CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER VIII

A WORLD OF DIVINE INTERVENTION

Critics who claim that God should have brought about a world with a lesser amount of evil sometimes propose that God should divinely intervene to save man from disastrous evils. In Part 11 of his Dialogues, David Hume talks about God making interventions in "the secret springs of the universe" and turning all the accidents to the good of mankind and rendering the whole world happy.1 A good God would see to it that a righteous armada of ships might always meet fair winds. Good princes would enjoy sound health and a long life. Persons born to power would have good tempers and virtuous dispositions. Hume does not demand that God make a world without any evil. He would be content if the Creator saw to it that man had a greater propensity to industry and labor, used his mind more and was more diligent in applying himself.2 He thinks that almost all of the moral as well as natural evils of human life come from idleness.

In the world of divine intervention God might see to it that a motorist caught in a snowstorm would have super traction and extra power and fuel to keep going and reach a safe refuge. When a volcano erupted, God might direct the lava harmlessly around homes and valuable property. He would miraculously rescue a mountain climber who slipped on a patch of ice. In a hurricane. He might make a tidal wave subside as soon as it threatened life. He would divert a shark away from a nearby swimmer. He might see to it that the wood, plastic and fabrics found in our home would not burn if threatened by fire. God might see to it that a car heading for us avoids our vehicle, or in the event the accident occurs, that our gas tank would not explode. If a farmhand fell into a piece of machinery, the machine would stop. We don’t let children climb out on window ledges and play in refrigerators. If we are God’s children, why does he not protect us from all like dangers? Why shouldn’t God see to it that we do not suffer the tragic consequences of what we do?

According to some proposals for a better world, not all evils would have to be avoided. God would intervene in a limited way as Edward Madden and Peter Hare, the sceptical authors of Evil and the Concept of God, would have it. They argue that a good God should intervene from time to time to lessen the amount of evil in the world.3

H. J. McCloskey in his "God and Evil" claims that God could miraculously intervene to prevent some or even all moral evil, as he is said to do when he answers our prayers to prevent wars.4

Richard Rubenstein, the theologian mentioned in Chapter II, thinks that God should have intervened to protect the Jews during the holocaust. God cannot be perfect because he stood by and allowed man to inflict horrible evils upon his fellowman.

It is claimed that occasional rather than regular interventions could be made by God, thereby avoiding the more serious evils on the one hand and a pervading chaos on the other. God could enter the world to prevent natural calamities and some or all moral evil. G. Stanley Kane, in opposition to John Hick, claims that science, more or less as we know it, could exist in such a world. Steel and water would behave as they do in our world except in circumstances in which they might harm someone. Then they would act differently, and their pattern of action in such circumstances could be discerned and integrated into our scientific knowledge of them. Such science would not be rudimentary and crude, but much like our own. We would have many of the same substances as we have in the present world, and they would behave in much the same way as they do now. In such a world, we would still have regularities and this would allow us to carry out projects and study the world scientifically, much as we do today.5

Michael Martin, writing against Bruce Reichenbach’s Evil and a Good God,6 mentions the possibility that we could grasp the miraculous regularity of God seeing to it that an avalanche will swerve around a skier or stop at his feet. If no human is in its path, it will proceed as we are accustomed to see it.

Surely, it is possible that we could grasp principles such as that an avalanche or earthquake would stop whenever a human life was in danger. Or, . . . that while animals could be electrocuted by touching a live wire, a human could do it without losing his/her life. It also is possible to grasp the idea that dogs or cats when they fall into deep water might drown, but humans be saved in one way or another.

However, the matter is not that simple. The first serious difficulty of such an interventionist demand arises from the virtually unlimited number of persons who would have a claim or would think they had a claim on special help from God as they face injury from others or from natural forces. The intervention would have to be not occasional or particular but on a very large scale. A limited number of interventions will not work. God would have to save every person in difficulty. An infinitely large number of adjustments would have to be made if all those who suffer terribly are to be relieved.

