A few months ago, a “gun-toting atheist” and self-proclaimed “anti-theist” killed three Muslims in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. There's some question still about whether the killer was motivated by atheism or some other motivation. What there's no question of is that much of the secular response was predictably tasteless and exploitative. For example, the Daily Beast's Suzi Parker responded with an essay on how hard it is to be Muslim “in the most religious—and Christian—part of the country.” Somehow, in Parker's view, it was Christians who were to blame.

CNN's response was perhaps worse, lumping the Chapel Hill murders in with seven other attacks as examples of “religion's week from hell,” blaming the attacks on the “religious violence” that either “is fueled by faith or is a symptom of larger factors.” There's been a lot of talk lately about so-called “victim blaming,” and it's something of a nebulous term, but I think that blaming religious people for an atheist murdering them probably constitutes victim blaming.

The Chapel Hill murders have upset the popular “religion is what makes people violent” narrative, and both the Daily Beast and CNN's response amounted to shutting their collective eyes and repeating the “religious people are bad” mantra. So let's talk about that narrative: is it true that religion is the main cause of violence in the world? Or if not all violence, what about terrorism? Or if not all terrorism, what about suicide bombings?

Religious or Non-Religious?

In The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, Sam Harris tries to lump “religion” in with “terror,” pitting the two against “reason.” He opens with this story:

"The young man boards the bus as it leaves the terminal. He wears an overcoat. Beneath his overcoat, he is wearing a bomb. His pockets are filled with nails, ball bearings, and rat poison. The bus is crowded and headed for the heart of the city. [...] The young man smiles. With the press of a button he destroys himself, the couple at his side, and twenty others on the bus. [...] The young man’s parents soon learn of his fate. Although saddened to have lost a son, they feel tremendous pride at his accomplishment. They know that he has gone to heaven and prepared the way for them to follow. He has also sent his victims to hell for eternity. It is a double victory."

At this point, he hasn't told you the man's religion (although his inclusion of Heaven and Hell in his story conveniently exonerate atheists). He then asks, rhetorically:

"Why is it so easy, then, so trivially easy, “you-could-almost-bet-your-life-on-it easy,” to guess the young man’s religion?"

As I've mentioned before, Harris wants you to guess Muslim, an answer he claims is “you-could-almost-bet-your-life-on-it easy.” But there's just one problem with this claim, which is that it's factually incorrect. Worse, Harris knows this, but buries that fact in an endnote:

"Some readers may object that the bomber in question is most likely to be a member of the Liberations [sic] Tigers of Tamil Eelam—the Sri Lankan separatist organization that has perpetuated more acts of suicidal terrororism [sic] than any other group."

So if you bet your life on the suicide bomber being a Muslim, chances are, you were wrong. And the Tamil Tigers aren't just the deadliest in regards to suicide bombings. They're the deadliest terrorist group on earth, period. You can check out the numbers for yourself at the University of Maryland's Global Terrorism Database or Periscope's summary by group. Since 1975, the Tigers have killed nearly 11,000 people, and wounding nearly 11,000 more.

If you're not familiar with the Tamil Tigers, here's how the Library of Congress describes them:

Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) strongest of Tamil separatist groups, founded in 1972 when Tamil youth espousing a Marxist ideology and an independent Tamil state established a group called the Tamil New Tigers; name changed in 1976.

The University of Chicago's Robert A. Pape, whom Harris cites in the endnote, is even more direct: “Religious fanaticism does not explain why the world leader in suicide terrorism is the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, a group that adheres to a Marxist/Leninist ideology.” Marxist-Leninist groups are hardly what you'd call “religious.” Here's what Lenin had to say about religion:

"The philosophical basis of Marxism, as Marx and Engels repeatedly declared, is dialectical materialism, which has fully taken over the historical traditions of eighteenth-century materialism in France and of Feuerbach (first half of the nineteenth century) in Germany—a materialism which is absolutely atheistic and positively hostile to all religion. [...]

Religion is the opium of the people—this dictum by Marx is the corner-stone of the whole Marxist outlook on religion. Marxism has always regarded all modern religions and churches, and each and every religious organisation, as instruments of bourgeois reaction that serve to defend exploitation and to befuddle the working class."

So the deadliest terrorist group in the world, and the one responsible for the most suicide bombings in history isn't just a secular group, but one advancing an ideology that is “is absolutely atheistic and positively hostile to all religion.”

Nor are the Tamil Tigers an isolated case in this regard. The 25 deadliest terrorist groups in the world are responsible for most of the terror deaths since 1975. And the Tigers are just one of several Marxist-Leninist, Maoist, and Communist groups on that short list. They're joined by Peru's Shining Path, El Salvador's FMLN, Colombia FARC, the Kurdistan Worker's Party, the Philippines' New People's Army, Angola's UNITA, the Communist Party of India (Maoist), Spain's Basque Homeland and Freedom (ETA), Colombia's National Liberation Army (ELN), and Chile's Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front (FPMR).

Is Religion the Chief Cause of the World's Violence?

Having seen that the world's deadliest suicide bombers and the world's deadliest terrorist group are the Marxist-Leninist Tamil Tigers, what about the world's deadliest ideologies? Compare the number of killings done in the name of religion to the number of killings done in the name of an anti-religious ideology.

At the top of the list of the twentieth century's deadliest regimes, you'll find three anti-religious states: Communist China, the USSR, and Nazi Germany. These three alone were responsible for an estimated 130,000,000 victims, which dwarfs the number of people killed in the name of all religions throughout all of history. And that number doesn't even take into account the millions killed by Pol Pot's Khmer Rogue, the Communist North Korean regime, or the Derg (the Ethiopian Communist state, headed by Mengistu Haile Mariam).

Religion isn't the cause of most of the world's violence: it's not even close. In fact, in each of the deadliest states of the twentieth century, we see the same pattern: an aggressive campaign to neutralize or eliminate religious belief (and believers). Ross Douthat pointed this out, using the example of the Soviet Union, in a debate with Bill Maher:

Maher: “Someone once said: to have a normal person commit a horrible act almost never happens without religion. To have people get on a plane and fly it into a building, it had to be religion.”

Douthat: “I think that what's true is: to get a normal person to commit a crazy act, it does take ideas, right? But those ideas can be secular as well as religious. A lot of normal people ...”

Maher: “But mostly, in history, they've been religious.”

Douthat: “Not in the twentieth century. Not in the Soviet Union. A lot of dead bodies there, not a lot of Christians... except among the dead bodies.”

Maher: “I would say that's a secular religion.” (Maher then quickly shut down debate before Douthat could respond.)

In a way, Maher ends up conceding one of Douthat's points: that secular ideas can be just as deadly as religious ones (and in fact, have been many times deadlier). But Douthat's other point is worth drawing out: religious belief serves not only as a potential motivator for violence, but as a check against state totalitarianism.

For a totalitarian regime, religion is dangerous. As a believer, I recognize that human rights come from God, not the state or social convention. I recognize that there's an authority higher than the state to whom both I and the state leadership will someday be accountable. It's precisely this sort of belief system that serves as a check on ideology and state authority that made these Soviet and Nazi states so anti-religious: they don't want you to render unto both God and Caesar. They want you to obey Caesar alone.

That's one reason that the bloodiest regimes in history have tended to be atheistic and anti-religious. But there may be a second, related point. Maher calls Soviet totalitarianism a “secular religion,” and that's something of a cop-out. He's trying to pin all the blame for violence on religion, by labelling all potentially-violent ideas as “religious,” even (as in the case of Soviet Communism) the ideology's founder and adherents were fiercely anti-religious. This evasion would seem to turn everything, even atheism, into at least a “secular religion.”

But Maher may yet be on to something in referring to these totalitarian systems as a “religion,” of sorts. Nazism and Soviet Communism did mimic religions in certain fashions, and did hold themselves out (implicitly and, at times, explicitly) as replacements for religion. That's because there's something inescapable about religion. Michael Crichton described the phenomenon like this:

"I studied anthropology in college, and one of the things I learned was that certain human social structures always reappear. They can't be eliminated from society. One of those structures is religion. Today it is said we live in a secular society in which many people – the best people, the most enlightened people – do not believe in any religion. But I think that you cannot eliminate religion from the psyche of mankind. If you suppress it in one form, it merely re-emerges in another form. You can not believe in God, but you still have to believe in something that gives meaning to your life, and shapes your sense of the world. Such a belief is religious."

At its core, this is a rudimentary point. All of us operate according to our beliefs about the world. Sometimes, we're conscious of this, sometimes, we're not, but we do it all the same. And these worldviews are heavily influenced by what we believe, or disbelieve, about religion.

Christianity carries with it beliefs about every human being made in the image of God, and being worthy of dignity and respect, along with the notion that we'll be held accountable for our evil actions. If we really believe these things, these beliefs can't help but shape how we interact with the world. And when people stop believing these things, it's not surprising that something else sweeps in to fill that void. Sometimes, as in Crichton's talk, that religion-replacement is a movement like environmentalism. Other times, it's something much darker.

Which Religion?

I said in the last point that religion can either motivate you to commit violent acts (as with ISIS) or it can motivate you to resist violence and tyranny (as with the 21 Coptic Christians recently martyred by ISIS). But on the question of whether religion will spur or spurn violence, a lot depends on which religion we're talking about.

