Mourdock's Dilemna

October 26, 2012

Mourdock’s Dilemma

Posted by James Wood

The latest Republican spin seems to be that when Richard Mourdock, the senatorial candidate for Indiana, said that if a child is conceived by an act of rape, “it is something that God intended to happen,” he was bumbling his way toward a less controversial proposition—that “life is precious, regardless of the circumstances,” as Rob Jesmer, the executive director of the Republican National Senatorial Committee, told the New York Times. Jesmer added that Mourdock “didn’t say it in a particularly articulate way.” Mourdock may be both idiotic and vile, but I don’t think he was especially inarticulate, and I don’t think he was merely alleging that life is cherishable, whatever the conditions of its conception. He was more pointed: he said that life is a “gift from God,” and that even “if life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen.” Obviously, it all depends on the meaning of “it.” For an air-brusher like Rob Jesmer, “it” means life, and not rape. But the force of Mourdock’s claim, the shock of its haplessly radical transparency, lies in the fact that by “it” he clearly meant both the rape and the life that might come from it. Since God intends life to happen, God also intends all the various ways, good and horrible, in which life comes about. That is the commonsensical reading of Mourdock’s words.



This may be unpalatable, and for many non-believers it is a profound reason not to believe in the traditional God of monotheism, but there is nothing theologically peculiar about Mourdock’s position. (He is an evangelical Christian.) First of all, he was doing nothing more than offering the familiar weak defense of God in relation to evil and pain, the silver-lining defense: out of the unavoidable abundance of great suffering and hardship that exists in the world, God produces redemptive teaching. New life is born, or we learn something important about ourselves, or we come anew to God or Christ, etc., etc. As Bart Ehrman pointed out in his book “God’s Problem,” the Bible is full of such stories. When Joseph confronts his murderous brothers in Egypt, he lectures them about how (in Ehrman’s words) “even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good, in order to preserve a numerous people, as he is doing today.” The Job story ends in the suffering faithful man restored to happiness and prosperity, as reward for his hardship. And, of course, the story of Jesus’s sacrifice and resurrection is the ultimate version of the redemption idea: God suffers with us on the cross, dies, and is born to new life in heaven, a place where God wipes away all tears from our faces, and where there is no more death or sorrow. In her essay on affliction, the philosopher Simone Weil essentially argued that suffering is good for us; that we are like apprentices who must learn on the job, by making painful mistakes.



A second, stronger claim was lying within Mourdock’s first claim: not just that good may emerge from bad things, but that since God intends the good to emerge, he must also intend the bad things. This is a hard idea, and people naturally flee from it, but its logic is implicit in the Biblical stories that Ehrman mentions. God knew in advance everything that was going to happen to Job—indeed, it was a little game he hatched with Satan. If the great good of the resurrection was a result of the crucifixion, then it makes no sense to separate the one from the other: both events were divinely intended, divinely anticipated. I give the reprehensible Mourdock some credit, at least, for spelling out the implacable and pitiless logic of divine foreknowledge. Most believers refuse to face the implications of their own beliefs in this regard, except when it suits them: that is, when they think they have been “saved” by God from some terrible calamity. Climbing out of the wreckage of the bus accident or the gas explosion or the terrorist bomb, the relieved survivor easily praises God for “the miracle” of his survival, and sometimes even adds that “God must be looking out for me,” apparently unaware that the same God must therefore have approved the demise of the person who didn’t make it out. If God is the author of “miracles,” he is also the author of death. (And it might be added that Mitt Romney, and all those who argue that life begins at conception but who allow an abortion exception in the case of rape and incest, are also refusing to face the implications of their hesitations: for if abortion is murder but abortion is permissible in certain circumstances, then either it must follow that murderous abortion is permissible when an adult life is more important than a fetus’; or it must follow that a fetus conceived by rape or incest is simply not a human life. Again, Mourdock is coherent where Romney and others are incoherent.)



