By A C Grayling  One
thinks with sorrow of the hundreds of thousands whose lives have been
horrendously lost or affected by the great Japanese earthquake and
tsunami, which will put a black mark against this year 2011 in the
annals, coming so soon after the earthquake that hit Christchurch in New
Zealand. The events are almost certainly linked tectonically,
reminding us of the vast forces of nature that are normal for the
planet itself but inimical to human life, especially when lived
dangerously close to the jigsaw cracks of the earth’s surface.Someone
told me that there were to be special prayers in their local church
for the people of Japan. This well-intentioned and fundamentally kindly
proceeding nevertheless shows how absurd, in the literal sense of this
term, are religious belief and practice. When I saw the television
footage of people going to church in Christchurch after the tragic
quake there, the following thoughts pressed. It
would be very unkind to think that the churchgoers were going to give
thanks that they personally escaped; one would not wish to impute
selfishness and personal relief in the midst of a disaster in which many
people arbitrarily and suddenly lost their lives through ‘an act of
God’. If they were going to pray for their god to look after the souls
of those who had died, why would they think he would do so since he had
just caused, or allowed, their bodies to be suddenly and violently
crushed or drowned? Indeed,
were they praising and supplicating a deity who designed a world that
causes such arbitrary and sudden mass killings? An omniscient being
would know all the implications of what it does, so it would know it
was arranging matters with these awful outcomes. Were they praising the
planner of their sufferings for their sufferings, and also begging his
help to escape what he had planned? Perhaps they think that their god was not responsible for the earthquake. If they believe that their god designed a world in which such things happen but left the world alone thereafter and does not intervene when it turns lethal on his creatures, then they implicitly question his moral character. If he is not powerful enough to do something about the world’s periodic murderous indifference to human beings, then in what sense is he a god? Instead he seems to be a big helpless ghost, useless to pray to and unworthy of praise. For
if he is not competent to stop an earthquake or save its victims, he
is definitely not competent to create a world. And if he is powerful
enough to do both, but created a dangerous world that inflicts violent
and agonizing sufferings arbitrarily on sentient creatures, then he is
vile. Either way, what are people thinking who believe in
such a being, and who go to church to praise and worship it? How, in
the face of events which human kindness and concern registers as tragic
and in need of help – help which human beings proceed to give to their
fellows: no angels appear from the sky to do it – can they believe
such an incoherent fiction as the idea of a deity? This is a perennial
puzzle. Comments...
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