All of this brings me to my last point:  the whole question of whether or not “religion” is violent is badly-formed. People don't believe in “religion.” They believe in a particular religion, and different religions teach different things. Given this, we need to stop pretending that all religions are equally prone to violent extremism, as if a Quaker is as likely as a Wahhabist to be responsible for the next terrorist attack. That idea is both illogical and directly contrary to the empirical data (here again, I'd point you to the Global Terrorism Database or Periscope summary).

Denouncing “religion” for the sins of radical Islam is disingenuous, akin to blaming “politics” for the Holocaust. “Religion” wasn't to blame, but one particular, violent religious movement, just as the Holocaust was the fault of one particular, violent political movement. In both religion and politics, we're dealing with sets of ideas – ideas about God, morality, human dignity, and the like – and ideas have consequences. Good ideas tend to have good consequences, while bad ideas tend to have the opposite. Treating all ideas as if they're equally valid is ridiculous.

That's why it's foolish to approach this question in the way that it's typically formed – whether or not “religion” is to blame – and why it's wrong to blame all religion for the actions of a few (or one). Using violence done in the name of a particular religion to justify hating all religion is no better than the Daily Beast using violence committed by an irreligious atheist against Muslims as a stick with which to bash Christians.
 
 
(Image credit: sonias_2007 via Photobucket)

A recent Live Science press release, titled “Believers Leave Punishment to Powerful God,” opened with the memorable words:

"Believing in an involved, morally active God makes people less likely to punish others for rule-breaking, new research finds."

Which is equivalent to saying that non-believers are less forgiving, less compassionate, less merciful, and—oh, let’s just say it: they are worse people. Don’t get mad at me. This is research!

But then maybe this summary is too telegraphic. Because the very same research that proves atheists are more bloodthirsty than theists also proves “that religious belief in general makes people more likely to punish wrongdoers — probably because such punishment is a way to strengthen the community as a whole” (emphasis mine).

In other words, theists are less forgiving, less compassionate, less merciful, and just plain worse people than atheists. Except when they aren’t and when their roles are reversed.

The press release explains the conundrum thusly: “In other words, religion may introduce two conflicting impulses: Punish others for their transgressions, or leave it to the Lord.”

This is the power of statistics, a field of science which, given the routine ease with which two opposite conclusions are simultaneously proved, we may now officially dub Orwellian Analytics.

Research Shows...

 
The paper which this popular article was based on is titled “Outsourcing punishment to God: beliefs in divine control reduce earthly punishment” by Kristi Laurin and three others. It was published online in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

After a lengthy introduction arguing that all morality (except presumably the morals of the authors) can be reduced to urges induced by evolutionary “pressures,” and defining something called “altruistic punishment”, the authors describe how they gathered small pools of WEIRD young people (i.e. Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic undergraduates) and had them play games. The results from these games told the authors all they needed to know about who enjoys punishment more. Incidentally, about the punishment, they said this:

"Prior to effective and reliable secular institutions for punishment, large-scale societies depended on individuals engaging in ‘altruistic punishment’—bearing the costs of punishment individually, for the benefit of society."

And did you know that “According to theory”—are you ready?—“Though administering punishment benefits society as a whole, it has immediate costs for punishers themselves.” Who knew?

Experiment one corralled “Twenty undergraduates” who “participated in exchange for course credit.” That’s one more than nineteen, friends. The supplementary data (which is mysteriously left out of the main article, but which is linked there) shows that these participants contained 8 whites and 9 Asians, with 1 black and 1 Arabic left over; 10 Christians, 1 Buddhist, 1 Hindu, 1 Muslim, 1 “Other”, and 6 Atheists. The authors claim to have “measured participants’ belief in powerful, intervening Gods, and their general religiosity.” Which makes you wonder how they classed the Buddhist and “Other.” No word on the breakdown of how participants answered the “religiosity” question.

But the next part is more fascinating: “We then employed the 3PPG–an economic game commonly used to measure altruistic punishment.” I'm struck by the words “commonly used.” It must be common, because there isn’t word one in the paper or supplementary material of what this creation is. But I can reveal to you it is the “Third-Party Punishment Game,” a frivolity invented by academics designed to flummox undergraduate participants in studies like this. More about that another day.

The “game” runs so (sorry for the length, but do read it):

"Player A receives 20 dollars, and must share that money between herself and player B in two-dollar increments, without input from player B. In the second stage, player C [who presumably knows what A did], who has received 10 dollars, can spend some or all of that money to reduce player A’s final payout: For every dollar that player C spends, player A loses three dollars. Player A’s behaviour does not affect player C, all players are anonymous and expect no further interactions, and punishing player A costs player C money. People treat sharing money evenly between players A and B as the (cooperative) norm; thus, player C’s willingness to punish player A for selfishly violating this norm can be taken as an index of altruistic punishment of non-cooperators."

In other words, Player C looks at how much A gave B. If C thinks this too low, C sacrifices some of his own money to reduce the amount A kept. But A and C got the money for free and since these are students we do not know if A actually knew B in real life, or if C knew either. For example, if I as A and Uncle Mike as B and Ye Olde Statistician as C were to play this game, I would split the money with Uncle Mike and Ye Olde Statistician would go along. This is because we were pals before the game commenced. But if we were enemies, something entirely different would occur. The authors never mention if they look for these kinds of effects in this or in any experiment. Leave finding flaws and contrary evidence for others.

But never mind, because C giving up some of his play money is scarcely the same thing as C desiring that a child rapist be tossed in jail to rot, even though C knows that the cost of the rapist’s cell will be taken from his wallet. But C in real life hardly knows even that. C knows that he pays taxes and that some of his taxes go to prison upkeep, but those taxes also go to pay for the fuel to ferry the president around on Air Force One from fund raiser to fund raiser. That is, most of us Cs don’t think that ponying up taxes is altogether altruistic.

The authors are mute on this objection, too.

Enter The P-value

"We regressed participants’ levels of altruistic punishment [amounts of money] on their God beliefs and their religiosity (both centered around 0) simultaneously…participants who believed more strongly in a powerful, intervening God reported less punishment of non-cooperators, β = -0.58, t(17) = 2.22, p = 0.04; whereas more religious participants showed a trend towards reporting greater punishment, β = 0.33, t(17) = 1.67, p = 0.11."

And there it is. Theists reported less punishment and more punishment. Except that the p-value for the “more punishment” isn’t small enough to excite. (And a linear regression is at best an approximation here.) The authors also discovered “more religious people tended to believe in powerful, controlling Gods.” The correlation wasn’t perfect, but neither should it be when you mix Buddhists and Christians. Let’s don’t forget that this regression model only included 6 atheists for its contrast.

The really good news is that “Given the strong correlation between religiosity and conservatism (r = 0.52), we conducted an additional analysis including conservatism in the regression. Results are reported in table 1; we found no evidence that conservatism explains the religion–punishment association.” Sorry, Chris Mooney.

The authors did four more studies, all similar to this one, but with increasingly complicated regression models (lots of interactions, strong hints of data snooping, etc.). The findings don’t change much. In their conclusion, however, they include these strange words: “In our research, we found it necessary to remind participants of their beliefs for these beliefs to influence their decisions.” This sounds like coaching, a way to induce results the authors expected.

So what's the real lesson here? That one of the largest science sites on the Internet has no problem squeezing a complex mass of data into a terse and misleading headline.
 
 
(Image credit: Steve Dease)

"The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully."

So says Richard Dawkins. Obviously, he doesn't want readers to think he's on the fence about God as presented in the Old Testament—or at least, how God seems to Dawkins. But if we clean ourselves up after this blast of rhetorical wind, how strong is Dawkins' case against God?

Dawkins lists a number of objectionable Old Testament scenes, ending with God's command to massacre the Midianites (Num 31:17-18), Joshua's putting all of the inhabitants of Jericho to the sword (Josh 6:21), and God's "rules" for waging holy war in Canaan (Dt 20:10-18). In regard to the last two, he remarks, "the Bible story of Joshua's destruction of Jericho, and the invasion of the Promised Land in general, is morally indistinguishable from Hitler's invasion of Poland, or Saddam Hussein's massacres of Kurds and the Marsh Arabs," and "Do not think, by the way, that the God character in the story nursed any doubts or scruples about the massacres and genocides that accompanied the seizing of the Promised Land…. [T]he people who lived in the land…should be invited to surrender peacefully. If they refused, all the men were to be killed and the women carried off for breeding."

Let's try a little experiment, and assume Dawkins' skewed and unfair reading of the Bible. Suppose upon reading his devastating attack on the God of the Old Testament, we would reject the Bible and embrace Dawkins' atheism—exactly what Dawkins wishes to be the effect on readers. What then? Would we be any better off?

First of all, as he himself admits in his book River out of Eden, in coming over to Dawkins' side, we have thereby embraced a cosmos indifferent to good or evil. As a consequence, we immediately face a dilemma: we have no moral grounds for condemning the actions of God (He doesn't exist) or the characters in the Bible (good and evil don't exist). Since God doesn't exist, there is no reason to work up a froth of indignation against Him, anymore than against the lunkheaded Zeus in Homer's Iliad.

Yet now another, more amusing problem arises for Dawkins as the champion of Darwinism today. It would seem that a good many of the complaints made by Dawkins against the God of the Old Testament could with equal justice be made against natural selection itself. To say the least, that puts himself in a paradoxical position.

