how involved is God?

[cellio]

Well, all right. Maybe I will write more tonight. (I was going to watch West Wing, but Dani has already gone to sleep.)

I suspect that most people who believe in God believe in a God who intervenes, who (potentially) responds to individual prayer, who involves himself at least a little bit in each person's life. I'm not really any different here except to the extent that we might differ in degree. But there are problems with believing this.

We've all heard people say things like "it's a miracle I was running late and missed my flight on that plane that crashed". Some of those people are in fact attributing it to a miracle -- divine intervention. But I can't accept that in those cases. If God wanted you to miss your flight, doesn't that mean that God wanted the people who were on the plane to die? If you go down this path, then every death, every injury, every setback has to have divine origin, because you can't credit God with the good parts without also blaming him for the bad parts. And we become nothing more than puppets.

One standard hedge for this problem is to look for the hidden good in bad situations. Sure, sometimes it's there, and it's happened to me -- getting laid off only to get a better job, breaking up with someone only to find my life going in better directions that wouldn't have been possible within the relationship, etc. But it's hard to see hidden good all the time; some things are just bad no matter how you spin them.

On the other hand, if God is aloof and completely uninvolved in our affairs, then why bother to pray? Are we just fulfilling commandments to pray in certain ways because God will smite us if we don't? Yes, religions have been built around intimidation alone, but I don't think of myself as belonging to one of them.

Maimonides believed that God set the world in motion, including "programming in" certain miracles ahead of time (like the parting of the Sea of Reeds), but that he doesn't exert any control now. I don't understand Maimonides well enough yet; I can't tell if he's saying that God's preprogrammed world includes certain rules, like "prayer of this sort elicits this response", or if that's something I'm just reading into it. Any acceptable solution, both to me and to Maimonides, has to preserve free will. There's a difference between "if people pray [X] then [Y] will happen" and "people will pray [X] and [Y] will happen". We were given commandments and told to do them; I think that means God wants us to choose to do them of our own free will, else he could have just made robots.

Pre-programmed rules sound reasonable intellectually, but when I pray every morning and ask (among things) that a certain friend be healed of her cancer, I don't think I'm just activating a rule that might or might not produce the desired outcome. I think I am actually petitioning God, who might (or might not) take action as a result of that petition. But if I believe that, then I am forced to believe that if my friend doesn't recover then it's because God wanted her to be sick, and I don't want to believe that.

Of the Jewish prayer that is petitinary (rather than praise or acknowledgement), the vast majority is communal petition. There is very, very little of the form "please do such-and-such for me". (And, you'll note that the rewards and punishments spelled out in the Torah are largely communal -- crops, strength of the nation, land, and so on.)

I guess it's the old immanent-versus-transcendant debate. I believe God is both, even though that's hard to reconcile, and even though I'm not yet able to answer some of the consequences of that, like why one person was on that plane and another wasn't. But, I am convinced, I have experienced the immanent God, so I can't accept a God who is never involved. (No, I haven't heard voices or anything like that -- but I am convinced that my path to Judaism had an external origin and that I got some nudges along the way.)

Maybe I should actually go find a copy of Kushner's Why Bad Things Happen to Good People, which I have never read.

This doesn't keep me up at night, but it is an as-yet-unaddressed issue in my theology, and every now and then something reminds me that it's there.

Comments

[pocketnaomi.livejournal.com]

Who was it who framed the paradox: "If God is God, He is not good; if God is good, He is not God?" I think you only have a difficulty with the question of why bad things happen even if God is interventionist if you assume He is also benevolent by some definition we can understand. I mostly come down on the side of believing God is all-powerful and at least somewhat interventionist, but not especially nice, at least in any way that has any meaning to human ethics.

P.S.

[pocketnaomi.livejournal.com]

A friend of mine, in the voice of an RPG character she played who had lived through Auschwitz and a few other especially nasty traumatic experiences, said, "Based on the evidence, God is a magificent artist who specializes in tragedy."

Re: P.S.

[cellio]

Well, that assumes that God somehow caused Auschwitz. I don't think God did; I think we did. (Abstract, broad "we", of course. Not you and I personally.)

Bad things happen, and some bad things happen that are largely outside human control (like tornados and cancer), but bad != evil. I think good and evil are characteristics that only people, and divine beings, can have. Evil requires a mind.

I think God is either good -- on a very macroscopic level -- or neutral. Mostly I lean toward the former. I kind of envision God looking in on us and cheering when we figure something out that he wanted us to get, or being disappointed when we start another pointless war. But, while God could intervene, it would in the end not be a good act to do so if that intervention causes us to stop trying to solve our problems ourselves. Going back to the parent analogy, sometimes you have to let the kid touch the hot stove so he'll learn not to do that, and following the kid around so you can snatch him away from every danger before it happens is not a good, or kind, act.

Hmm. Last Yom Kippur afternoon the question came up, in our study session, of whether people start out good or neutral. I was, I think, the only person in the room arguing for neutral.

Re: P.S.

[pocketnaomi.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure it assumed 'caused'; I think it assumed 'permitted'. If you assume God had the physical power to prevent it and for some reason did not, then serious questions about His benevolence occur. If you assume He had no power to prevent it, serious questions about His omnipotence occur. I don't think it's possible to have it both ways. One *can* say, which you seem to be trying to, that perhaps God permitted Auschwitz and other bad things because of a standing policy of nonintervention in most cases, despite having the ability to intervene. Combine that with the assumption that His reasons for the existence of this policy are, on the whole, good, and you can get to the point of saying that overall He's got a benevolent agenda going, but it is not 'good' in the sense that we most usually understand the term. Admittedly that sense is centered pretty exclusively around us -- meaning one species and fairly short-term -- and that might reasonably not be the case.

I think people start out neutral by definition, since our meanings of 'good' and 'bad' are based around the range of what humans are capable of achieving. We define our terms by what we see. Actually, since our definition of good usually includes some degree of self-restraint and civilization, I think we start out pretty conclusively on the bad side, if not by all that much; we have to be taught civilization. Someone who retained their childish innocence to the extent of retaining their childish self-centeredness and savagery would not be considered an acceptable adult.

Re: P.S.

[cellio]

One *can* say, which you seem to be trying to, that perhaps God permitted Auschwitz and other bad things because of a standing policy of nonintervention in most cases, despite having the ability to intervene.

Yes, that's what I'm trying to say -- that perhaps, ultimately, the greater good comes from forcing us to cope with the consequences of our actions, rather than bailing us out, even when innocent people suffer. Obviously this is not "good" at the level of the individual (and particularly the individual victim!), but intervention could seriously interfere with free will and growth/maturity, not just at the individual level but at the species level. For example, perhaps one of the things we are supposed to figure out is how to structure our society such that things like this can't happen -- which ties into one of the Noachide laws (laws for all people) about establishing a system of justice.