Last night I watched the third part of Channel 4's excellent "The Bible: A History", this episode being presented by the intensely irritating Anne Widdecombe. However, I forebore my annoyance because I was interested to see what she and others had to say. The topic, for anyone who didn't see it, was the 10 Mosaic Commandments, how they form not only the basis of religious morality, but also of English Common Law, and how they should still underpin our behaviour today.
I could feel my annoyance growing--as it tends to do these days very quickly when I hear people defending the literal truth of the Bible--and found myself wondering why such basic, obvious tenets as "don't kill" should necessarily have a religious origin. Surely these ideas--don't kill, treat other people the way you would like to be treated, don't steal, etc.--are essential axioms for human society? Must they have been handed down by God? And are we to believe that before God's chat with Moses, such things were commonplace and acceptable?
I was brought up a Christian. My parents were both active in our local church, my father being both choirmaster and lay preacher up until his cruelly premature death at the age of 32. Since then my faith has been on a generally downward slope, and today I find it virtually impossible to hold on to a belief in any kind of omnipotent, omniscient, essentially benevolent God, when simply turning on the TV brings so much evidence to the contrary. Today it is from Haiti. Before that it was New Orleans. Before that, Indonesia and Sri Lanka. All of these places lost tens, hundreds of thousands of good, law-abiding and--in the majority of cases--religious people. I know it's an old and hackneyed argument against the existence of God, but it doesn't make it any less potent, and if an argument is good enough for Richard Dawkins, its certainly good enough for me.
What do such disasters tell us about God, and a belief in Him? We are presented with three equally unsatisfactory options, it seems to me, if we wish to maintain a belief in God:
1) God is neither omnipotent nor omniscient, and cannot prevent natural disasters
2) God could prevent such tragedies but chooses not to
3) "God works in mysterious ways."
Which of those would I most like to have as my own creed? Frankly, none! Do I find infinitely more palatable the idea that in fact there is no God, at least in the sense that the major religions cast him, and that such events just happen? Yes, hugely so. There are geological and meteorological reasons why, and that's all. On a human scale such disasters are immense, beyond comprehension, but I actually start to feel a certain comfort in knowing that these events were neither a punishment from God, something that He chose to allow to happen even though He had the power to prevent it, or that He couldn't have stopped it even if He'd wanted. The Universe may not care about us one iota, but I actually find that more acceptable than a punitive or powerless God.
So why do I still have even the slightest lingering doubt, the last remains of a reluctance to call myself an atheist? That one is easy to answer: because in that simple and--apparently--obvious act, I would be killing my father. Since the age of nine I have held on to the belief that I would one day see him again, in Heaven. By finally losing totally my faith in God, I would be forced to accept that my father left my life for good when he died thirty years ago, and his spirit died with him.
I have two hundred thousand Haitian deaths telling me there can be no God, and a single one telling me I must hang on to the possibility that there is. And as illogical as it may seem, the scales aren't entirely tipped towards Haiti.
