Tsunami Theology

Comments

1. 

   January 2, 2005

   Eve Garrard

   That’s exactly right, Mick. The most cursory acquaintance with the history of the 20th century should have raised these problems for the Archbishop in a very pressing way, and I find it hard to believe that this is the best that Christian thought can come up with in response to the problem of natural evil. But what do I know, I’m just an atheist ….

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2. 

   January 2, 2005

   Tom

   To be fair to the Archbishop, he does have a much more sophisticated view than the one you give in your paraphrase – as his complete article shows. He’s criticising theologies which try to explain this sort of thing, by constructing theodicies which attempt to reconcile mass death (or any death) with some kind of divine purpose, and contrasting them with the view of “[Believers who] have learned to see the world and life in the world as a freely given gift; they have learned to be open to a calling or invitation from outside their own resources, a calling to accept God’s mercy for themselves and make it real for others; they have learned that there is some reality to which they can only relate in amazement and silence.”
   As an atheist myself, I’m not ultimately convinced by all this, but it seems to me to be just the kind of thing a serious religious leader ought to be saying.
   And while, clearly, it would be very odd if the tsunami was the first thing ever to make Williams think about these issues, it’s something which has brought them to the forefront of public discussion – so it’s not unreasonable for him to join in.

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3. 

   January 2, 2005

   Eve Garrard

   Tom, you’re absolutely right. Having now gone to the original article, I can see that it’s a much more serious response than I was allowing for. But the admirable bits in it are so severed from such ability as we have to reason about the value of life that I still feel that Christian thought, which isn’t as far as I know hostile to reason, must be able to do more than that.

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4. 

   January 2, 2005

   Eve Garrard

   Tom, one other small point – the piece which you rightly claim is misleading about the archbishop’s views wasn’t Mick’s paraphrase, but rather the Telegraph’s own.

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5. 

   January 3, 2005

   Backword Dave

   Eve, I think you were right the first time. If the Archbishop had considered the many disasters of history, he should have no difficulty with the body count from this earthquake. As Mick suggests, this is just a pose of seriousness.
   Christian thought is far from hostile to reason. Christian ‘thought’ (which I’m reading as education) gave us Macchiavelli, Galileo, and Newton, among many others. That doesn’t mean that the majority of Christians aren’t idiots.

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6. 

   January 3, 2005

   Eve Garrard

   Dave, the original article suggests that the Archbishop regards past disasters as well as this present one as raising the same problems for faith, and that if there’s a resolution of the problem it doesn’t take the form of a justification. That’s a better position than the one implied in the misleading Telegraph resume. In my view we don’t need disasters to raise the problem, any death will do, but I know that not every atheist would agree with this view, and I also note that its finest articulation (‘any man’s death diminishes me, for I am involved in Mankind’) was made by a committed Christian. And do you think that the proportion of idiots is greater among Christians than among any other group? Think of the kill rates under those noted atheists Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot – plenty of moral idiocy there, I would think.

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7. 

   January 3, 2005

   Tom

   Eve, fair enough – although I’m not convinced the last paragraph came from the Telegraph.
   Incidentally, there’s a leader in the Telegraph today which says that Williams complained about yesterday’s headline too, and which blames him for not expressing himself clearly enough.

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