What hath the LAT wrought

March 22, 2011 By

We mentioned last week that people were trying to make sense of the tragedy in Japan. I noted that a few celebrities did a very bad job blaming the Japanese for angering God; the specific ESPN story I discussed broached but did not address the theodicy question.

This story from the Los Angeles Times tries to answer that question. Its structure reminds me of one I wrote for San Bernardino’s The Sun after Hurricane Katrina and the Sumatra tsunami. However, reporter Mitchell Landsberg doesn’t cast his net as wide, talking primarily to theological conservatives, and only from the Christian and Jewish traditions.

Overall, the story is a good read, and includes thought-provoking and insightful quotes like this one from Erik Thoennes, a Biola University theology professor and an EV Free pastor:

“Is God judging Japan?” he asked. “Well, no more than He’s judging me.”

Yet, this story was not without its problems. Unfortunately, they come at the beginning of the article and belie the foundation upon which the story was reported:

If there is a God, and if He (for the sake of convention) is all-powerful, what in God’s name was He thinking?

This is perhaps the oldest of theological questions — the one that may, in fact, explain the nearly universal human yearning for faith, what evolutionary psychologist Jesse Bering calls “the belief instinct.” How can we explain the inexplicable? How can we make sense of suffering?

Atheists say we can explain life’s complexities through science, and that there is no meaning in suffering. It just is, and we should do our best to alleviate it.

Monotheists see it somewhat differently. Faith offers answers, if only the unsatisfying: “It’s a mystery.” But there is little consensus among the faithful.

Let’s take that graph by graph.

In the first paragraph, Landsberg is suggesting that God might not be a He, but that is completely irrelevant to, and distracting from, the topic at hand. More importantly, the early tone is way too cute for what should be a serious, even somber, story. Using God’s name in vain to question what He was thinking is pretty close to a pun, and every journalist knows those are to be avoided.

This second paragraph is a nice set up.

But it is oddly followed with a third paragraph about how atheists see suffering. This is a relevant perspective, but I don’t think it belongs right after a paragraph suggesting that inexplicable suffering gave rise to the idea of God.

In the fourth paragraph, I saw two major problems. One is that monotheists don’t see things “somewhat differently” than atheists. They see questions about God and suffering diametrically differently. And, two, is that monotheists don’t just say, “it’s a mystery so don’t worry about it.” They pine for explanation, which they often find in God’s greater plan. Further, Christians and Jews are far from the only monotheists, though they are the only ones whose views appear in this story.

Print Friendly

Filed Under: Evangelicals, Judaism, Religion, World
  • http://rub-a-dub.blogspot.com mattk

    I hate that theodicy question. I’ve noticed that it is usually people who are not religious who ask it. It is kind of elementary. I don’t know about other religions but Christianity is pretty clear about what causes sufering, and what God is doing about it. Come on, media professionals, that question is answered, find a new question.

  • Judy Harrow

    MattK (#1)

    With respect, although you and other religous people may have found a satisfactory answer, journalists are writing for everybody, and many have not. Furthermore, I don’t know whether Shinto/Buddhist Japan has found an answer similar to yours. I think it’s fair to ask journalists to present various takes on theodicy within Japanese culture, but not to assume that the question is answered beyond any need for discussion.

    Judy

  • http://ingles.homeunix.net/ Ray Ingles

    And, two, is that monotheists don’t just say, “it’s a mystery so don’t worry about it.” They pine for explanation, which they often find in God’s greater plan.

    Well, there’s some dispute about whether “God’s greater plan” counts as an explanation. For example, why did God’s greater plan require several thousand people to die in a tsunami? The article itself cites Siroj Sorajjakool: “As a Seventh-day Adventist, he prefers not to dwell on that which is unanswerable.” (Emphasis added.)

  • Martha

    Probably off the topic, but quoting an evolutionary psychologist just turned me right off (and makes me dismiss the rest of the story).

    It’s hard enough making sense of present-day human psychology; saying ‘the reason the colour red represents danger is because when Neolithic housewives hung up red curtains, this attracted cave tigers to eat them’ makes no sense to me whatsoever.

    By the bye, what is the evolutionary psychologist’s explanation for the ‘reporter uses jokey tone to show he’s not one of those unsophisticated believers’ instinct?

  • Dave

    Martha, the basic idea of evolutionary psychology is that, if we believe in evolution, and if widespread ways of thinking are in fact inborn, they must have once had some survival value. There’s nothing wrong with all that. Of course an attempt to explain a particular way of thinking may be risible.

