Tsunami and faith

Another odd response is given on successive days by the Chief Rabbi in The Times and the Archbishop of Canterbury in The Telegraph. They discuss what theologians call theodicy, or an explanation for the existence of evil that would reconcile it with the existence of a benevolent deity.

I never normally comment on religion, except insofar as it affects the subjects I do write about and that are the sub-title of this blog. I make an exception here because I find it a peculiarity that these responses by religious leaders are a standard part of our culture.

The Chief Rabbi and the Archbishop are wise and good men, and I intend no disrespect to them, or to Orthodox Jews and Anglicans, in being incredulous at what they say. The Chief Rabbi, Dr Jonathan Sacks, begins:

IT IS THE question of questions for religious belief. How does God permit a tragedy such as the Indian Ocean tidal wave? How does he allow the innocent to suffer and the guiltless to die?

I accept that it is impossible for the religious believer to avoid the question Dr Sacks raises. Yet I still find it a disconcertingly self-referential approach. It amounts to asking, from the standpoint of the religious believer, how such great suffering affects me, and how may it be assimilated in my personal credo.

The problem of immense and random suffering is indeed a huge (I would say insuperable) objection to religious faith, but theological agonising is a personal or institutional, not a civic, matter. Unlike many non-believers, I regard religion as a valuable cultural resource in a heterogeneous modern democracy. It is so, however, in the sense of reminding us of the doubt and contingency that must accompany our deliberations on public policy. Religious apologetic – the justification of faith to counter objections to it – is another matter; I can see no civic role for it, because it really is just a matter of faith rather than guidance.

Trying to reconcile more than 100,000 deaths from a natural disaster with his belief in a benevolent God, Dr Sacks writes:

The simplest explanation is that of the 12th-century sage, Moses Maimonides. Natural disasters, he said, have no explanation other than that God, by placing us in a physical world, set life within the parameters of the physical. Planets are formed, tectonic plates shift, earthquakes occur, and sometimes innocent people die. To wish it were otherwise is in essence to wish that we were not physical beings at all. Then we would not know pleasure, desire, achievement, freedom, virtue, creativity, vulnerability and love. We would be angels — God’s computers, programmed to sing His praise.

You either find this convincing or you don’t. Being no philosopher, I should be rash to try to refute it by citing Hume, whose treatment of natural religion I have long found utterly convincing despite the doubtless numerous philosophical objections to them. It merely strikes me as implausible to suppose that the effect Dr Sacks describes requires anything like the superfluity of suffering that our world exhibits, especially in the past week.

There’s also a pragmatic objection I have to this way of reasoning. Dr Sacks writes:

It was just such a disaster — the Lisbon tragedy of All Souls’ Day 1755, in which 60,000 people died as a result of tsunamis produced by an earthquake — that led Voltaire to write Candide, satirising religious faith…. What incensed Voltaire was that there were religious believers at the time who thought that the earthquake represented God’s anger at Lisbon’s “sinful” ways. After all, didn’t the Old Testament speak of divine anger? Were catastrophes not interpreted as punishment against sinful nations? Is there not justice in history? Yet in the end the interpretation was unsustainable. Why Lisbon and not other cities? Why were the young, the frail, the saintly among the casualties? Even the most dogmatic found it hard to answer these questions. In any case, the suggestion is morally unacceptable. It blames the victims for their fate. After the Holocaust, such thoughts ought to be unthinkable.

Certainly, they ought. Yet there is, as a matter of fact if not doctrine, an inherent tendency in religious apologetic to suppose that redemption emerges from suffering. This is obviously true in Christianity, which maintains that God became flesh (the Incarnation), died for our sins (the Atonement) and rose again (the Resurrection). It is quite a short step from holding that doctrinal belief to seeking signs of redemption in circumstances where patently none, but only suffering, exists. There are examples too among Jewish theologians, as of course Dr Sacks knows better than anyone. The Reform Rabbi and theologian Ignaz Maybaum, who left Germany for Great Britain in 1939 and served as lecturer in theology at the Leo Baeck College for many years, argued forcefully (e.g. Ignaz Maybaum: A Reader, 2001) that there was rebirth out of destruction (churban): the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem allowed the Diaspora to form; and in the Holocaust, God’s redemptive purpose was served by the miraculous survival of two-thirds of world Jewry.

I do not share this way of thinking (which I hope I have not misrepresented). I believe in neither heavenly nor earthly redemption, but only in the ability of human intelligence to secure piecemeal improvement of our condition for the benefit of ourselves, and of future generations when we are dead. The reason I am interested in public policy is primarily that I think we have some limited scope in each generation to advance that end and almost unlimited capacity to retard it.

The inference I draw – the only political principle I believe in passionately – is that the Western Enlightenment tradition needs to be militant in its self-defence against the forces of barbarism, such as secular and theocratic variants of totalitarianism, yet aware of its own capacity for sin. I am with theologians who urge that position. The Protestant Reinhold Niebuhr brilliantly criticised the pacifism of the Christian Churches in the 1930s in the face of the Nazi threat. Emil Fackenheim, a Rabbi who escaped Nazi Germany and became Professor of Philosophy at Toronto University, perceived (of course in an entirely non-triumphalist way) that “except among the theologically or humanly perverse, Zionism – the commitment to the safety and genuine sovereignty of the State of Israel – is not negotiable” (To Mend the World: Foundations of Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought, 1982, pp. 284-5).

Of great suffering produced by human agency, that is the best – and entirely secular – response I can make. Of great suffering produced by natural disaster, I can make no sense whatever, and wouldn’t try.