A while ago, Crawley discussed an exchange (video) between theist Alister McGrath and atheist Richard Dawkins, recorded in a TV interview. During the exchange, Dawkins asked McGrath about the problem of evil: why would God not protect people from tornados? (Or, better yet, I’d add, steer the tornados away, or, better still, not create the tornados in the first place? Dawkins posed the question in this manner: A tornado occurs and a hundred people die. One little girl in the eye of the storm is alive and relatively unscathed by the storm. Was God responsible for saving her? (That is, did he intervene?) If so, why did he not save the one hundred others? If not, how can he be thanked for her survival? It reminded me of this great letter posted to Viz magazine:
“A woman whose daughter was hospitalised in a U.S. tornado told ITV News that God would make her better. Presumably that’s a different God from the one that almost killed her with a tornado.”
It’s a good point, actually. A commenter on a recent thread made the point that religious people like to praise God when things go right (and beg God for help when it’s needed) but don’t like to blame God when things go wrong. If God is not to blame for the bad, is he to praise for the good? Assuming God exists, to what degree does he intervene? Is he a kind of cosmic puppet master? If so, how often does he pull the strings?
Assuming God exists, it seems a tad ridiculous to assert that God is pulling any strings at all, ever, if you ask me. The whole subject is fraught with difficulty. Let me tell you why.
The first problem with assessing the value of prayer is that for every ‘answer’ that can be attributed to the supernatural activity of God, there are other answers that can usually be even more easily attributed to natural causes. Of course that fact contributes nothing toward proving that God doesn’t exist, as atheists would like it to do, but it does suggest that we’re not dealing with a God who likes to intervene. A second difficulty is knowing how to reconcile the fact that most prayers will be contradicted by the prayers of others. If a high school student asks God to let her be top of the class, and God answers that prayer, does he ignore the prayers of the others in the class who wanted the same thing for themselves? Would such prayers cancel themselves out and result in natural (as opposed to supernatural) ends? Perhaps, then, all prayer is self-canceling and God just allows things to be? In which case we now have a non-interventionist God?
It’s this line of reasoning that, after much contemplation, leads me to deism. In all practical respects, I am now a deist. Of course that’s interesting to me as a libertarian, because many of the libertarian champions of history have been deists, including many of the founders of the United States: Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Cornelius Harnett, Gouverneur Morris, Hugh Williamson. People who desired freedom and freethought, and used it to create the philosophy of a new society, changed their minds about an interventionist God. Franklin had this to say:
“Some books against Deism fell into my hands; they were said to be the substance of sermons preached at Boyle’s lectures. It happened that they wrought an effect on me quite contrary to what was intended by them; for the arguments of the Deists, which were quoted to be refuted, appeared to me much stronger than the refutations; in short, I soon became a thorough Deist.”
I laughed when I read this, because I can think of many books which I’ve read with that exact result: the opposite of what the author intended. In any case, this got me thinking: is there some unconscious reason why deism and libertarianism would find themselves such comfortable bedfellows?
8 responses so far ↓
1 Dave Powell // Nov 1, 2007 at 3:49 am
I can’t say i’m surprised John - after reading some of your other posts on this topic on here and on Will and Testament I always wondered why you called yourself a Theist rather than a Deist.
The interventionist god has never made much sense to me because as you said s/he is full of contradictions, and i’ve never seen any evidence for his / her actions.
But is Deism still not just using a god to fill one of the last remaining gaps in our knowledge - the creation of the universe.
This is one topic that i’d planned to write a bit more about on my blog but my wife took offence at my posts about atheism and took it as a personal insult, especially as her father - a retired methodist minister died this summer. So I may have to start a new blog and acquire a psuedonym. I have already written to the Ulster Star as Oliver Benen - its an anagram, work it out yourself.
Just hope my wife doesn’t read this blog.
2 John // Nov 1, 2007 at 7:42 am
LOL Dave that’s fairly funny. Yes, keeping the wife happy is always a major priority; I understand!
3 Stephen // Nov 2, 2007 at 2:48 pm
John:
I hinted at a possible reason on one of my recent articles. I mocked religious people who pray for all manner of stupid things as if they didn’t want to make a decision for themselves and be responsible. I think libertarianism has such a strong sense of individual freedom that divine activity can be seen to limit that freedom by perpetually intervening rather than letting human beings lead their own lives, make decisions, and be responsible. I think there’s a good argument in there but it doesn’t automatically justify deism over classical theism, since there seems no logical reason to say that God definately doesn’t intervene or can’t I don’t think Dawkins argument was as good as many seem to think. All he raises is a problem of explanation, but classical theists don’t need to provide an answer as to why God does this and not that in order to defend their beliefs. Dawkins hasn’t actually shown that there is any logical inconsistency - because there isn’t one. At best it shows that if God does indeed intervene he does so in a rather odd way.
S.
4 Sue Blackmore v Alister McGrath // Nov 13, 2007 at 11:35 am
[…] recent article of mine titled Deism and Libertarianism stemmed partly from the same exchange between Dawkins and McGrath in which McGrath failed to answer […]
5 Joe // Mar 25, 2008 at 12:44 pm
John- I thought that McGrath’s answer to Dawkins was incredibly revealing. His face was straining badly and he looked incredibly uncomfortable. He really had no answer.
It reminds me about Sir David Attenborough talking about a slug like creature in Africa. He said that the creature has no benefit in the ecosystem and could only survive by burrowing into the skin of human beings, feeding on their blood and causing blindness in the carrier. That really struck a chord with me and it is directly related to the question that McGrath failed to answer. If you believe in a benevolent, omnipotent and interventionist God who created us and who loves us, you are going to struggle to explain the slug like creature that Attenborough describes.
Stephen- “all he raises is a problem of explanation that Christians dont need to explain to justify their beleifs”? I’m sorry but this does seem to be a cop out. If you believe that God is all good and intervenes in our lives, then you do have a problem that you need to explain. Take the incident in tornado valley last year, when a lightning strike destroyed a church and seriously injured a church worker and two other little children (both of whom were on life support for weeks….sorry I dont have a citation). If God is all good, created the natural order (as the Christian God supposedly is) and intervenes in our lives, explain that incident.
I know you are saying to don’t have to but I would be interested to see you try.
6 Joe // Mar 25, 2008 at 4:19 pm
Stephen- would like to take back the cop-out statement I made in my previous post. Should have read your post a little more carefully. Its pretty clear you are not trying to cop-out. The point you make has really got me thinking actually. I still think theists should have to explain such questions, yet I can see where you are coming from.
7 John // Mar 25, 2008 at 6:25 pm
Joe- Don’t worry, Stephen is a thick-skinned bastard and won’t mind your point. He’s setting aside some time tomorrow to deal with these points, so make sure to check back then.
8 Jefferson and America and religion // Apr 14, 2008 at 9:37 am
[…] fact is, as mentioned in this post about deism, that Thomas Jefferson’s religious belief doesn’t remotely resemble that of […]
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