This is an ancient dilemma. The gods of Genesis and an early Mesopotamian poem like the “Atrahasis” are violent, punitive creators, and these texts seem unashamed by the idea of a deity that produces both good and evil. Why would we be shocked by a God who intends a rape, but not shocked by a God who floods the world, kills most of the life on it, and starts all over again? Or who orders a man to kill his son? In the Book of Isaiah, the Lord announces: “I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil. I the Lord do all these things.” When Abraham pleads with God to spare the inhabitants of Sodom, it is Abraham who seems to be the ethicist, and God who seems to be the murderous hothead, in need of Abraham’s wise counsel. And this is the same God who knowingly hardens Pharaoh’s heart whenever Moses asks him to “let my people go,” even though the cost of this divine control is a series of devastating plagues for the Egyptians, culminating in the slaughter of every first-born. Note the Mourdockian emphasis: it is not Pharaoh who hardens his heart against the Israelites; it is God who does so. It’s all part of the plan of Exodus: life comes out of death, good comes out of evil.



Sure enough, this kind of thing has made theologians and annotators very anxious: we have two thousand years of awkward and justifying commentary, in both the Judaic and Christian traditions. The Protestant and Catholic churches struggled for centuries with the implications of God’s foreknowledge of sin and suffering. You can try to wriggle out of these implications by arguing that we humans must have freedom to do good and evil or we would just be automata, remotely controlled by God. But this returns us to Mourdock’s dilemma. Because if God knows in advance what we will do, he knows that we will misuse our freedom, as he surely knew that Adam and Eve would. As Pierre Bayle, the seventeenth-century skeptic, sardonically puts it in his “Historical and Critical Dictionary,” divine foreknowledge of this kind is a bit like a mother who lets her daughter go to a ball, knowing in advance that she will be violated. What mother would do that? Why would God, Bayle says, bestow a gift that he knows in advance will be abused? And abused in such a way that—as in the case of Adam and Eve—it will bring about our eternal damnation?



In his book, “What I Believe,” the English philosopher Anthony Kenny, who was ordained a priest in 1955, but who left the priesthood and his Catholic faith in the nineteen-sixties, says that it was precisely the issue of divine omniscience that determined the course of his subsequent unbelief. It is not possible, he argues, to “reconcile the freedom of the will with the attributes that Christians traditionally ascribe to God.” He quotes the following prayer of confession, from the Calvinist Belgic Confession: “We believe that the same good God, after He had created all things, did not forsake them or give them up to fortune or chance, but that He rules and governs them according to His holy will, so that nothing happens in this world without His appointment; nevertheless God is neither the Author of nor can be charged with the sins that are committed.” Notice again the theological wriggle: God ordains all things, but can’t be charged with the sins that are committed. He knew the Holocaust would happen, but he didn’t intend it to happen. Kenny comments that though this is a Protestant statement of belief, “orthodox Catholics would agree with every word of it.” Kenny goes on to appraise the dilemma with admirable clarity:



I have argued in several places that there cannot be any such thing as the God so described. If determinism is false, and free actions are contingent [i.e. accidental and truly free], then there can be no infallible knowledge of future free actions, since as long as they are future there is no necessity about their happening, and any prediction of them must have an element of conjecture. On the other hand, if determinism is true, then God is indeed the author of sin, because if an agent knowingly sets in motion a deterministic process with a certain upshot, then the agent is responsible for that upshot.



Philosophers might quibble with Kenny’s lucid either/or. But religiously speaking, there are only three possible responses: you can continue to believe in a God who knows in advance the number of our days; you can sharply limit your conception of God’s power, by positing a deity who does not know in advance what we will do, or who cannot control what we will do; or you can scrap the whole idea of divinity. The problem with the first position is that most believers, as Richard Mourdock did not do, run away from the dread implications of their own beliefs; and the problem with the second position is that it is not clear why such a limited deity would be worth worshipping. So cut Richard Mourdock some slack. He’s more honest than most of his evangelical peers; and his naïve honesty at least helpfully illuminates a horrid abyss.

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