Choice in Dying

This morning when I woke up I had in mind writing something about theodicy, and how it is simply impossible to square the way the world is with a god that is considered even remotely good, and so I wrote the post “A Disaster of a God,” but then, checking in just now with a few of my favourite blogs, I came upon Jerry Coyne’s post about the Biologos video below. How can you plan for this kind of thing? Christians go from one peak of nonsense to another. As we saw yesterday (was it?), it’s hard to tell the jokes from the real thing. Do you think the guy in the video below is really serious? What, I wonder, would tip you off?

Clearly, it seems that whoever posted it believes that, if a pastor said it, it can’t be stupid, but it is. (And that’s not surprising, since a pastor is a shepherd, and shepherds herd sheep. As Christopher Hitchens says, “Once you know that Christians call themselves a flock, you already know enough about this religion.”) In it Pastor Daniel Harrell proposes a solution to the problem of evolution and the problem of evil. The problem is that evolution magnifies the problem of evil, since waste and death and suffering are part of the process of weeding out the fit from the unfit. That’s how the filter of natural selection works.

So, not very surprisingly, Pastor Harrell’s solution is all about death, and how important Christians think death is, since the central “mystery” of Christianity is Jesus’ death on a cross (with which Europeans can now festoon their classrooms). What could be simpler? This, Pastor Harrell thinks to himself, must have something to do with the problem of evil, surely – don’t you think, … maybe? Besides, we can’t get to eternal life any other way, and none of us gets out of life alive, so perhaps god planned it this way, and if he did, he’d have to make it pretty obvious that death was at the heart of his plan, wouldn’t he? Well, wouldn’t he?! 

Anyway, I found this so abhorrently and contemptibly mindless, that I simply could not refrain from commenting, and what I write, for the most part, is in anger. Here’s the video.

Dr. Coyne has very kindly transliterated some of it for us, only I’ve added a few words that Jerry leaves out (in italics). Here’s a bit of this fatuous attempt to justify god’s ways to man.

The amount of death and waste that evolution requires — the apparent death and waste that evolution requires – was a big stumbling block for a lot of Christians who began to dig into it.Why is it that things wouldn’t develop just linearly and beautifully and just happen? Why all this waste or death? And one of the things that was so helpful to me was the realisation of how death is part of the character of God.

(Notice the reference to apparent death and waste.) And then, of course, he launches into his schtick about how Jesus was god and died for us, and all that sort of Christian thing. But the point, in case Pastor Harrell, caught up as he is in his Biologos moment, misses it, is that Jesus’ death, in the Christian imagination, is a victory over death. Now, there’s no point making Jesus’ death a victory unless death itself is something evil, not a part of the character of god, but a part of all those forces that oppose god.

And this has always been a part of the Christian message. Death came into the world through one man (Adam), and it is through Jesus’ death that that curse, imposed on all humankind (and all of creation too) by Adam’s sin, will be lifted. But just as, with Job — see the last post about “A Disaster of a God” — merely replacing all that was lost is not a really a substitute for those lost things, so nothing will be able to make up for all the suffering that is the outcome of the long, still unfinished march of life by means of evolution.

Contrary to what Pastor Harrell and Biologos may think, this is not only an unacceptable solution for Christians — you cannot simply map the death of Christ onto the whole train of suffering involved in evolution — if that one unique death doesn’t do the trick, other deaths can contribute nothing; but quite aside from that, it is a desperate attempt to make science consistent with a religious myth that took shape in the religious imaginations of a few people a long time ago. There’s not a single reason why this myth should be consistent with the discoveries of science. Indeed, it is very unlikely to be so. When the myth of the supposedly redemptive death of Christ was told, little was known about how life on earth came about. Many centuries passed before it was known that life evolved from simple beginnings, and that we are connected by almost an unimaginably long succession of suffering life, going back millions of years, to single celled organisms that are our ancestors. Think of how many millions of years life on earth has been simply a vast toiling mass of misery, without even the ability to ask the question why. Think of those years, and that long, weary weight of suffering. And then think of all this as part of the character of a god.

It is simply absurd to try to fold all of this suffering into the suffering of one man on a cross in Palestine sometime in the first century of the common era, no matter how horrible it may have been. Jesus’ suffering — if, indeed, the story is even true — lasted only three hours, according to the gospel account. Some men lived for two days hanging tortured on a cross, and I have watched people suffer affliction from cancer and other diseases much more intensely and for much much longer than that. The kind of idiocy represented by this Biologos video is beneath contempt. Whatever could these people be thinking?!

When I hear this kind of contemptible special pleading, Christians trying desperately to clutch at straws of meaning in order to preserve their ancient stories, I remember that these are the people who, almost every time, seek to prolong the suffering of those who are living in intolerable pain and suffering and indignity. This, after all, is the character of god. This kind of religious folly fills me with a deep sense of repugnance and loathing. It is nothing more than lunacy masquerading as seriousness. Can anyone speak so stupidly and be thought to be making a serious contribution to a civilised conversation? I think not. As one commenter on YouTube says, “Theology is the art of making shit up.” That’s about the size of it.

And yet this is produced by people who think they are bringing religion and science together. Of course, the truth is that something that can simply be made up without constraint can be dismissed without reflection, and cannot be made compatible with a dimension of human knowing which demands rigorous testing and clear formulation. The Biologos aim to integrate science and Christianity is and must remain a failure. The real question we should ask is how it is possible for serious scientists to take it seriously – or is this only a parlour game that they play when they are not doing science?

Even though it’s a response to other offences by religious leaders, Tim Michin’s Pope Song comes to mind in the face of this vapid idiocy. It captures my sense of offence and anger at the confident authority of the religious who justify suffering in order to keep their fucking god: