God in Haiti

After listening to the UK Radio 4 Today programme, I was struck by the interview with John Sentamu, the bishop of York, who was trying to explain the role of God in the Haiti earthquake disaster.

It is understandable that the media wants to cover the human cost of the disaster, the suffering, the relief effort and the social and economic consequences, but it seemed rather strange that a religious figure should be involved in the coverage.

As is common in these circumstances, the media always invites some religious figure to officially sympathise with the suffering, to wring their hands and explain how it shouldn't be a cause of loss of faith. But how reasonable is that position?

It has always been very difficult for religions to claim both that their god is merciful and omniscient, all-powerful and loving, and at the same time accept that natural disasters create massive suffering.

Some conservative evangelists, such as Pat Robertson in the US, argue that disasters are God's punishment for sinning, but that's a rather peculiar take on events like Katrina and hurricane Mitch, and also implies mass punishment. Most theologians steer well clear of such blanket condemnation but they have a really hard time with the question.

The bishop did his best to deflect attention away from the question and instead talked about the munificence of nature, the grandeur of the world, and the goodness of Christ. What he didn't talk about was the problem of an all-powerful omniscient God letting disasters happen which kill thousands of people.

Of course, the reality is that Haiti lies on the edge of the Caribbean tectonic plate and for the last 250 years it's been stable, but gathering pressure as the plates try to move against each other. Suddenly, 10km down in the ground, the stresses reached breaking point and the quake occurred. This is a well-understood, but hard to predict, process and doesn't need any deity as an explanation.

The suffering problem

The difficulty with claiming that any God is benevolent is that you need some kind of explanation to account for bad things happening. You can, like Pat Robertson, opt for the "it's your own fault" solution. But if you reject that, and still need some notion of blame, then it has to be down to the God itself. That's uncomfortable for theologians.

So typically they retreat into the idea of non-intervention. Although there is some kind of God who is omniscient, all-powerful, and loving, they are supposed to cast the world adrift, subject to its own natural laws, leaving humankind to suffer natural disasters. That fits very well with the incidence of disasters but leads to other trickier ethical problems such as how can that stance be justified? It all makes work for the theologians.

The suffering problem appears also in nature. Why for example, as Dawkins asked, does the gazelle not have an inbuilt anaesthetic which is released just at the point when the lion kills it? Why does it need to suffer at all? The suffering seems entirely gratuitous, affecting something which the Christian religion claims has no soul. It would be a marvellous opportunity for intelligent design.

The evolutionary explanation is both accurate and harsh. There is no evolutionary advantage in the development of such an anaesthetic. Should the mutation arise to develop such an anaesthetic, it would not give the individual a survival advantage and would not therefore be passed on to future generations. Suffering is endemic in nature, since all living things are subject to the forces of their environment, predators, natural disasters, food shortages, and so on. Nature does not have a sense of suffering.

So when religious people publicly wring their hands in media-focussed sympathy for the victims of disasters, they are denying the reality of nature, pretending that some deity is responsible but not responsible, present but distant, knowing but unwilling to act.

The contradictions of theology which results provide a confusing space in which religious academics can work without end, but it offers nothing by way of explanation. Maintaining the ambiguity is what gives theologians their job security - answering these questions would put them out of work.

Even exhortations to pray for the victims are fatuous - nothing fails quite like prayer - and when religious figures like the worthy bishop say the earthquake in Haiti should not shake Christian faith, he knows full well that it really should. Even though the technology of earthquake prediction is still poor, it is still infinitely more reliable than prayer, and getting better every year.

Placing trust in an immaterial superbeing who is supposed to be omniscient, omnipotent, every-present, jealous, vengeful, loving, kind, and all the rest, is a complete nonsense in a world governed by evidenced physical laws. Natural disasters such as the earthquake in Haiti ought to be a wake up call to people to lose the illusion of religious faith.

But it's a sad fact that on these occasions, the media always drag out some religious figurehead for a bit of public piety. In any other area it would be seen as the cynical exploitation of a media opportunity.