Sermon 40 - Disasters Prove God Exists
Psalms 31:7
I will be glad and rejoice because of your constant love. You see my suffering; you know my trouble.
Luke 13:2
Do you think that these people were worse sinners than all the other people because they suffered this way?
James 2:15,16
Suppose a brother or a sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to them, "Go in peace; keep warm and well fed," but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it?
Disasters are not usually used to prove that God exists. Most of the time, it is the other way around. Most people would ask, how could there possibly be a loving God if He allows hundreds of people, hundreds of miles from any seacoast, to be drowned because of the rainfall from a hurricane that is already dying because it has travelled hundreds of miles over land? Or, to put the problem of pain in a more classic formulation, if God exists, and is all-powerful, and is good, why does He allow pain?
Since we are talking about proofs for the existence of God, let us turn to one of the broadest. That is Pascal's wager. Pascal's wager sees two sets of two possibilities each. Either God exists, or God does not exist. And, independently of whether or not God exists, either you believe in God, or you don't believe in God. This sets up four possible alternatives. One possibility is that God does not exist, and that you don't believe in God. Another is that God does not exist, but you believe in God. A third is that God does exist, but you don't believe in God. And the fourth is that God exists, and you believe in Him.
If God does not exist, well, it doesn't really matter whether you believe in Him or not. If God does not exist, and you believe that God does not exist, then you were right. But what prize do you get for being right? You were right, but there is really no reward for *being* right. When you die you die. There is no afterlife, there is no salvation, there is no particular advantage in being right, so if God does not exist the wager is kind of a no-win situation. Whether you believe in God, or you don't, there isn't any prize for being right, and there probably isn't any punishment for being wrong. So, if God does not exist, then whether you believe in Him or not you don't win, and you don't lose, anything.
If God does exist, then the situation is a bit different. If God does exist, and you don't believe in Him, well, you lose out. I'm not necessarily saying that you go to hell, but if you don't believe in God, and God does exist, then you have no chance of having a relationship with him. You lose whatever benefits there are and having a relationship with God, if you don't believe in Him.
But if God exists, and you *do* believe in Him, you win. And you win *big*. And I'm not just talking about going to heaven. In this life you get to have a relationship with God. But you can only have a relationship with God if you believe in Him. So, if God exists, and you believe in Him, in this life you have a relationship with Him, and, in addition, you get heaven thrown in and salvation when this life ends.
So, kind of regardless of whether or not God exists, in Pascal's wager the only winning move is to believe in God. This, of course, does not prove that God exists, but, as the old joke has it, that is the way to bet. If you're wrong, you're not going to lose anything. And if you're right, you win big.
Now Pascal's wager does posit only one of the many varieties of religious philosophies that have been created. This posits one God, and a good God, who is going to reward us for relieving in Him, and who it is worthwhile having a relationship with. So let's look at a couple of other options.
The next possibility is that there is more than one God. This possibility comprises paganism, animism, and, for example, the Greek, Roman, and Norse mythologies. You have a whole bunch of different gods, and they spend most of their time fighting with each other. And, for the most part, we mortals just get caught in the backlash.
In order to deal with that kind of situation, I would turn to another philosophical classic, that of Occam's razor. Occam's razor states that the simplest explanation is the best. Logically, I would suggest that monotheism has it all over paganism. In the first place, when dealing with any kind of polytheism, it really just moves the question of how did this all start when layer back. You've got a whole bunch of gods, and goddesses, and often demons, and various other types of supernatural entities, and where on Earth did all of them come from?
I have another objection to polytheism, and I think that anybody will agree with me on this. Anybody who has ever been on *any* committee, *any*where, for *any* purpose, is going to agree that polytheism just simply can't work.
