Does God Really Care?
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| Google Image |
A migrant worker is toiling in a soybean field when he comes across a large metal box, mostly covered in dirt. He looks around before digging the box out and opening it. He’s stunned to find cash – hundreds of thousands of dollars.
He covers it up and next day, sells
everything he has and goes to the field’s owner with an offer to buy the field.
This
is a contemporary version of a Gospel parable in which Jesus is trying to make
a point to his listeners. He verbalizes the point earlier in the same gospel of
Mathew, saying that “where
your treasure is, there your heart will also be,” meaning that faith requires commitment. Ultimately, total
commitment.
I thought about this parable when
reading a recent article in the New York Times by Scott Hershovitz, a philosophy professor at the University of
Michigan. The article’s title is “How to Pray to a God you Don’t Believe In.”
“The world is awful at the moment,” he writes. “Millions have died of Covid-19. Authoritarianism is on the rise, abroad and at home. And now there’s war, with all the death, destruction and dislocation that entails.
Seeking Refuge in Religion
“In dark
times, many people seek refuge in religion. They hold fast to their faith. But
darkness also drives many people away from God.”
He then reveals that his
son, Rex, who is studying for his bar mitzvah - the Jewish initiation ceremony of a boy who
has reached the age of 13 - also has declared his disbelief in God.
“If God
was real, he wouldn’t let all those people die,” Rex told his dad. “God is
supposed to care about us. That doesn’t seem like something you’d let happen if
you cared — and could stop it.”
Father
and son are both tripped up by “the problem of evil,” the term traditionally
used for the question of “why God allows bad things to happen to good people.” A
common answer is that God has chosen to allow free will, not to force people to
believe or love him/her. That answer, to me, makes sense.
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| Scott Hershovitz Google Image |
You can’t
help having empathy with Hershovitz, and I am not judging him. There’s no doubt
that God seems to keep his/her distance from our problems, allowing us to do
the most awful things to each other and allowing natural disasters that often
take hundreds of lives and cause untold suffering.
But think about a world in which God did what
Hershovitz suggests. We would be automatons, machines designed to automatically follow the rules, responding to predetermined
instructions. Who would dare defy such a God? It’s true that we would be
relieved of burden of belief, but love of God and others would be far from free,
and free consent is part of the definition of love.
Failing to say 'Yes'
Many of us would like to leave all the
responsibility for the world to God, failing to say “yes” to God’s invitation
to believe and love, and tackle the jobs God expects us to do – such as eliminating
the causes of wars and strife and struggling to eliminate inequality, injustice
and lack of compassion.
Faith is not principally a matter of
following rituals, like Bar Mitzvahs and Christian Confirmation, but committing
ourselves to loving God and others. But to survive, commitment requires
nourishment.
How often do we read or view what confirms
and bolsters our faith or attend meetings or courses that do so? How often do
we read the Bible, pray and attend church or synagogue? How often do we go out
of our way to help others?
Commitment implies the determination to “put
our shoulders to the plow and never look back.” We can do that and still
maintain an openness to new ideas.
Praying to a God in whom we don’t believe
makes no sense.
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