If we might put it in an arresting way, many sociologists of religion argue that primitive people tend to fashion their notions of the gods according to the way they experience nature, as nature deified (whether this is true or not, we won't decide here, but will take it on trust for the purposes of illustration). What would evolution look like if we tried to deify evolution's principles? Would the Evolution God (EG) be "unjust" in its callous indifference "to all suffering," and supremely so, for continually picking off the weak and sickly? Would EG be an "unforgiving control-freak," "megalomaniacal," and "petty" since (as Darwin stated), "It may metaphorically be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing, throughout the world, the slightest variations; rejecting those that are bad, preserving and adding up all that are good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relations to its organic and inorganic conditions of life"? Would EG be "sadomasochistic" in his use of suffering, destruction, and death as the means to create new forms of life? A "capriciously malevolent bully" in his "lacking all purpose" and being "callous"? A "bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser," "genocidal," and "racist" in his continually pitting one species population against another in severe struggle, the struggles among humans taking place between tribe and tribe, race and race? And what adjective would describe EG, who uses these deadly struggles as the very vehicle responsible for the upward climb of human evolution?

So we've rejected the God of the Old Testament for Dawkins' atheistic account of evolution, only to find out that many of the traits Dawkins marked as repugnant are ensconced in natural selection (except that now, as a new and even more unfortunate kind of Job, we have no one against whom to complain).

Perhaps Dawkins will fare better in his case against the people of the Old Testament? But now another paradox comes to the fore. On Dawkins' own grounds, it would be hard to imagine a people who more assiduously pursued a better set of evolutionary strategies for ensuring that its gene pool was carried forward, undiluted by rival tribes and races, than the ancient Jews. They were genetic geniuses!

Think over the above "reprehensible" examples Dawkins provided from the Bible, and then ruminate upon his account of how evolution, including human evolution, works. Dawkins maintains in his classic book The Selfish Gene that we may "treat the individual as a selfish machine, programmed to do whatever is best for its genes as a whole" (although, as he makes clear, the invisible level of the struggle between genes in a single individual is, for him, the real level of natural selection and the struggle to survive). The selfish machine works, literally, by gene-o-cide, the destruction and use of other selfish machines, treating them as fodder for its own survival.

What, then, is left of Dawkins' case against the God of the Old Testament? Nothing at all.
 
 
Originally posted at To the Source. Used with permission.
(Image credit: The Guardian)

Today I’d like to consider an issue on which many atheists and Catholics may—perhaps to their surprise—find a point of common ground. “Violence is incompatible with the nature of God.” This line is not from an atheist but rather from Pope Benedict XVI. The context in which he penned it was his famous (in some circles infamous) Regensburg Address from 2006. In this particular case, he was endeavoring to foster a dialogue with Islam over a theology which “might even lead to the image of a capricious God, who is not even bound to truth and goodness.”

As good Muslims and atheists whom I’ve known in the past have indicated, this warning applies to Christian theology and Scripture as well. Namely, what do we make of the many Old Testament texts in which God commands seemingly evil deeds such as the slaughter of men, women, and children? For just one example, read 1 Samuel 15. Within this chapter, God commands the extermination of an entire people and then proceeds to remove King Saul for office for not having fully carried it out!

Before I proceed any further, I want to make something clear. Within the constraints of a short blog post, I have no pretense of offering an exhaustive defense of the many passages in the Bible which seem to fly in the face of the words just cited from our previous pope. In fact, I have recently authored a 300-page book entitled Dark Passages of the Bible that itself only scratches the surface of this issue. What I hope to achieve here is simply to make an observation which I hope will better frame debate over the Bible’s so-called dark passages, as well as to offer a key principle for explaining their presence from a Catholic perspective—a perspective which, unfortunately, not many Catholics themselves grasp and hence are unable to convey to non-Christians.

To begin, the very notion of violence being contrary to God’s nature is something we Catholics debate amongst ourselves. Thomas Aquinas, for example, seeks to justify violent divine actions in the Old Testament on the basis of the fact that all people are sinners and in fact deserve the punishment of death on account of original sin. Hence Aquinas states, “[B]y the command of God, death can be inflicted on any man, guilty or innocent, without any injustice whatever.” For Augustine as for Aquinas, the problem of thinking God is being cruel when killing people is that we just don’t realize the gravity and pervasiveness of sin and thus the punishment it deserves. Now I love both of these Doctors of the Church, and this is a very brief paraphrase of their arguments, but here I have to join my atheist friends in saying that I simply don’t fully buy the explanation. To be sure, it’s not the only possible Christian answer, but other ones I have come across usually leave me just as unsatisfied. So my observation is this: if even I—a Catholic theologian who buys fully into the Catholic worldview and tradition—don’t find this approach satisfying, then I don’t think we are going to make progress in our dialogue with atheists by taking an approach wherein we seem to have no problem in saying that God directly wills the killing of men, women, and children. Perhaps God does do this. I am open to being convinced otherwise, but again I just don’t buy it.

