1. Thus far I haven't commented on the pandemic from a theodical standpoint. One reason is that I've written so much about theodicy in general that anything I have to say about the pandemic is apt to be repetitious to some degree, and repetition is boring.
2. In addition, there are atheists who act like every time there's some new natural disaster, such as the Christmas Day tsunami (2004) or the Japanese tsunami (2011), this is supposed to shake the faith of Christians. That every natural disaster ought to send us back to the drawing board. But in Christian theology, moral and natural evils are to be expected. And we have a number of preexisting theodical strategies to deal with these events. Natural and moral evil aren't something new, and theodicies aren't generally new, although they undergo refinement.
3. There's a sense in which I agree with unbelievers that evil can call into question God's existence. By that I mean, many people labor under a faulty concept of God, and evil may expose their faulty concept of God. In that regard, evil can have a winnowing effect on theology.
4. It's common to ask why God allows evil. When a Calvinist uses that terminology, some freewill theists object that it's deceptive for a Calvinist to characterize evil in terms of divine permission. According to Calvinism, God predestined evil.
That's true, but when I say God allows evil, I simply mean that God did not prevent a particular evil. You allow something you were in a position to prevent. That's a coherent concept. To say "allow"/"didn't prevent" are stylistic variations on the same idea.
5. Moral and natural evils are not unplanned events. They happen for a purpose. I'd add that even according to influential models of freewill theism like Molinism and simple foreknowledge, these aren't unplanned events.
In open theism, God doesn't have a master plan for the world, but a set of contingency plans.
6. A basic function of theodicy is not to explain why God allowed a particular evil, but to show how that's consistent with God's existence. There may be different reasons God had for allowing the evil in question. Even if we lack the information to narrow it down to one "correct" explanation, we can offer a number of potential reasons showing that the evil is consistent with God's existence.
7. Some Christians deny that natural evils or natural disasters preexisted the Fall. I disagree. I think they serve a necessary purpose to maintain the balance of nature.
I think one effect of the fall is to expose humans to natural dangers that always existed, from the time of creation. In an unfallen world, humans would be divinely shielded from certain natural hazards, but due to the fall, God withdrew his providential protection.
8. This doesn't mean God directly created a pathogen like the coronavirus. God created a world in which natural organisms adapt and mutate.
9. Although Christian theologians tend to focus on the punitive aspect of death, as divine punishment for original or personal sin, that's one-sided. Human mortality has other spiritual purposes. Nothing exposes human vulnerability and helplessness like death. So death provides an opportunity for humans to renounce their feigned autonomy and admit their total dependence on God's mercy and provision.
10. We like to be in control. An unnerving aspect of the coronavirus is the element of uncertainty in terms of scale, lethality, and distribution. It's so unpredictable. Who will it strike next? For unbelievers and nominal believers who live in denial regarding the inevitability of death, who shove the prospect of death into the back of their minds or only think of death in abstract terms, the coronavirus forces them to confront their mortality and lack of control.
11. It exposes the ineptitude of many public officials. It chastens blind faith in the cult of expertise. It's a test of moral character, revealing what people are really like when altruism is costly. Does ruthless self-interest dominate?
12. It raises questions about the importance and relevance, or unimportance and irrelevance, of public worship. By the same token, it raises questions about how we prioritize risk assessment. Is a supermarket an essential business but a church service is inessential?
13. Several standard theodicies are germane to the pandemic. For instance:
i) The soul-building theodicy, where suffering is an opportunity to tap into compassion and cultivate sacrificial virtues.
ii) Second-order goods. There are certain kinds of goods whose existence is contingent on the existence of evil. If you eliminate the evil, you eliminate the resultant or compensatory good. So there are tradeoffs. Some evils a necessary evils, in the sense of conditional necessity. They don't have to exist, but they're a necessary source of certain otherwise unobtainable goods.
In that respect, there are tradeoffs. It's easy to imagine ways the world might be a better place, yet that mental exercise involves freezing the goods in place while changing some variables to eliminate the evils. Yet in a cause/effect world, that's artificially compartmentalized.
iii) Events in a cause/effect world have a domino effect. Like time-travel stories, changing a variable in the past changes the future. And the change is more far-reaching the farther it extends into the future. When we think about improving the world, we artificially isolate or insulate causes and effects. But it's not possible to strike an optimal balance where a single world history or timeline contains all the distinctive goods, devoid of evil.
iv) Apropos (ii-iii), housebound couples will result in a baby boom a few months from now. Although many people will die as a result of the pandemic, many new lives will come into being as a result of the pandemic. Individuals who'd never experience the gift of life had it not been for the pandemic. The dying already had an opportunity to live. The tragic death of some creates a situation where others will now have the same opportunity.
v) Human life is brief. What ultimately matters is the world to come (i.e. the New Eden). But you can't participate in the world to come unless you participate in the lifecycle. You must be brought into existence, and you must die, before you can step into eternity. Of course, many humans fail to take advantage of that. They live for what this world has to offer, so the world lets them down. They lose what they had while missing out on what they might have had by squandering their opportunities.
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