A reader has emailed me to take me to task for the title of my previous post. The note began:
To me, G_d is synonymous with the Explanation for Everything; for you, He is an angry, immature old man.
I responded:
Just to set the record straight, to me God is not “an angry, immature old man”, or anything else; my view of God is that the word “God” is simply a placeholder for a variety of fictional entities.
For most religious believers, though, God is directly, actively involved in what happens down here: for a natural disaster to occur, it must be caused, or at least permitted, by God. On the other hand, your own view — of God as an actually existing, ineffable abstraction, but not the sort of agent that plays a deliberate causal role in things like earthquakes that crush and drown thousands of innocent people — while far more defensible intellectually, is shared by only a microscopic minority of theists. Obviously my title does not refer to the God you appear to believe in, so you shouldn’t be offended. (That you are just shows what a confused and confusing term “God” is.)
I’ve been re-reading the Bible and the Koran over the past few weeks. That’s the sort of “God” I’m referring to here; and it’s the one that most people believe in, and that they think of when they use the word “God”. It amazes me that people are capable of the cognitive dissonance required to witness natural disasters like this, or the awful earthquake in Haiti that killed and maimed multitudes of the innocent faithful, square it somehow with the idea of an involved, active, personal God who is nevertheless infinitely loving and merciful, and then keep coming back for more. It just boggles my mind [in the same way that it boggled Voltaire’s mind after the Lisbon earthquake of 1755], and I can’t help remarking on it from time to time.
I will say this — given my growing conviction that secularism is, from a group-level perspective, most likely maladaptive, I’ll admit that I am, for tactical reasons, somewhat conflicted lately about making these points, and so I have been largely mute on the subject of theism v. atheism for a while now. Every now and then, though, something comes along that prompts me to let out a little squeak of protest.
Weighing all of this, then, I do admit that the title was stingingly, and rather gratuitously, harsh, and given the rawness of the wound, it might have been better not to have chosen it.