That said, I am fairly certain that my response is not going to satisfy atheists, either. Yet I do think it makes a step in the right direction by at least admitting that they have a point in seeing the Old Testament’s dark passages as problematic from a certain point of view. So what does the Catholic have to offer the atheist by way of explanation, then?

First, for Pope Benedict with whom I agree, we have first have to admit that the Bible really says what it seems to be saying. It says God did some violent things.

Second, we may admit that what the Bible says does indeed seem to conflict with the nature of God such as we understand it through reason.

Third—and here is the key according to Pope Benedict—the Catholic has to interpret the entire Old Testament as a gradual progression towards Jesus Christ: “Anyone who wishes to understand the biblical belief in God must follow its historical development from its origins with the patriarchs of Israel right up to the last books of the New Testament.” Christians believe the fullness of truth is revealed in the person, teaching, and ministry of Jesus. We look at the entirety of Scripture in light of him. Indeed, according to Pope Benedict, problematic passages in the Old Testament are “valid insofar as they are part of the history leading up to Christ.” Now if he had commanded violence, then we’d be in trouble. (Perhaps you have an objection here, but that’s a topic for another post).

Benedict’s 2010 exhortation Verbum Domini is particularly significant because it has a section entitled “Dark Passages of the Bible” in which he states that instances of violence and immorality in the Bible can be adequately addressed only if Catholics take seriously the fact that “God’s plan is manifested progressively and it is accomplished slowly, in successive stages and despite human resistance.” Benedict admits that “revelation is suited to the cultural and moral level of distant times,” and for this reason the Bible narrates certain things without denouncing their immorality in the way that we would rightly do today. In an interview Benedict stated in the same vein: “It follows straightaway that neither the criterion of inspiration nor that of infallibility can be applied mechanically. It is quite impossible to pick out one single sentence [of the Bible] and say, right, you find this sentence in God’s great book, so it must simply be true in itself.”

Bottom line: the Old Testament does not give us a video-camera account or transcript of what God said and did in times of old. It is God’s word; it is inspired; it is inerrant (Due to space constraints I’m not addressing that issue here, although it definitely needs addressed). Neither I nor Pope Benedict nor anyone who takes such a position need deny these Catholic doctrines. But interpreting passages which seem to contradict the nature of God requires us to recognize that the people who penned the Old Testament were not privy to the fullness of divine revelation and the Catholic tradition whereby we now distinguish, for example, between God’s active will and his permissive will (whereby he allows evil to be done by humans).

Did the authors of the Old Testament think that God wanted them to execute entire peoples? To me it seems disingenuous to reply in the negative. Yet notwithstanding that these authors thought, for Catholicism and its doctrine of biblical inerrancy the question revolves around what they intended to assert or teach, as stated in Vatican II’s constitution Dei Verbum. But I digress. The simplest way to say it is that the Old Testament’s conception of God and God’s deeds was imperfect because God was working with an imperfect people to gradually lead them to Christ. Like any good teacher, God in his divine pedagogy had to work the pupils he had, not the 4.0-GPA honors students he wished he had! The imperfections we see in the Old Testament are therefore not God’s, but rather due to the fact that he deigned to “condescend” (to use a term from the Church Fathers) and patiently work with a truly human people to lead them into communion with himself. I suppose God could have “zapped” people’s minds and taught them the Trinity ten thousand years ago, but in the Catholic worldview this is not the way we understand God typically acts. He creates a human nature and works with it. As the scholastics aptly said, grace builds on nature. Problematic passages within Scripture are among the clearest of evidence that grace does not eliminate human nature.

Like I said above, I don’t expect an atheist to be convinced by this. First of all, it’s an incredibly abbreviated summary covering only one of several key distinctions needed to account for the Bible’s dark passages. Second, to accept the divine pedagogy is already to have accepted something prior to it: namely, the existence of God and faith in Jesus Christ. Seeing Old Testament passages in light of their progression towards Jesus is only going to satisfy someone who already believes that Jesus is God in the flesh. But it’s not my job in this post to prove that Jesus is God or even that God exists. What I’ve tried to do is the only thing a Christian can do in this situation, according to Thomas Aquinas. That job is to provide answers to objections from unbelievers so that they might see what a reasonable way to deal with dark biblical passages might look like if faith in Christ and his revealed word is granted.
 
