For the Love of God, Don't Baptize Evil

The other day, a Facebook friend posted a Twitter snapshot that seems to be making the social media rounds, at least among some people. He posted it with the caption, "Some Gods deserve atheism." I saved the image under the name "Terrible Theodicy." Here it is:

In case something happens to the image, here's what it says: "Abused as a child? God ordained it. Suffered a miscarriage? God ordained it. Lose your job? God ordained it. Robbed? God ordained it. Cancer? God ordained it. Rest, Christian. Every trial, every moment of suffering was ordained by Him who saved you. SDG." (The SDG probably stands for "Soli Deo Gloria," or "Glory to God Alone.")

This Twitter post captures a particular conception of God, one popular among many (not all) Calvinists, which lifts up God's sovereignty over all things, presenting it as the most important divine attribute. What we see here is that this conception of God is offered as a distinct way of "solving" the ancient and persistent problem of evil.

In brief, the problem of evil is the problem of making sense of why an almighty and perfectly good God would permit all the evils that we find in this world: all the child abuse, the miscarriages, the poverty, the criminality, the disease and the natural disasters and the wicked actions of our fellow creatures.

In the discussion that follows the posting of this tweet, the tweet's link to the problem of evil becomes clear. Most commenters (probably reflecting the dominant theology of those friended to the one who posted it) were horrified by the way the post seemed to make God responsible for the evil in the world, but a few brave defenders of the post rejected this take. Their view, which I suspect reflects the view of the original Twitterer and those who find comfort in his post, is basically that God ordained all these things for a good reason that we mere mortals cannot discern.

In other words, those who favor the view of God expressed in this post address the problem of evil by doubling down on God's supremacy, God's perfect knowledge, and insisting that any apparent imperfection is really just a failure to see the perfection of it from our limited perspective.

The idea is roughly this: "God works in mysterious ways, and even when something seems awful, it is all part of God's great plan. There is a good reason for everything that happens, no matter how terrible or wrong it seems to us." This supposedly comforting thought explains why the original Twitterer, after affirming God's responsibility for each of the evils named, says, "Rest, Christian."

My friend who posted the tweet, like me, finds little of comfort in this idea. In effect, the vision of God put forward here strikes him (and me) as unworthy of our worship because it sacrifices God's goodness at the altar of God's power. Better to be an atheist than to embrace such a God whose actions defy our most basic conceptions of what is good and right.

Of course, the defender of this theology will insist that it is not God who is evil but our conception of good and evil that is misguided. I find such a response deeply unsatisfying, for reasons I'll get to in a minute. But before I do that I want to step back and say something important: There is more than one "problem of evil." The one described above is what we might call the philosophical or theological problem, but there's also the existential one: How do we live with evil. At least some people find a comfort that I don't find in the image of God presented in the tweet above. In other words, for some people this image of God helps them live with the tragedies of life.

I don't want to trivialize that. But I do want to invite those people to consider whether the same resources for comfort might be found elsewhere, in a conception of God that has fewer troubling implications.

With that in mind, let me talk about why I think the implications of this approach to evil are so problematic.

My friend's caption for the post--"Some gods deserve atheism"--reminds me immediately of Simone Weil. Weil was not an atheist, but at one point she described atheism as "a purification." The idea is that to discover the true God, we need to purge ourselves of the gods we invent or construct and cling to so firmly that they fill up the space into which divine reality might enter.

I think the problem of evil, and the form of atheism that springs from moral revulsion to certain solutions to the problem and their accompanying God-concept, can be purifying in just this way.
But one needn't become an atheist to experience this purifying effect. What one does need is to hold onto a healthy skepticism towards "solutions" to the problem that baptize evil--in other words, solutions that, in an effort to "defend" God, urge us to set aside our most basic horror at the most terrible wrongs and insist in defiance of our moral conscience that they're really good in some mysterious way.

Once we make that move, we have silenced our moral sense so thoroughly that we are dispositionally cut off from the Good Itself and so from the kind of openness to the true God that is required to have an actual encounter with the divine.

At least that's how I see it. Any solution to the problem of evil that asks us to ignore our clearest moral intuitions based on some vague invocation of God's mysterious ways asks us, in turn, to shut down that part of us that is most directly linked to the divine. That, in turn, imposes the most final impediment to experiencing and connecting with God--with the truth that transcends our understanding, as opposed to our particular construct.

All of this is true, I think, even if we concede that our moral sense is fallible. What that concession forces us to do is be open to having our moral intuitions proven wrong in the light of a more encompassing perspective, not to develop the habit of ignoring our moral intuitions based on the bare theoretic assurance (offered by some preacher or theologian) that the more encompassing perspective, which we don't know anything about, really does defeat our moral intuitions (as if we know at least that much about the unknowable).

We are closer to God if we rage against God's apparent injustices, arguing with God or crying out "Why, God? Why?", than we are if we baptize the horrors we face and invoke the view that none of these horrors are really evil after all, that our moral sense is not to be listened to, that our conscience and our compassion and our heart should be set aside or put away in the name of vaunting God's glory.

When we harden our hearts against the evils in the world by calling them good in defiance of our instincts, we harden our hearts against God.