Now, as a side note to all of this, I might note, before I get to the final possibility, that there are those who claim that the monotheistic, father, God of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, is one that they don't like. Sometimes they would prefer a goddess, and sometimes they prefer to say that Satan has got a bad rap, and is actually the good guy in the story. I would submit that this is, actually, a distinction without a difference. It doesn't particularly matter what name you call God. What I am saying is that there is one, single God, and that God is good. And fighting about what name you use to refer to this God is pretty pointless. As the title of J. B. Phillips' book points out, whatever your idea of God is, it is too small. We are human, and mortal, and limited, and God is eternal, and created all of time, and space, and eternity, and so is simply beyond our comprehension. So if you want to call God by another name, I'm not going to fight you on this: I just don't care. It doesn't make any difference.
So, as far as I can see, the final possibility that we have to explore is that there *is* a God, but that he (or she or it) is actually a bad god. He doesn't care about us, and, in fact, may harbour ill feelings towards us. That is a possibility that has to be explored. But I think that the evidence is against it. We started out with what is often proposed as the problem of pain. If there is a God, and God is good, and God is omnipotent, how come He allows bad things to happen? Well, if there is a god, and he's a bad god, why does he allow *good* things to happen? It seems that it is a waste of energy to have created a universe in which there are so many wonderful and beautiful things, to be enjoyed by entities that you think badly of. Why would a bad god have created a universe that has so much good in it? If God is bad, why would he have done that? Wouldn't it just have been easier to never have created the universe in the first place? Or, if you wanted to create a universe just to punish your creatures, then why make it so complicatedly wonderful and beautiful? You could have just filled it with concrete apartments. Wouldn't that have been easier?
Why, aside from the fact that I am always spreading my little ray of darkness everywhere I go, am I so concerned about disasters? Well, for the past quarter century, it has pretty pretty much been my life. For most of that time I have been teaching business continuity planning, all over the world. Business continuity planning is about teaching people how to prepare themselves, and their business, to survive any kind of a disaster. At the same time, my major volunteer work has been with emergency support services. This is the area of emergency management that prepares to help people, who have been faced by, or caught in, a disaster, to survive for a few days until they can get over their shock, and start getting back on their feet.
I also tend to tell my colleagues in the field of security, that they should also volunteer for emergency support services, or disaster relief, or something like it. It provides you with an additional perspective, somewhat broader than the single focus on restoring business functions, about what is necessary in the aftermath of a disaster. Also, the training you get in disaster relief, and emergency management, gives you credits that you can use for the continuing professional education that you require when you are qualified and certified in security. And usually someone else pays for it.
So, I know about disasters. I know what a disaster is. And what is a disaster? Well, as the joke has it, the difference between a problem and a disaster is that it's a problem when you fall into an open manhole cover and die. It's a disaster if I find that my cell phone has run out of battery. No, you cannot precisely define what a disaster is. Even the literature on disaster response doesn't try. All it says is that a disaster is a bad thing, and it's a very *large* bad thing, that affects an awful lot of people.
In emergency support services, we tend to say that we deal with people at the worst time of their lives. They have just suffered a significant loss. They have lost property. They have lost resources. They have probably lost the idea that life continues, and that they can go on and recover. In the aftermath of a disaster, it is often the case that the loss, and the shock of the sudden loss, makes people feel like giving up. They can't even think of how they might start to go on.
My other major area of volunteer work is with hospice societies. We also say that we deal with people at the worst time of their lives. (Are we beginning to see a pattern here in my choice of volunteer work?) The death of a friend or close family member is also a loss, and very often that loss also makes it seem that it is impossible to continue with life. Certainly life changes in very significant ways.
So, as we saw right at the beginning, it is completely unsurprising that people feel that such losses can make it hard to go on with life. Life is not the same. Your world is not the same. You're ideas about how the world, and the entire universe, works, take a hit. It's a big shock to your system, and the loss can prevent you from thinking clearly, and certainly thinking creatively. And, rather ironically, you have to think more creatively at this point in your life, since the ideas and beliefs upon which your normal life has been based have been completely shaken. It can, and probably does, feel that life is not worth living. It can feel impossible to *continue* living. And it can also be that you feel that what you believed about the world, that life is basically good, was wrong, and so what is the point in even trying to continue to live? Therefore, the question of the problem of pain pops up. If there is a God, and he is good, how is it possible that he allows disasters to happen. How is it that he allows people to hurt so much, and to lose so much? Why doesn't he do anything to help?