  • http://ingles.homeunix.net/ Ray Ingles

    Martha – I suppose I’m continuing an offtopic thread, but even people who are, ahem, passionately committed to evolution have issues with ‘evolutionary psychology’: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/01/the_evolution_of_rape.php

    On the other hand – slightly more on-topic – actual psychology has a few things to say about the type of ‘explanations’ that faith provides: http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/gilbert05/gilbert05_index.html

    Yet, psychology experiments reveal that people are often satisfied by empty form. For instance, when experimenters approached people who were standing in line at a photocopy machine and said, “Can I get ahead of you?” the typical answer was no. But when they added to the end of this request the words “because I need to make some copies,” the typical answer was yes. The second request used the word “because” and hence sounded like an explanation, and the fact that this explanation told them nothing that they didn’t already know was oddly irrelevant.

  • Jerry

    Especially for a story about Japan, limiting the question of theodicy to western religion is a mistake. Eastern concepts such as reincarnation and karma need to be addressed as well including that some Buddhists have different views of those two.

  • Martha

    Dave, I realise that. However, evolutionary psychology seems to be saying “Because behaviour A occurs today, it must have survived from our past. If it survived, it has evolutionary value. If it has evolutionary value, that consists in – ” and here’s where the whole shebang breaks down.

    An assumption as to why or how a particular behaviour survived is just that; an assumption. “The belief instinct” may be a snappy term, but it’s not much of a help. You might as well talk about “the science instinct”; because we are faced with massive environmental factors outside our direct control, we seek to make sense of them and so have evolved a system whereby the chaotic natural world is rendered intelligible and more importantly, controllable, by means of a system of “laws” which nature “obeys” and which, crucially, humanity can manipulate.

    If it’s a consolatory fantasy to invent spirits, deities, and animist forces which we can manipulate and control in order to make sense of the world around us, and this out-moded attitude survived because of the evolutionary value it offered our ancestors, you could say as much for science (without getting into the whole “Yes, but science is true!” argument). Such quick and easy quotes seem to me to be the same as the catch-all archaeological explanation for a site or artifact that cannot otherwise be classified: “possibly ritual object”.

    In short, I submit that since none of us have personal acquaintance with people from five thousand years ago, we cannot speak to their mental state and what their attitudes may or may not have been. We can say what we think those attitudes were, or how they appear to us, and that’s as far as it goes.

  • Hector_St_Clare

    Re: Especially for a story about Japan, limiting the question of theodicy to western religion is a mistake.

    It might be interesting to talk to some Zoroastrians too. I realise there aren’t a lot of them around nowadays, but they influenced the evolution of the Judeo-Christian tradition, as well as (especially) many of the early Christian heresies, and they had one of the most interesting answers to the problem of evil.

    Re: I’ve noticed that it is usually people who are not religious who ask it.

    If you think that, then you really should read Dostoyevsky. Seriously, the problem of evil is one of the most ancient and enduring sources for inter-religious debate, and most people that have argued about it, on both sides, were passionately religious themselves. Even those who have argued that orthodox Christianity didn’t sufficiently answer the problem of evil, usually argued from some alternative religious perspective of their own.

  • Dave

    Martha, where it falls apart for me is that it is difficult to produce a psychological fossil. There’s little one can point to as that from which a modern global human behavior evolved the way one can point to a fin and say, “This evolved into a leg.”

  • mattk

    Judy, that’s kind of my point. The whole theodicy thing doesn’t even work with Shinto and Budhsm. Shinto has no all powerful all loving deity, merely a collection of local deityies of limited influence. Buddhsm, at least the most prominent variety in Japan is atheist. In neither case does the theodicy question even make sense. So, in Japan, for the Japanese, this question doesn’t even make sense.

  • Peabody

    My problem with the article is right here:

    Atheists say we can explain life’s complexities through science, and that there is no meaning in suffering. It just is, and we should do our best to alleviate it.

    Monotheists see it somewhat differently. Faith offers answers, if only the unsatisfying: “It’s a mystery.” But there is little consensus among the faithful.

    So Monotheists are all put in one basket, but the only representative for the irreligious comes in the form of the Atheists?

    As an Agnostic, I feel slighted. We are the single largest body of persons within the non-religious category. The majority of non-religious scientists are Agnostics. So why not include us?

    Why not just say “Nontheists” or “Non-religious” or “Irreligious persons”?

  • Jeff

    Dave said: “Martha, where it falls apart for me is that it is difficult to produce a psychological fossil.”

    Exactly. It is all speculation with some guesswork and wishful thinking thrown in for good measure. The observations are not empirical.

  • Jeff

    It just is, and we should do our best to alleviate it.

    Why should we alleviate suffering according to atheists?

  • http://ingles.homeunix.net/ Ray Ingles

    Jeff, offtopic for this discussion, but you could start here:

    http://ingles.homeunix.net/rants/atheism/strategies.html

    If you want to talk it over, the GetReligion coffeehouse is specifically set aside for general discussion.