If God protects some from evil and allows others to suffer, how would it be determined as to who is to be saved and who is to be left to suffer? We would need here some criteria to determine who should be the recipient of God’s saving action. How far should God go in his efforts? Why should God intervene to save some and let others perish? Can we make a distinction between the person caught in an earthquake and an innocent person being threatened by a mugger with a lethal weapon, or a truckdriver who skids off the road into a ravine? Where do we draw the line? The huge number of persons who would have to be protected from evil would result in a very strange world.7

A limited response from God would not be of much value. If God did not save everyone, then those who would have to suffer evil would be exposed to the added evil of the appearance of unfairness in the selection process. The possibility remains that an occasional or limited response would not necessarily affect the amount of evil in the world to a significant degree. The problem of evil might still remain.

Second, although we might be able to understand the modifications of natural law indicated above in the example of the skier, it seems certain that the huge number of people who are to be protected by divine interventions would result in an overwhelmingly complex created order. The problem here, as C. A. Campbell has pointed out, is that we would be confronted by an undependable world in which we could not predict the outcome of our actions.8 If God intervened to prevent calamities, the interventions would have to be on such a large scale as to undermine all confidence in the predictability of natural events.

We could never have a reasonable assurance that any particular natural sequence in which we were involved would not be interrupted by God because of some tragic consequence to others which God foresaw.9 When we set in motion a project we would never know when we would be hurting someone. We could never know for sure which person (if any) was being protected from harm when one of our endeavors was frustrated. Given the infinitely large numbers of people in danger anything that happens could be the result of this kind of protection. Any natural process in which we are involved might be frustrated by God because of some tragic consequence to others, a consequence which God foresaw and prevented.10

Our difficulty would be in perceiving regularity in nature. Even if the restructuring of this God-protected world would produce new and different regularities, it is difficult to see how man’s mind could get an effective grip on whatever order would be involved. The safety of humans as a principle of order in any such system would not be sufficient to afford us the reliability of our predictions. The problem is exacerbated beyond comprehension if we accept the view that animals must also be protected from evils.

John Hick calls such a state a dreamlike world in which we could not pursue any aims or goals.11 For it would work by a continual series of adjustments, of "special providences," and would be shot through with irregularities. It would be impossible to study it scientifically.

According to the English theologian, F. R. Tennant, the suspension of events painful to man would result in a chaos in which anything would succeed anything, as far as man could tell.12 Tennant cites Hume’s view that if all general laws were superseded by particular volitions in the governance of the world, then no man could use his reason in conducting his own life.13 The sufferings inflicted upon humans are the outcome of the order and regularities in the world, which, if done away with, would make it impossible to use our reason.

John James, the author of Why Evil also sees a problem here. We would never be able to depend on our environment to give a calculated result. If God’s intervention took the form of turning nature into a succession of miracles in order to avoid an occasional injury to man, a greater and a permanent evil would result.14

The complexity of such a world would prevent us from predicting the outcome of our actions. We would not have the needed confidence in the predictability of natural events, the necessary precondition of our undertaking a purposive project of any magnitude. Such a world would have a significant influence on the development of our moral life.

Every human being must act---he or she cannot just exist. Repeated actions give rise to virtues and vices as one develops morally. Along the way, we must become aware of the consequences of our actions which can at times help or hurt other persons, as well as ourselves. In order to develop morally, a person has to be able to predict the outcome of his actions. Without confidence in the regularity of natural events it is hard to see how man could have much of a moral life or how he could live at all.

