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Tuesday, October 22, 2019

Does God punish people through natural weather events?

I'll comment on a post by progressive theologian Randal Rauser:


Before I get to that I have a preliminary observation. It's striking that his post is hosted by a Catholic apologetics website. In particular:

StrangeNotions.com is the central place of dialogue between Catholics and atheists. It's built around three things: reason, faith, and dialogue. You'll find articles, videos, and rich comment box discussion concerning life's Big Questions. The site was created by Brandon Vogt (brandon@brandonvogt.com) and operates under the aegis of Word on Fire.


That's revealing with regard to how Catholic apologists like Brandon view the Bible. Perhaps sweet little Brandon is just too gullible and guileless to suspect where Rauser is going with this. It should be obvious that Rauser doesn't think the Biblical accounts he alludes to are true. The reported events never happened. And the narrators misrepresent the character of God. From Rauser's perspective, these accounts are pious fiction, or in a sense, impious fiction. 

Regarding Rauser's argument:

1. No sophisticated Christian thinks all natural disasters are divine punishment. The fact that some natural disasters are divine punishment carries no presumption that every natural disaster, or any disaster in particular, is punitive. 

In the case of  Scripture, we have the benefit of inspired interpretation. Outside the Bible there may be some personal calamities that are so fitting and antecedently unlikely that they appear to be divine judgment. 

2. Rauser commits an elementary blunder by failing to distinguish between judgment and the side-effects of judgment. Because human beings are social creatures, punishing human behavior sometimes necessitates collective judgment.

That doesn't mean everyone who suffers as a consequence to collective punishment is being punished. Innocent people may be harmed as a side-effect of collective punishment. If parents are chronically tardy in paying the monthly dues on their apartment, and if they are evicted, both for failing to pay the landlord, as well as trashing the apartment, their children will suffer as a result of parental delinquency. But eviction isn't punitive with regard to the children. Rather, that's a necessary but incidental consequence of their inextricable involvement in the lives of their parents. 

3. It's striking that Rauser's morality is completely independent of the Bible. Indeed, from what I've read, he doesn't think that God necessary to ground moral realism. So it's hardly surprising that he often stands in judgment of biblical ethics. 

Rauser is basically an atheist with a thin coating of Christianity. That's why so few people on either side take his progressive alternative seriously. It's not consistently Christian or secular, although secularism represents his center of gravity. His residual supernaturalism is cobbled together from philosophical theology and the paranormal rather than biblical revelation. 

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