When bad things happen, a lot of people tend to say that these things are sent to try us. This is a common response to disasters: the idea is that God has sent bad things, or has allowed bad things to happen to us, to test our faith. This is to prove, to God, how good we are. We are tried by fire.
There is *some* validity in this idea. We wouldn't need much faith, if, as long as we did good things, nothing bad ever happened to us. It wouldn't be faith, as much as a kind of an exercise in behaviour modification. Believe in God, and do what He wants, and you just keep on getting positive reinforcement, with nothing bad ever happening. So, yes, there is some truth in the idea that these things are sent to try us.
If you know pyschology, there are also some problems with it. For one thing, if nothing bad ever happens; if you just keep always getting rewarded; the behaviour of doing good actually isn't very strong. The first time you *don't* get a reward, you tend to stop doing good. So *not* getting a reward every time actually doesn't just *test* our faith, it strengthens it. Gloria (you didn't actually expect me to get through a sermon with mentioning Gloria, did you?) often said that God had three answers to our prayers: yes, no, and wait. When God says "wait," He is actually *building* our faith.
OK, you can probably accept that, as long as the bad things that happen aren't *really* bad. What if they are?
I remember a short story that posited the idea that it is not test after test after trial after trial that God sends us. It is, in fact, chance after chance to do the right thing. These things are not simply meant to try us, but are opportunities that God sends us to demonstrate our belief, and our commitment, even when things go wrong.
This is kind of the theme of the book of Job. And remember that there is a lot of evidence that Job is actually the oldest, earliest written, book of the Bible.
Doing the right thing in the midst of a disaster could be patiently enduring. You have suffered a loss. Your life is possibly more difficult than it was before. But, you still have life. You probably still have health, even though you may be poorer than you were before. The Lord gives and the Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.
But it may be more than that. There is another opportunity, that is presented in the midst of a disaster.
When a disaster strikes, there are always the stories of destruction and loss. But there are also the stories of those who run to help. When hurricanes unleash flood water, the people who have fishing boats, which they trailer to rivers and lakes for recreation in the good times, often bring them, and possibly even bring them hundreds of miles, to launch them into flooded streets, and to go, door to door, to find people who are stranded and may need rescuing, or may need food and water. Almost all of us in emergency support services are volunteers. When earthquakes and landslides happen, neighbours rush to dig out buildings that have crushed or fallen, and to rescue those who may be trapped, and to take in those whose houses are no longer safe.
Disasters present us not only with an opportunity to patiently endure, but to actively help.
It doesn't, of course, have to be a major disaster to give you an opportunity to help. It can be *any* kind of a loss. The loss of a job. The loss of a friend. It can be as small as someone having a bad day. All of these present us with the opportunity to help.
God can always provide help, of course. God can undoubtedly help better than we can. But God gives us these opportunities to help. There is probably a reason that God allows us to help. And that reason is probably something for *our* benefit, rather than for God's benefit. If we fail to help, God probably will provide for the person who needs the help. But we will have lost an opportunity, and possibly more than one type of opportunity. So, the next time you have an opportunity to help, why don't you take it?
In the book "Tales of the Hasidim," Martin Buber recounts a story. A rabbi was asked why did God create atheists? The rabbi replies that God created atheists to teach us the most important lesson of them all–-the lesson of true compassion. When someone reaches out to you for help, you should never say "I’ll pray that God will help you." Instead, for that moment, you should become an atheist-–imagine there is no God who could help, and say "I will help you."
Of course, there *is* a God. The disaster is Him giving you another chance.
No comments:
Post a Comment