In 1987, in Detroit, an airplane crashed, killing some 148 passengers and six crew. However, in the wreckage, a lone infant was found alive. Overnight, the world media were filled with expressions of “God is Great!”, “God is all-merciful,”, “Praise God.”
Wait a minute! Almighty, all-loving, all-knowing God just murdered 154 people in cold blood. I’m not hearing any criticisms of God. It must be part of his all-loving plan for us. “God is good — all the time.”
I think that even religious people don’t really believe this malarky. Rather, people see an overwhelming background of evil and suffering as the default condition. Once in a while, God creates a miracle and does something good. The existence of any small good at all is cause for praise and celebration. One good amidst a hundred evils is proof of God’s existence.
This psychology of a default evil is not too far from the Buddhist doctrine that “All life is suffering.”
I had a daughter who died of cancer at the age of seven. Family members prayed for her survival, to no avail. She might have survived if God had answered their prayers, but He chose not to intervene, so she died. Again, suffering was the default condition, so the family were not unduly shaken by God’s inaction. Their faith was not changed, and they continued to pray for an array of other divine interventions. God was still good, all the time.
Incidentally, there have been a host of scientific studies on the effects of prayer on healing. Some have been positive, while most have shown no effect. Some even demonstrate that patients who know they are being prayed for suffer even adverse outcomes. Never mind, miracle healings do occur, and with no other rational explanations, people naturally ascribe them to divine interventions.
A long time ago, I saw a movie called something like “The Debate”, about two Jews — maybe brothers — who somehow escaped the Nazi concentration camps and met years later. One had renounced his fate, after seeing the horrors that God had permitted. [Remember that old Emerson, Lake, and Palmer line, “Why did He lose, six million Jews?”?] The other had become a devout rabbi. When the apostate brother asked him how he could have become a rabbi after witnessing and escaping the horrors, he replied, “The Holocaust proved that there is right and wrong in this world.” In some Hegelian way, the existence of evil implies the existence of good.
The bottom line is, “God chooses.” A soldier who gets ‘foxhole religion’ sees the guy next to him have his head blown off while he remains alive. Why does God choose for one soldier to live while the other dies?
If I pray to God to help me be admitted to University X, that means someone else will be denied admission. Does God believe in affirmative action?
I’m often amused by high school football games, where before the game, team A huddles for the ‘team prayer’, basically asking God to help them beat the shit out of team B. Simultaneously (and known to team A), team B across the field is asking God to help them beat the shit out of team A. Does each team think that they can out-pray the competition?
The football prayer illustrates not only that we believe God can take sides, but that we can influence that choice by praying fervently enough. This leads to a slippery slope, as follows:
Suppose I pray to God to help me win a tennis match. This is equivalent to asking God to help my opponent lose the match. That is asking God for a negative outcome, or ‘evil’, if you will. Once you start asking God for negatives: “God, make my opponent lose this match”, you might as well ask for specifics: “God, make my opponent break his leg.” From there it is only a short step to issuing curses on people. Just as we ask God, before our meal, to ‘bless’ our food (whatever the heck that means), we might as well ask him to curse the food of our political opponents.
No, the arrogance of trying to manipulate God into choosing our side doesn’t make much sense to me. As Jim Morrison (The Doors, Soft Parade) put it: “YOU CANNOT petition the Lord with prayer!” If God, once in a while, performs some unsolicited miracle (seemingly either bad or good in our eyes), that is His business, not ours to question.