God: Did I miss anything?

Though I’m not really following the Virginia Tech shooting tragedy, bits of it are leaking into the Australian news. I’m sort of absorbing it from an Australian perspective. I’m guessing that this event will not reignite the gun debate in America in any long term way — the power of the NRA and the reluctance of the American left has ensured the gun debate’s been canned for the next twenty years, no matter how many people get shot. I watch and wonder if America will ever learn to stop this.

I don’t know what to do about gun violence. Crazy people get guns. It even happened in Australia once. Once. But contrast that to the grim regularity with which these stories come out in the USA. The theme of ‘gun rampage/closed-room slaughter/suicide’ has become a script, an American story that grows with each retelling.

As a believer, I used to respond to the problem of evil by explaining that God refused to curtail our agency. If we decided to kill a hundred people, it was allowed so that we’d be justly judged by our actions in the hereafter. It didn’t occur to me that God was a being that could see the future and already knew what we were going to do.

Now that explanation seems unsatisfactory. I imagine what kinds of events would take place if there were no supreme intervening being, and it looks like… well, pretty much like what’s going on right now.

Still, this doesn’t stop a dissembling ferret like Dinesh D’Souza, whose blog features the most invitingly punchable face in all conservativedom, from wondering how athiests deal with the problem of evil.

Where Is Atheism When Bad Things Happen?

Notice something interesting about the aftermath of the Virginia Tech shootings? Atheists are nowhere to be found. Every time there is a public gathering there is talk of God and divine mercy and spiritual healing.

Notice something interesting about horrible tragedies in progress? God is nowhere to be found. Sure, people talk about God afterwards. Talk and talk and talk.

What this tells me is that if it’s difficult to know where God is when bad things happen, it is even more difficult for atheism to deal with the problem of evil. The reason is that in a purely materialist universe, immaterial things like good and evil and souls simply do not exist. For scientific atheists like Dawkins, Cho’s shooting of all those people can be understood in this way–molecules acting upon molecules.

If this is the best that modern science has to offer us, I think we need something more than modern science.

Fine. What has he got to offer? A magical man who finds car keys and parking spots, but is eternally late for real emergencies. An absent father. A failed superhero.

So D’Souza finds science less comforting than stories about heaven. Fair enough. It probably is in some ways. But an idea is not true in proportion to its comfortingness. Part of becoming an adult is learning to deal with some pretty bleak truths, and Christianity (and theism) forestalls that part of our development by offering baseless fluffy stories.

D’Souza thinks atheists have a problem that they need to explain. I think theists do. The real issue is bigger than ‘where is God during shootings’. It’s this: Why does the universe consistently fail to show the kinds of things that we should be seeing if theism were true?