One of the cornerstones of debate about religion is the idea of God’s plan. A common objection to the idea of God is the ‘Problem of Evil‘, which questions how evil can exist in a world governed by a benevolent god. One of the prime responses is that what we see as evil isn’t really so, it’s just our lack of understanding of God’s plan that makes it appear evil.
I can’t argue against that (well actually I can, but for our purposes I won’t now). What puzzles me is that this is seen as a defense of religion. One person dies of malaria every 30 seconds. Now I consider myself quite an imaginative person, at least judging by the amount of daydreaming I do, yet I am utterly unable to conceive of a plan that requires a person to die every 30 seconds from a bug bite. One person every 30 seconds, almost all of whom will be unknown to more than a few dozen other people.
I contend that if you truly believe that, then you have lost all basis for, well, pretty much anything. If you think that a plan so utterly incomprehensible to mere humans is in play, then it seems unavoidable to think that literally anything could be part of that plan, including having your god lie to you about what he wants. Certainly I struggle to understand how God so loves us that he lets one of us die every 30 seconds, in or out of His faith.
Update: This is an old article that I finished off today, and the link no longer works. The latest figures I could find are around 1-3 million deaths per year, which is consistent with the one every 30 seconds)
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I’m only remotely qualified to provide Christian apologia, but I think the justification is in Genesis. In short, I made you perfect and gave you everything, and then you did the one thing I forbade you to do. So now you and all your descendents are gonna suffer and know death. Tough love from a god with one helluva temper.
I’ve been in a big long discussion about this at another site – the big reservation I have is that, assuming for a moment that any of this is true, God knew *all* of it, every detail. Even if he isn’t responsible for evil (and I don’t see how he isn’t, given that he created everything), he knew exactly how every detail would turn out. Despite knowing, therefore, that someone would die every 30 seconds from a mosquito bite for decade upon decade, he decided to go ahead with his ‘plan’.
Now I’m not saying that such a plan couldn’t exist. But if it does, the sheer enormity of the waste of life (comfortably outstripping the Holocaust, decade after decade) makes the plan so far out of human comprehension that, as I said, literally anything could be believed of it.
Is it that fabulous Clash of the Titans movie that starts on Olympus with the gods playing board games with the humans? That’s a good illustration here – they take away the choice aspect which is a critical point of Judeo-Christian theology.
God didn’t want to create a bunch of puppets – the key point is humanity was given free will (something I think most of us are pretty pleased to have most of the time, well for ourselves, I’m not totally sure it’s always attractive in small children…). God’s plan was indeed to have us all living happily in an Edenesque paradise for ever.
As AndyJ pointed out after fair warning of the consequences free will led to disobedience – if God had prevented the choice then what was the point in granting free will? If you follow the story you’ll see that the next many thousands of years went into trying to bring everyone back to bliss. Didn’t work hence the ultimate get back to paradise card with the Passion story.
Now what I don’t know, (and I suspect some Victorian theologians, Jewish philosophers etc spent a long time considering to no useful end), is if indeed ‘bad’ things could happen in Eden. I assume there were mosquitoes – did they bite? I don’t know.
Plus we’re all so attached to life that there is an underlying assumption that death is bad. I think it’s fair to say the the consequences of a head of very poor household dying of malaria can be very bad indeed. But was the death itself bad? Is it not the social conditions that humanity created for itself that leave families destitute that are truly the evil here?
Em – you’ve hit upon a related issue, which is that of free will. My understanding is that God is omniscient. Given that, I don’t think humans can have free will, at least not in the sense that we typically think of it. If God knows the result of every choice you will ever make, before you will make it (and as he exists outside of time, a requirement of being omniscient, he does), then you don’t have free will. If I ask you to pick any color, and secretly predict that you’ll pick taupe, then you’re clearly free to exercise free will. If, on the other hand, I *knew* beyond the human ability to know that you would pick taupe you only have the illusion of free will.
As to God’s plan for us to live in happiness, God knew that Adam and Eve would disobey, that Noah would go ahead with the Ark, and that I would start this sentence with the word As. Given his omnipotence he could have set up the original conditions of the universe to have changed any one of those decisions, but he chose not to. Hence everything that happens is part of God’s plan. While I don’t believe that there is such a thing, I could understand that it might exist. But I can’t begin to understand that plan, and I don’t believe any human could. And if you can’t even begin to grasp a plan, I contend that you can’t claim that any conceivable action could be outside it. In fact I’d say that every single action specifically is part of the plan.