Conversations: Faith and Facts

Helena
People who believe there is such a thing as a loving caring omnipotent being have always had a tough time, for examples of God’s failure to protect humanity are everywhere to be seen. The city of New Orleans, for instance, was destroyed by a hurricane not too long ago. More than a thousand people died; tens of thousands lost all their earthly possessions; and nearly a million were displaced. It is safe to say that almost every person living in New Orleans at the moment Hurricane Katrina struck shared the Abrahamic belief in an omnipotent, omniscient, and compassionate God.

Zoe
Following that line of reasoning, what was God doing while Katrina laid waste to their city? Surely He heard the prayers of those elderly men and women who fled the rising waters for the safety of their attics, only to be slowly drowned there. These were people of faith. These were, undoubtedly, on the whole, good men and women who had prayed throughout their lives. Do we have the courage to admit the obvious? – These poor people died talking to an imaginary friend.

Helena
And as Hurricane Katrina was devouring New Orleans, nearly a thousand Shiite pilgrims were trampled to death on a bridge in Iraq. These pilgrims believed mightily in the God of the Koran. Indeed, their lives were organized around the indisputable fact of his existence: their women walked veiled before Him; their men regularly murdered one another over rival interpretations of his word.

Galene
Human tragedy though it may be, there is nothing remarkable about people’s reactions to these catastrophes. Indeed, it would be remarkable if a single survivor of this tragedy lost his faith. Is it not more likely that the survivors imagine they were spared through God’s grace?

Zoe
Definitely. It is time we recognized the boundless narcissism and self-deceit of the saved. In fact, it is time we acknowledged how disgraceful it is for the survivors of a catastrophe to believe themselves spared by a loving God, while this same God drowned infants in their cribs.

Helena
And once people stop swaddling the reality of the world’s suffering in religious fantasies, they will feel in your bones just how precious life is—and, indeed, how unfortunate it is that millions of human beings suffer the most harrowing abridgements of their happiness for no good reason at all.

Galene
Well, one wonders just how vast and gratuitous a catastrophe would have to be to shake the world’s faith. The Holocaust did not do it. Neither did the genocide in Rwanda, even with machete-wielding priests among the perpetrators. Five hundred million people died of smallpox in the twentieth century, many of them infants. God’s ways are, indeed, inscrutable. It seems that any fact, no matter how infelicitous, can be rendered compatible with religious faith.

(Based on: Harris. S. 2006. Letter To A Christian Nation p. 18)

See other: Philosophical Conversations