Accidentally on Purpose

by Richard Dieterle

The Perfect God is all-knowing and all-powerful, and amazingly, turns out to be identical to the god of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures. This god, known to the Hebrews as Yahweh, often intercedes in human affairs, and on rare occasions miraculously suspends the very laws of nature that he created. The power of the Perfect God, coupled with the willingness of the Scriptural God to interfere in human affairs, shows us that God could reverse any natural course of action at will.

Letting bad things happen when we can easily correct them is surely wrong. Even the Scriptures affirm this view in the example of the Good Samaritan, whose action is commended in contrast to people who pass by a crime victim without offering aid. Yet, oddly enough, God himself stands by idle while all kinds of evils befall the innocent. Why isn't God a Good Samaritan? His failure to help the righteous is not only immoral, but certain jurisdictions would consider it a crime.

Since the Creator is omniscient, he knows exactly what will happen in any conceivable case. Despite foreknowledge of earthquakes, God does not intervene to save the innocent victims. An earthquake is called an "act of God" for a reason. God cannot deny a hand in the result since he foresaw all the effects of his omipotent power from the beginning of creation. Denial of divine responsibility would be rather like someone denying responsibility for damaging a car that he had deliberately pushed over a cliff (- "the rocks did it"). God is even more responsible for his creations: the man could not stop the effects of gravity once the car left the cliff, but God could intervene at any time at no cost to himself.

We cannot deny that many truly innocent people, most particularly children, are killed in earthquakes. Defenders of the cosmic regime sometimes present the truly bizarre argument that God allowed the death of innocent children because he knew that they would eventually grow up to be radically sinful. Since a child is innocent of any wrong doing, the act of God by which her life was taken will gain her the eternal reward of the righteous. This seems satisfactory on the face of it: in one action God eliminates a foredamned sinner (the adult that the child would have become) substituting the infinitely better outcome of eternal salvation. The theory that God kills children because he has foreknowledge of their future sins, leads inevitably to a corollary of great practical value to Men of the Cloth: they can now comfort the bereaved parents by pointing out that it was all made necessary by the child's infamous destiny. Unfortunately, it will take some luster away from their child rearing practices to know that seemingly accidental death is really caused by bad upbringing.

Such a clever technique of salvation is no doubt a good result, but is it fair? God has in his possession a list of everyone who will be "naughty or nice." So if he saves one person on the list from damnation by homicidal "early retirement," then how could he justify not saving everyone else by the same means? By murdering those destined to commit mortal sins while they are still in their minority he could insure that no one at all ends up in the cosmic furnace. Yet this does not happen. The truth is that if there is a God, he simply permits the evils of natural disasters to occur without lifting a finger to mitigate them.

And what of genuine accidents? God knows when a car will skid on slick pavement through no fault of the driver and cause a fatal accident, yet he does nothing to intervene. God created a world in which he knew that this would be an outcome unless he himself acted to prevent it. Isn't this accident another "act of God"? In a deterministic world, God caused this event as much as the man who pushed his car off a cliff caused it to be banged up; but in a world that is not deterministic (if such is possible), we would have to concede the existence of genuine accidents. Yet when accidents happen in the face of an omnipotent power to prevent them, they become, if not intentional, at least voluntary. Willful negligence is hardly an excuse for standing by, contrary to the example of the Good Samaritan, and permitting great evils to flourish. There may be genuine accidents which God did not cause, yet in the universe of the Perfect God, they can only occur accidentally on purpose.

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