Haiti: God and scepticism (4)
God and disasters (4). Post from Talking Philosophy by Mike LaBossiere and a response from Kim Batteau.
When watching the news clips of people speaking about prayer and faith in the face of an earthquake, I was reminded of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake [9]. in philosophy [10], this event is best remembered in the context of Voltaire’s criticism of Leibniz [11]‘ claim that this is the best of all possible worlds [12]. After all, it is rather difficult to reconcile the idea of a benevolent and all powerful God [13] with such natural disasters. David Hume [14] also wrote on this problem and explicitly criticized Leibniz.
Response from Kim Batteau: Let us look at the phenomenon “earthquake” more closely, thinking of the famous Lisbon earthquake 0f 1755 and the Haiti earthquake of 2010 as our examples. In these and similar earthquakes tens of thousands of people, men, women, and children lost their lives in violent deaths, or died after somtimes long drawn-out suffering under collapsed buildings. Voltaire and Hume reacted with their criticism of Leibniz, as Mike LaBossiere points out. Leibniz was a theist of sorts, and defended the compatibility of the existence of a good and all-powerful God with natural disasters. Voltaire was not an atheist, but a deist, believing that God had created everything, winding nature up like a clock, which then moved totally mechanically on its own and without further interference from Him. Hume was a sceptic, and most likely an atheist, although he clothed his ideas about religion in deist-sounding words, and criticized some of the blatant atheism of his time. Voltaire and Hume were adamant in finding God’s (theoretical) direct involvement with natural disasters as an incompatible with His (possible) goodness. Therefore they doubted such involvement. Effectively they were criticizing the God of the Bible, who creates, but also causes (or allows) natural disasters. This criticism struck a chord with Enlightenment man, and today the atheist’s creed (see my first entry under this heading) is widespread in the West, among intellectuals and among ordinary people on the street.
To a certain degree, we may perceive this critical reaction to natural disasters in the Bible book Job, where Job complains to God that he is being unfairly punished, with family being killed (by a natural disaster) as well as with his own sickness. However, we notice that Job never doubts God’s existence or involvement with life on earth. Making Job a modern man, as in the play J.B., is a modern misuse of him.
The key issue has to be: on what consistent basis can we say that natural disasters “ought not to happen”? On the basis of naturalism, natural disasters are simply natural phenomena. The consistent naturalist must deny that nature “ought” to behave in one way or another. Nature is not a matter of “ought,” but of “is.” Therefore we get the paradoxical result of naturalists (Voltaire, Hume) objecting to the theoretical possibility of God’s causing or allowing natural disasters, on the basis of the idea that “such disasters ought not to happen,” while their naturalist presuppositions deny that such an objection to natural phenomena is possible. This is more than a paradox: it makes their case against God groundless. It is also leads inevitably to the philosophical position that the terrible suffering of people in earthquakes is simply a natural phenomenon.
We may not let naturalists get away with murder, philosophically speaking. You cannot be at peace with a nature in which natural disasters are merely natural phenomena, and at the same time be deeply disturbed by such disasters. Even the word “disaster” is a misnomer here. However, your disturbance may lead you to question the “normality” of nature as we now experience it on earth. With the result that one’ s gut feeling that natural disasters like the Lisbon and Haiti earthquakes “ought not to happen,” is warranted, and leads you on to the truths which the Bible reveals about God as creator, judge, redeemer and recreator, and you begin to look at nature, earthquakes, and the story of our life on earth in a new way.
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