As we try to make our way in the world and not waste our time and resources, we look for things that we can count on. Our moral life is based on experience in the real world--we know that a certain kind of conduct will bring about certain effects--and from this experience we learn to rely on things behaving in a regular way. My conviction that I should give food to a starving person is based on the conviction that food will alleviate the person’s hunger. My decision that it is wrong to give that person a spoiled sandwich is based on the knowledge that contaminated food will harm him. As a person tries to develop in virtue, he remembers his past successes in attaining his goals without harm to himself and others, and his past failures. At times he realizes that while his intentions were right and respectable, the means he used to attain them were unnecessarily harmful to other people. He knows that a certain kind of conduct will bring unnecessary suffering to others as well as himself, and that he should resolve to avoid it in the future. In his moral development, the prediction and probability which play a large role are based on order. A physical order upon which we can rely on natural things to behave in a regular way is necessary for our moral development. Even David Hume admitted that, without a regular order of things, man could not rationally pursue his life. The basis of morality is not only the possibility of free choice but also rationality.

If all this is so, then it renders occasional and particular, as well as wide scale proposals for lessening the evil in the world, irrelevant. Such proposals, if actualized, do not guarantee a world of less evil than we have at present.

A third difficulty with both an occasional intervention and a wide scale intervention stems from the way in which a small requested change in our present world demands other changes and results in an alternative world of greatly increased complexity and problems. The elaboration of such a world is especially susceptible to error. It is too easy to let a contradiction or what leads to a contradiction slip by unnoticed in a world that depends on theoretical projections and imaginations alone, a world in which we do not have to feel hunger, thirst, exhaustion, remorse and betrayal--a world in which we cannot test our theories in a concrete, unforgiving situation.

It is generally accepted among men of science that, at times, the elimination of an apparently small element or a small modification of a process has far reaching consequences. Davies and Gribben mention the well-known remark that the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Adelaide today can affect the weather in Sussex next week.15 The consequences of splicing genes, continued use of aerosol sprays, a small rise in temperature or in the level of the oceans, and like changes cause concern among the knowledgeable.16

Each apparently simple change has a multitude of consequences that have a domino effect on other things and other systems. An occasional change here and there, with a view toward eliminating an evil, has a long string of consequences. The problem is that few if any of these changes have been elaborated by those who advocate them in the world. Any critic who puts forth a world better than the present one is obligated to spell out his proposed changes and their implications in considerable detail. This requirement is at the basis of Bruce Reichenbach’s criticism of McCloskey’s proposal of a world with no disease.17 Until a detailed account of a new and better possible world is made, claims of its possibility are not to be considered seriously.

Any attempt to come up with a better world, if it succeeds, surely would result in a rewriting of the basic structure of the world. In such a science fiction kind of world, the status of humans very probably would be greatly altered. Ninian Smart is right when he warns us that fictions are not a good guide unless they are systematically elaborated.18 A world which is modified slightly to get rid of some evil is more easily suggested than elaborated, and suggestions leave much to be desired when great issues are at stake. This is a powerful objection to the demand that God intervene to prevent the many evils that humans suffer. The so-called "better worlds" are, as of now, imperfectly conceived rudimentary worlds that are in the class of unfinished fiction rather than reality.

A fourth possible difficulty is rooted in the notion of real possibility. Even though a radically restructured scientific world might be conceivable, its real possibility can be questioned. That is, the basis for that conceivability is the actual world and the concepts that we abstract from it. This suggests a certain dominant status to what we might call the real possibilities of the present world. In a sense, any world that changes the essential characteristics or properties of something in the present world can be judged as impossible. If our proposed world, for example, discards the rationality of man, then it would be an impossible world. However, if we see that it somehow follows, but not rigorously, from the nature of man that he must die, then, true, we can expect him to die. If we ask that God create a world in which man never dies, then we are asking for human nature to be changed. It is possible, of course, that the change be in the form of an addition, for example, that the omnipotent God can raise a being to a higher nature. Theists are accustomed to view God’s action here as "supernatural."

A fifth difficulty for the view that God should intervene regularly to save us from disaster is the type of human being that such a world would tend to develop. If we were sure that God would save us from any and all disasters, then would not many of us develop into carefree, irresponsible human beings, unworried and unconcerned about doing things right, unconcerned about what happens to others? Would we develop into people who would not care about avoiding famine in a poor country or a financial collapse in our own because God always would do something to save us, . . .or who would try hard to find the means of stopping an epidemic, for we would be sure that God would take care of it.

