universe in which disasters occur, they think, because
goodness only develops in response to people's suffering.
To appreciate this idea, try to imagine a world containing people, but
literally no suffering. Call it the Magical World. In that world,
there are no earthquakes or tsunamis, or none that cause suffering. If
people are hit by falling masonry, it somehow bounces off harmlessly.
If I steal your money, God replaces it. If I try to hurt you, I fail.
So why didn't God create the Magical World instead of ours? Because,
the soul-making view says, its denizens wouldn't be - couldn't be -
truly good people.
It's not that they would all be bad. It's that they couldn't be
properly good. For goodness develops only where it's needed, the idea
goes, and it's not needed in the Magical World.
In that world, after all, there is no danger that requires people to
be brave, so there would be no bravery. That world contains no one who
needs comfort or kindness or sympathy, so none would be given. It's a
world without moral goodness, which is why God created ours instead.
But there is wiggle room.
Even in a world where nothing bad happens, couldn't there be brave
people - albeit without the opportunity to show it? So moral goodness
could exist even if it were never actually needed.
And, anyway, suppose we agree moral goodness could indeed develop only
in a world of suffering.
Doesn't our world contain a surplus of suffering? People do truly
awful things to each other. Isn't the suffering they create enough for
soul-making? Did God really need to throw in earthquakes and tsunamis
as well?
Suffering's distribution, not just its amount, can also cause
problems. A central point of philosopher Immanuel Kant's was that we
mustn't exploit people - we mustn't use them as mere means to our
ends. But it can seem that on the soul-making view God does precisely
this. He inflicts horrible deaths on innocent earthquake victims so
that the rest of us can be morally benefitted.
That hardly seems fair.
It's OK, some will insist, because God works in mysterious ways. But
mightn't someone defend a belief in fairies by telling us they do too?
Others say their talk of God is supposed to acknowledge not the
existence of some all-powerful and all-good agent, who created and
intervenes in the universe, but rather something more difficult to
articulate - a thread of meaning or value running through the world,
or perhaps something ineffable.
But, as for those who believe in an all-good, all-powerful agent-God,
we've seen that they face a question that remains pressing after all
these centuries, and which is now horribly underscored by the horrors
in Haiti. If a deity exists, why didn't he prevent this?
David Bain is a lecturer in the philosophy department of the
University of Glasgow.
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