God Indicted

 

It’s time to put God in the dock. How has he allowed 2020? 

Perhaps we are just too used to having it too good. But then, how did he allow the Holocaust—the many holocausts of the 20th century? How does he allow the poverty of so many lands? How does he allow children to die of malaria and tuberculosis? Christopher Hitchens condemns God for allowing awful parasites to infect small children. Why make the innocent suffer?

Isn’t he ultimately responsible for all such evils? He could stop them. He does not. Can we overlook this?

I can accept that suffering is not itself evil. Suffering it seems to me has mysterious benefits. It builds soul. We are vaguely aware of this when we relish the pain from physical exertion. Or when we step off a roller coaster. Or go to see a horror movie. And God promises to compensate in the next life: blessed are those who mourn.

We do not want suffering, on the whole, beyond familiar limits. That does not make it evil.

More troubling to me is injustice; watching evil triumph over good. COVID itself troubles me less than the venal and self-interested reaction of so many: of the drug companies, the politicians, the “experts,” the government of China, Antifa, Black Lives Matter. Why doesn’t God intervene on behalf of his own? What message is he sending? 

Why does Anne Frank die in a concentration camp, and Stalin in his bed?

Jesus responds with the parable of the wheat and tares: the weeds will not be pulled up until the harvest, for fear good grain might be uprooted too.

The striking thing about that parable is how clearly it goes against good gardening advice. Of course one pulls up the weeds—they will stunt the growth of the grain.

It has to be that souls work differently: that weeds, suffering, improve the crop. “Such things must come, but woe to the person through whom they come.”

But has he left us without a sign? Without assurance that the universe itself will resolve towards the good?

In fact, the Bible, the Old Testament, insists that he has given us just such a sign: that God will intervene for his faithful on the battlefield. As he repeatedly did for the Israelites.

Perhaps he does. It does seem that the trajectory of history, as someone has said, arcs towards justice. Just not within each lifetime. Stalin may have died in his bed, but the Soviet Union eventually collapsed suddenly, as if a miracle. The Berlin Wall fell as abruptly as the walls of Jericho.

Nazi Germany collapsed in flames, and its name became infamous.

Leaving aside revisionist history, the Central Powers were the bad guys in World War I, and they lost. The North were unambiguously in the moral right in the US Civil War, and they won. The South held slaves, and the South fired the first shots. Rome, against the odds, won the Punic Wars. The Carthaginians practiced child sacrifice. The colonials, against the odds, achieved independence from the British Empire. The colonials were fighting under the banner of human equality and human rights.

Sometimes, no doubt, there is no clear moral superiority of one side over the other; but that is a rarity, for without some egregious act on one side or the other, why would things come to war?

Is there any clear example in history of an immoral society subjugating a clearly more moral one?

One can respond, of course, that “the winners get to write the history,” but that is not actually true. Historians almost by definition come by to do their work long after either side to a conflict has passed on. They may have their prejudices, but these will not be consistent historian to historian, and much of the point of history as a discipline is spotting and countering such biases when they appear.

No doubt there is a limit to divine intervention. God cannot be too obvious about it: he cannot intervene immediately to defend Jews from the Nazis, or the Irish from the British Empire, or the Jews from the Roman Empire. If he did, he would eliminate the opportunity to be moral. One would simply be moral out of immediate self-interest.

In other words, the spiritual grain needs weeds nearby in order to reach maturity.