Theodicy

15 January 2005

There has been a remarkable outbreak of discussion lately on what the recent tsunami implies about God. The pieces I've read have generally started from the observation that such disasters show that God is either not omnipotent or not benevolent; better to be an atheist, they conclude, than accept an enfeebled or malicious Deity. There was even some suggestion, later denied, that the Archbishop of Canterbury was tempted by this line of thought. Now the idea that God is powerless, indifferent, or malevolent is indeed rather scary: but that is obviously a logically feeble reason for rejecting it. Moreover, God's existence is to a large extent beside the point here. When we ask "What kind of God could let this happen?" we're not looking for ontological clarification. Rather the issue is how the fact of sudden arbitrary death and suffering can be accommodated within any tolerable view of human existence in the world; and this needs an answer of some kind even from atheists. God, I think, comes into it mainly because He provides a convenient metaphor with which to address such issues, even if we don't believe in his literal existence. And after all, if Richard Dawkins can talk metaphorically about the selfishness of genes, why should we hold back from talking metaphorically about the coldness of God?

All right then - what kind of God could let this happen? The idea of a spiteful or vicious God is just as difficult to sustain here as the idea of a loving one. An omnipotent God, or even a merely powerful one, could surely do much more to make our lives miserable; and surely He would want to taunt us with open threats and menaces. The real point about God, in fact, is that he does not seem to intervene in the world at all; even 'acts of God' such as earthquakes and tidal waves have clear physical causes and don't seem to require divine causation. We seem to be dealing with the entity a friend of mine used to call Larvatus - God in a mask - and the question must be, why does he hide his face from us?

It could be that God is simply mad, or a clown, or on the contrary so far above our understanding that his behaviour remains forever inscrutable. Most likely of all, he could simply be supremely indifferent to us. But the very consistency of his non-intervention tells against these hypotheses. A mad God couldn't observe the restraint necessary to stay out of our way, and an incomprehensible one would surely find that his mysterious movements intersected detectably with human history at regular intervals by sheer chance. The balance of probability must be that the absence is deliberate, that it has a purpose. There is a project behind the mask.

At this point, we have to ask - is this enquiry wise? If God wants his project kept secret, had we not better avert our eyes? It seems possible that all discussion of God and his will is disastrously ill-advised, and that religious observance is actually annoying and frustrating to Him. Perhaps Pascal's suggestion that we have nothing to lose by belief in God, and everything to gain, is a tragic inversion of the truth. But without knowing something about God's secret project, it is impossible to be sure. The project might be malign, and the there might be discoverable ways to mitigate the danger. Or God might want us to guess His riddle.

The only clue we have to the nature of the project is this same absence of its sponsor. What project could there be which requires its initiator to exercise no influence on the product? Well - and I expect, gentle reader, you can see this coming - according to some schools of thought that is among the challenges which face anyone who wants to generate artificial consciousness. If the beings we create are to own their own thoughts and have real moral responsibility, they cannot, on this view, be programmed to behave in a given way, no matter how complex the program: they have to arise, presumably through some broadly evolutionary process. This idea resembles a classic explanation of the existence of evil in the world - God wanted us to have free will, so he could not intervene directly either to make us automatically virtuous in the first place or to save us from ourselves when we succumb to temptation or stupidity. The argument is fine as far as it goes, but the snag is that it doesn't seem to go quite far enough. It explains why God might have allowed us to develop as the imperfect beings we are, but it doesn't offer any convincing reason why he could not give us some clear and direct guidance, or save us from arbitrary catastrophes. Having undeniable signs of his existence might cramp our style a bit, but it would hardly deprive us of free will or turn us into robots.

There can't, however, be any certainty unless and until, unimaginably, the mask comes off. So much by way of metaphor - but is there anything behind the mask after all? It seems to me that the progress of modern cognitive science is actually producing a new and more formidable reason to doubt the existence of God. Generally, atheists have had to rely on the lack of evidence for God's existence, the absence of any particular need for that hypothesis. But as we reach a better understanding of how the property of consciousness is rooted in physical brains (and how it arises from the process of evolution) it becomes harder to see how a non-physical non-evolving being could possibly have it. I don't think the task of accounting for God's consciousness is demonstrably impossible, but it does seem that theists have much more explaining to do than was once the case.

Perhaps, in view of the above, this is a good thing - perhaps, even if God does exist, we are lucky to have such good reasons for atheism.

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