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

[geekosaur]

These questions are why I'm essentially a Deist; but I suppose that could be considered a cop-out, since on some level I believe the answer is fundamentally beyond mortal understanding so it's not really worth worrying about.

[browngirl.livejournal.com]

If God wanted you to miss your flight, doesn't that mean that God wanted the people who were on the plane to die?

I remember twitching during the coverage of the Oklahoma City bombing because of this. I *hate* it when people say that.

I'm obviously working out my own personal theology (I don't even have a religion settled on yet), but part of what I think about these issues may be similar in its vastly simpler and lower level form to what Maimonides thought. The world, well, can't be perfect, it has to have rules, and badnesses, the way light implies darkness. It might have had differerent rules and badnesses than the ones it has, but it would have had to have had some to be a viable dynamic world.

Of course, what do I know about creation anyway? Another part of what I think is that I don't actually expect to understand God anymore than I could understand my parents when I was three. I'm just a girl, God is God, I couldn't fit all the Truth into my head, it would pop. That attitude might seem to negate the idea of striving after knowledge, except that I hold with one of my favorite filksongs that "the profoundest act of worship is to try to understand". Perfect understanding may be an asymptote but the climb is worth it.

*smile*

A.

[almeda.livejournal.com]

I'm an unassociated deist; I have some things that feel right, in my head, so I believe them. I believe God (to pick a useful word-descriptor) is somewhat more complex than just a Prime Mover -- that is, that he doesn't simply sit there and make everything that is in the world happen, just as it is, crashing this plane, sparing that person. I think he's less imminently involved than that, if for no other reason than that this is *our* world, and we *do* have free will.

Have a (probably bizarre and unhelpful) analogy: imagine you have a hamster. Let's call her Josie, just because it's shorter than 'the hamster'. You buy her a nice cage with lots of ramps and a water dish deep enough to wade in and a snuggly bed and things to chew and crawl through and a running wheel. You put Josie in the cage. You watch her play, and smile, and sometimes pet her, and sometimes put more things in the cage to see what she does with them. Are you *making* the hamster run the wheel? If it missteps and falls off the top ramp to land on the bottom of the cage and look all confused, did you do that?

See what I said about bizarre and maybe unhelpful? But it feels true to me. Many things happen because they *happen*, because people are like that, and people make them happen. The hamster chooses. However, some things happen because they are a test, I think, or maybe that's a bad word. A test implies there's a right answer. Some things happen because you gave the hamster a new toy, or a puzzling object, and you wanted to see what it did. And sometimes the hamster can't handle it. You bring the kitty up to look into the cage, and the hamster shrinks back against the wire and shrieks. It smells the new object and freaks. All the concatenation of stressful things in my life builds and builds until I have to curl up in a ball in bed, close my eyes, and *reach out* towards God, with just a simple request: help me. And every time I've really needed it, he(/she/it/they/bar) has.

This is what I believe. Discussion welcome. :->

[cellio]

I agree that we can't expect to understand God; the gulf is too great. We can't just blow the question off, though, because we need to tackle a subset of it: what is my proper relationship with God?

Because I believe one can have a relationship (beyond "just do this because that's the law"), I can't believe in a completely transcendant God like Maimonides did. The hamster analogy below is very good, and matches much of my thinking. (I'll comment more there.)

But I also don't believe in the degree of immanence needed to support the "God saved me from that disaaster" approach. I, too, twitch when I hear people say things like that. There is a flip side to that coin that the speaker usually hasn't thought about. (Actually, I don't know what's worse: when people don't think about it or when they do and come up with things like "AIDS is God's punishment for homosexuality".)

[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."

[cellio]

Your analogy is not unhelpful; quite the opposite. Ironically, I've used it myself, but usually with children rather than pets. :-)

God does not control our individual actions; God set a universe in place, gave us tools to manipulate it, and sat back to watch. Tools like intellect, curiosity, abstract thinking, emotion... He gave us these tools for a reason; we're expected to use them. We have free will, so we can do that.

Yet, I still think it's possible to have a more personal relationship -- not at the level of "please help me get an A on tomorrow's math test", but more at the level of "please help me to be a better parent" or "please help me be more compassionate" or the like. (I believe these because of personal experiences, not because of rigorous analysis.) Perhaps God helps with paths but is not concerned with individual stops along those paths.

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.

[dvarin.livejournal.com]

Hmm. No one said certain of the things I was going to, so I suppose I'll write a comment after all. :)

you can't credit God with the good parts without also blaming him for the bad parts.
This is false. People do this. I had someone argue something really similar to this with me on the street once. I'm not agreeing that it's a good or useful idea, and I'm doubting whether sane systems can be derived which include it, but it does exist.