 
(Image credit: Aleteia)

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then where does evil come from?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?
— Epicurus

 
Gruesome and tragic headlines from the past few months have thousands of people of faith scratching their heads, asking: why does God allow this evil to happen? Isn't he supposed to be all-loving and all-powerful? The question is even more pressing for people who are directly involved and suffering enormously.

This problem - known to philosophers as "the problem of evil" - is as old as the book of Job. Many theologians and artists, from Augustine and Aquinas to Dostoevsky and Thornton Wilder, have grappled with this fundamental question. In fact, we can survey the theological problem, its emotional gravity, and its strongest resolutions by looking at a handful of excellent films.

Oxford mathematician and philosopher John Lennox has often emphasized two very important things about this classical problem from the outset. I'll follow his lead here.

First, we have to first acknowledge that there is both an intellectual and emotional component to the problem. Secondly, both components amount to one of the best (if not the best) arguments against God that there is - and believers need to be humble enough to admit it.

With those preliminaries in mind, let's take a look at six films that wrestle with this problem: The Virgin Spring, Hannah and Her Sisters, Crimes and Misdemeanors, The Seventh Seal, Signs, The Tree of Life, and Shadowlands:

These two Woody Allen films sum up the intellectual side of the problem of evil (also neatly summed up in the Epicurus quote at the top of the article). In Hannah and Her Sisters, his character - who is in the middle of a profound existential crisis - asks: "If there's a God, why is there so much evil in the world? Just on a simplistic level, why were there Nazis?" In Crimes and Misdemeanors, a jaded humanist at a family Seder says that Hitler "got away with" the slaughter of 6 million Jews. Where was God in the Holocaust? Why didn't he stop it? Or at least punish the wicked after it happened?

Countless theologians and Christian thinkers have wrestled with the problem of evil on this intellectual level, as Woody Allen often does. For example, writer Fyodor Dostoevsky made the suffering of innocent children the sturdy basis of his character Ivan's atheism in The Brothers Karamazov. Theologian David Bentley Hart calls this argument against God "far and away the best argument" (nota bene all you atheists), and the one that occasions his own periodic loss of faith.

In Allen's films, the solution is often just comic diffusion: "How the hell do I know why there were Nazis? I don't know how the can opener works." But there have been noble attempts at solving the problem of evil intellectually, which include emphasizing the notions of free will, the fall of man, and the permission of evil to bring about greater goods. In the movie Shadowlands, Christian intellectual, apologist, and former atheist C.S. Lewis - played by Anthony Hopkins - says that confidently that God allows suffering because "we are like blocks of stone out of which the sculptor carves the forms of men. Blows of his chisel, which hurt us so much, are what make us perfect."

But to the soul of someone whose child was just kidnapped, or who has just been diagnosed with a rare, aggressive form of cancer, such legalistic answers mean little - especially when the suffering looks so senseless, and so preventable. These answers may address why God permits evil in the abstract; but why is he permitting it right now, in this way, to me, to my child? At this point, no amount of intellectual maneuvering will do - the problem is, as philosopher Peter Kreeft calls it, "not just an intellectual experiment," but a "rebellion of tears." This is the emotional side of the problem of evil.

We see this side very clearly in that same movie, Shadowlands. CS Lewis, who was able to speak eloquently about the problem in the abstract, is personally devastated when he has to confront suffering in his own life: the loss of his first and great love, Joy Gresham, to cancer.

"Don't tell me it's all for the best," he says to his colleagues, who are fellow intellectuals and theologians. He anticipates their best answers and doesn't want them. A kindly priest tries anyway: "Only God knows why these things have to happen." But Lewis is totally unsatisfied with this response. "It won't do. It's a bloody awful mess and that's all there is to it."

The power and pain of the emotional side of this problem is also masterfully portrayed in two Ingmar Bergman movies: The Seventh Seal and The Virgin Spring.

The Seventh Seal, which has the famous scene of a medieval knight (Max von Sydow) playing a game of chess with Death, meditates over and over on the silence of God in the midst of great despair, and even questions his existence - a motif that is obviously very relevant for those going through great suffering.

But The Virgin Spring, which is about a young girl who is unexpectedly raped and murdered, gets right to the heart of the matter. After the horrible act of violence, the girl's father collapses and prays: "The death of an innocent child...you allowed it to happen. I don't understand you." Remembering when he watched this movie for the first time, director Ang Lee said: "I'd never in my 18 years of life seen anything so quiet, so serene, and yet so violent, and so fundamentally questioning God."

To my mind, though, the two films that deal most brilliantly with the problem of evil are Signs and The Tree of Life, for this reason: they provide the hope of a resolution, one which engages both the heart and mind.

Signs, on the face of it, doesn't seem like it's about this philosophical problem at all; the M. Night Shyamalan sci-fi thriller follows a family in a small rural town dealing with crop circles and an imminent alien invasion.