Why would people care for one another if nobody could suffer harm, if no matter what we did to or for a person, she would not suffer? It is as if all meaning would be taken from life. John Hick thinks that such a world would be one in which we would not try to progress in virtue. "Life would become like a dream in which, delightfully but aimlessly, we would float and drift at ease."19 Ninian Smart suggests that in a world in which humans would not harm each other, nobody might be courageous because nobody would feel fear. Nobody would resist temptations because there would be no temptations.20 If God saw to it that we do not suffer the tragic consequences of what we do, then the meaning and value of our actions and our lives would be downgraded severely.

A sixth difficulty is that the mere conceivability of such a world should not allow us to place an obligation on God to bring it about. Possibility, taken as conceivability or the lack of contradiction, is not sufficient of itself to ground an obligation on God’s part to create things in a certain way. Rather, if God is to be truly free, it is his to give or not to give. It is actualized at God’s will, accordingly as God freely chooses to do so or not. Nobody can demand that God actualize such a possibility under penalty of being called less than all powerful or less than all good. We cannot rightfully complain if he does not give us something that is not due to us in virtue of our nature.

In a word, the proposal for an occasional divine-intervention world as a better world than the present one is an unsatisfactory solution. Rather, one would have to propose not occasional but extensive intervention.. But this would result in a state of affairs that would be fatal to the development of our human physical and moral capacities. Such a proposal would result in a restructured world, a world vastly different from our own, a world which no critic has presented in the necessary detail nor shown to be better than our own world.

In the following chapters, I will consider other modifications which supposedly result in the "better worlds" that the objectors claim God should have brought about.

NOTES

1. David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Essential Works of David Hume, ed. Ralph Cohen, p. 370.

2. Ibid., pp. 371-372.

3. Edward Madden and Peter Hare, Evil and the Concept of God (Springfield, Ill.: C. C. Thomas, 1968).

4. H.J. McCloskey, "God and Evil," pp. 273-291.

5. G. Stanley Kane, "The Failure of Soul-Making Theodicy," International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion, vol. vi (Spring, 1975), pp. 6-7.

6. Bruce Reichenbach, Evil and a Good God (New York: Fordham University Press, 1982). Michael Martin, "Reichenbach on Natural Evil," Religious Studies, vol. 24, pp. 91-99.

7. If God protected everyone who was in danger, would this do away with death-defying feats such as car racing and mountain-climbing? If it would not do away with such activities it would surely diminish their status. The difference would be something like the tight-rope walker who performed with a net, as compared to one who walked without any protection. We might have a situation in which God would save us once we asked to be saved, while withholding his saving influence until then, but would this take the excitement out of such activities?

8. Cf. C.A. Campbell, On Selfhood and Godhood (London: George Allen and Unwin, Ltd.: 1957), pp. 299-300.

9. Ibid.

10. Ibid.

11. John Hick, Philosophy of Religion, 2nd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1973), p. 41.

12. F.R. Tennant, Philosophical Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956), vol. II, p. 202.

13. Tennant, p. 200. Hume, Dialogues, xi.

14. John James, Why Evil?--A Biblical Approach (Baltimore: Penguin, 1960), p. 39.

15. Paul Davies and John Gribben, The Matter Myth (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), p. 41.

16. Cf. Errol Harris, The Foundations of Metaphysics in Science (New York: Humanities Press, 1965), p. 252.

17. Bruce Reichenbach, "Natural Evils and Natural Law: a Theodicy for Natural Evils," International Philosophical Quarterly, vol. xvi, no. 2 (June, 1976), pp. 179-196. Cf. H. J. McCloskey, "The Problem of Evil," J. Bible and Religion, vol. xxx, 3 (1962), pp. 187-197.

18. Ninian Smart, "Omnipotence, Evil, and Superman," God and Evil, ed. N. Pike (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1964), pp. 103-112. P. 111.

19. Hick, Philosophy of Religion, p.41.

20. Ninian Smart, ibid.