So, the concept of natural law may be useful here. God set up a world, and it has certain properties like the laws of physics and the set behaviors of animals, which govern how it proceeds. Assuming no divine intervention, every event involving a human can be regarded as a consequence of human choices working under natural law. The single person might have been spared the airplane crash because she decided to do extra chores that morning, and the attendants decided not to wait for her.

The fun bit comes in with the possibilities of intervention. God doesn't often go in for large, public, blatantly-break-natural-law types of miracles, so I guess most of his intervention is on the level of spiritual influence of individuals. Inspiring a person to choose in a particular way must respect free will, so it has more the form of a recognition of a certain path as good rather than a compulsion, perhaps. It was you who a while back posted the idea that god cannot/will not do certain things without human cooperation--this would seem to fall into that category.
Protection of free will is also the thing tying his hands for the large public miracles. Too many of those would cause people to be able to choose to acknowledge him or not with about the same level of freedom they have in choosing whether to acknowledge gravity or not. You could truly deny gravity, but it is not considered sane to do so.

If you assume God is good and vice-versa (define "toward/with God" == good, "away from/against God" == evil, something that seems popular for religions to do), then god cannot commit an evil act, as this would be denying his own nature. That might have kinda bad effects on his existence and that of the world dependent on him. :) So, anything God does is good. Though, because God has perfect future knowledge that we do not, it may not appear good at the time it happens.

If you pray for a friend, God hears you, but may not grant whatever specific thing you are asking for. That doesn't mean that praying is pointless--God would not grant aid unless you choose to seek for it. That's another respecting freedom and not compelling acceptance of God thing. In addition, whatever aid God does send is good, possibly the most good that you all would accept.

Standard disclaimer: Half of these are my own ideas, half of them ultimately find their source in the Book of Things That Other People Have Spent Lots of Time Thinking Out, otherwise known as the Catholic Catechism, which I consulted while writing this. :) I've not thought out the final implications of some of them, so aid in that endeavor would be appreciated. And now it is late and I will go to sleep.

[dvarin.livejournal.com]

[sigh], forgot this one:
God certainly has the power to ensure that the options everyone can freely choose from are only those which are good. This, unfortunately, makes free will kinda pointless since it is impossible to choose away from God, the choice between good and evil has been taken away, effectively compelling people to choose good.
The implication of this idea is that at every phase where someone makes a decision, there are both good and evil alternatives available to them. If someone (or some lot of people) chooses evil a lot, you sometimes get things like WWII as their decisions play out.

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.

[cellio]

So, the concept of natural law may be useful here.

I agree with what you wrote here. I think God set a system in motion and has largely stayed out of it, at least at the macroscopic level. I don't believe that God decides which trains will be late and where earthquakes will strike and who will go to bed hungry and who will kill whom in wars.

I guess most of his intervention is on the level of spiritual influence of individuals. Inspiring a person to choose in a particular way must respect free will, so it has more the form of a recognition of a certain path as good rather than a compulsion, perhaps.

Excellent point! If most of the intervention that does happen consists of opening people's eyes to new possibilities, rather than actual manipulation, that can cause the effects I've seen without mucking with free will. Very good.

[cellio]

Yes, evil options must remain available for choice to have any meaning.

Besides, from a more fundamentalist perspective, if evil choices aren't available, what was the actual result of eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil? One could argue that before Adam and Chava ate that fruit, all of their options were good. Note that if you make that argument, there is a consequence you might not like: that would mean that eating the fruit was not evil, because they were not yet capable of evil. (I, personally, believe that eating the fruit was not only good but necessary.)

[dvarin.livejournal.com]

The actual result of eating from the tree was, as advertised, the ability to judge between good and evil--in other words, a conscience. Having experienced evil, they could now discern it. The tree itself may have had no special property other than being forbidden.

So... eating from the tree was definitely evil, as it was disobeying the explicit word of God. I suppose there are two ways to interpret this:
The tree could be the thing that from the beginning provides the possible evil choice to complete the manifestation of free will, and A&C were conscious of the possiblity of eating from it but constantly rejected that action until tempted, by being so close to God that they never even considered any evil action.
Or, before the tree, free will exists just fine with only good options. The devil introduces A&C to the possibility of choosing evil by eating of the forbidden tree, which they may not have otherwise ever even thought of doing, and so adds another choice, a nongood one, to the realm of choosability. Previously they had not been capable of evil because no evil options presented themselves to their minds.
Personally I like the former model better, that they could commit evil but did not--it seems more neat if free will always entails a choice between good and evil, and the devil merely provided knowledge rather than an additional option. Just because A&C were facing exclusively toward God does not mean that the direction away from Him did not exist. On the other hand, I'm not sure that contrasting these situations produces a particuarly useful distinction. :)

[figmo.livejournal.com]

I've come to view God as a "big picture" kind of being. God is better to you if you're a good person, but when something bad happens to you, it's part of The Big Picture. There's a reason for everything, and sometimes you get sacrificed as part of The Big Picture, which can royally suck.