But underlying the film is a profound meditation on the problem of evil. The protagonist Graham Hess (Mel Gibson) is a former Episcopalian priest who renounces God after his wife is killed in a random, horrible traffic accident. For Hess - as for C.S. Lewis and countless others who have wrestled with the problem - theological explanations seem to fall short. Something is missing; it's God's voice, offering some reassurance, where instead there's only silence and what seems like indifference.

The key scene in the film comes in a discussion between Hess and his younger brother Merrill (Joaquin Phoenix) about the arrival of the aliens. Hess explains that there are two groups of people looking at the alien lights in the sky in two different ways: one group feels that they are on their own, and sees everything, including these lights, as evidence of blind luck, coincidence, even chaos; the other feels that "there'll be someone there to help them," and sees signs and miracles where the first group sees coincidences.

When Merrill asks his brother which group he falls into, Hess describes his dying wife's last moments: her innocent body pressed against a tree by a totaled car, her eyes glazed, and her lips saying" See. Swing away." What sign could that be? It was only the random firing of neurons, electrifying the memory of some baseball game right before his wife's unexpected death. From that moment on, he decides: "There is no one watching out for us. We are all on our own."

This is a glimpse into the darkness and despair wrought by the experience of suffering. It's not that God doesn't love us - it's that he was never there at all.

The Tree of Life presents a similar pain and loss. We watch Jack (Sean Penn) wander in a state of spiritual desolation, contemplating the loss of his younger brother at the age of nineteen. In a flashback, their mourning mother is comforted by a well-meaning neighbor, who says: "Time heals...the Lord gives and takes away." But these platitudes are like band aids on a festering wound; they do nothing, heal nothing. "Why?" the mother whispers in a voice over, calling out to God. "Where were you?"

In both of these films, we see that the mind wants explanations about God's ways. But the suffering heart needs to hear his voice, to know that he cares, or that he's even there at all. And both films, in their way, reveal that voice.

In Signs, a bundle of seemingly unconnected and random threads - including Hess' wife's last words - suddenly weave into a big and beautiful tapestry that makes sense of everything. This restores Hess' faith that someone has been watching out for him; that his profound loss and his wife's painful death are ugly threads that will, in some way, end up a necessary part of a perfect whole. As we saw in Shadowlands, this isn't a message Hess could hear from a friend or neighbor - instead, he had to "hear" it from God, and see it in his own life.

Sean Penn's character Jack in The Tree of Life also "hears" God's voice toward the end of the film, through a transcendental vision that points to the "why" of suffering:

This glimpse of the ultimate reality of eternity stirs hope in Jack's heart that "all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well" - not in spite of suffering, but because of suffering. Suffering is the groundwork laid in order to build shared, everlasting love.

Neither Signs nor The Tree of Life denies the problem of evil, or tries to explain it away. There are grim portrayals in both movies of random illness, evil acts, and tragic death - lived realities that hurt like hell.

But when Hess put his clerical collar back on, and when "Agnus Dei" ("Lamb of God") is sung during Jack's vision of eternity, a very particular picture of God is brought to mind: not God as puppet master pulling the strings, or a judicial authority punishing us for our own good, or (as Christopher Hitchens called him) a celestial Kim Jong-il. Instead, we glimpse a "suffering God"; one who, as atheist Slavoj Zizek brilliantly put it, "is agonized, assumes the burden of suffering, in solidarity with the human misery."

The image of God himself beaten, stripped naked, humiliated with thorns, and nailed to a cross to die contains one of the most powerful "words" - the Logos - that suffering people looking for God's voice can see and understand. Why is it such a powerful response to the problem of evil? Because the cross literally connects suffering and weakness and pain with divine life, with God's love. (This doesn't mean that pain ceases to be pain - or that suffering should be idealized for its own sake. As trappist Thomas Merton put it, Christianity faces suffering and death "not because they are good, not because they have meaning, but because the resurrection of Jesus has robbed them of their meaning.")

Even for those with this essential faith, intellectual problems still linger. For example: Why do certain people suffer so much more than others? How could eternity ever "undo" or "excuse" the horrible damage that has been done, especially to innocent children? And what about the suffering of animals - does that go unredeemed?

I think Hess and Jack would continue to wrestle with these questions beyond the final frames, just as we all do in our lives. But we see a fundamental hope taking root in both characters, grounded in a distinct understanding of who God is. This understanding, if we share it, matters; it means that when confronted with atrocious human evils like the Holocaust and asked "where was God," we're compelled to say: right there in the gas chambers, lifting up the suffering.
 

What other films exhibit the problem of evil?

 
 
Originally posted at By Way of Beauty. Used with author's permission.