Monday 2 February 2015

Why Stephen Fry Is Right, and I Love God.

Stephen Fry recently said some really powerful things in an interview about what he would say to God if he met him – he talks about suffering and injustice, especially for children, he refers to the East African Loa Loa eye-worm which eats children’s eyes and blinds them, and he imagines himself asking God, “How dare you?” He says, “It’s not right. It’s utterly, utterly evil.”

And I think that he’s right. I think that the reason that the video has been so widely shared and has provoked such a huge response of support and agreement is that everyone knows deep down, and feels really strongly, that it’s not right. It’s not right. Bone cancer in children is not right. It is utterly, utterly evil. So part of what I want to say is that I completely agree with that.

There’s just a couple of things I want to share about how I feel about it as a Christian; as someone who believes in Jesus and believes that he is God – the creator of the world revealing himself as a human being. Two things.

One is that it made me think of something I heard a man say recently, when he was talking about how he became a Christian. He was brought up atheist, but when he was in his twenties his father died suddenly aged 52. And he said something like this:

“It really made me look up and think about the world for the first time. And I thought, there’s really two ways the world might be – either it’s all just a product of matter plus time plus chance, you know, the sort of normal, no-God universe; or there’s a God who created it all. And I felt like the way I was feeling about my dad, the sorrow of it, didn’t seem to make sense in the no-God universe, if we were all just stuff.”

He was saying that his sense of grief about his father seemed to him like something that did not fit in a universe that was purely the product of time and chance and evolutionary process. And as I watch Stephen Fry speaking it seems to me like he’s really expressing a deep feeling that we all have – this profound sense of injustice, that the world is not as it should be – and that strangely, that feeling doesn’t quite fit in a world where there is no God. I think we are heartbroken and outraged by suffering because it is actually wrong. It is not right. We know, deep within us, that there is good and there is evil, and that the Loa Loa worm, and Auschwitz, are evil. And I just want to suggest, as gently as I can, that it seems to me, we have that feeling because good and evil are real things. There is a way that the world should be and a way it shouldn’t be, and if everything is just matter plus time plus chance, then that doesn’t really make sense. If that’s all it is, then this is just the way things are. There can be no ‘ought’. But if there is a God, and there is right and wrong, there is what ‘ought’ to be; then it makes sense that our hearts would hate pain, and wrong, and injustice, and suffering.

And the second thing I want to say is that I don’t believe in the God that Stephen Fry hates. If I met the God he describes, I hope I’d have the courage to say what he says too. But I think that God isn’t like that. I think God isn’t like that because he died on a cross. A guy called Pete Greig puts it much better than I could:

“The Nobel Laureate writer Elie Wiesel recollects a terrible moment in Auschwitz when he saw a child hung from the gallows. For more than half an hour the boy writhed, his body not yet heavy enough to finish the job quickly. Forced to watch this atrocity one observer cried:

‘Where is God? Where is God now?’ But another person pointed to the child’s corpse and wept: ‘There he is, hanging on the gallows’.

This is the tragedy at the heart of Christian faith: the belief that God suffered with us, like us and for us. That God is not distant, malignant or dispassionate. The cross, if it means anything at all, means that he identifies with us in our suffering, and that he is not yet fully in control. Evil things happen which God does not want or intend. When a woman is raped, this is not the will of God. When a child is sold into slavery, God is not the perpetrator but the victim.”


Stephen Fry talks about how he would prefer the Greek gods, because they admit to being human and capricious, whereas the Christian God presents himself as all-seeing and all-wise and so on. I see what he means, but I think that in the bible, and in Jesus, God presents himself not as a kind of ultimate dictator who watches approvingly over every agony, but as a God who to a very serious extent has allowed the world to be not what he wants it to be, and feels the pain of that. There are loads of reasons for him doing that, and it would make this blog way too long to go through them, but the most important thing is that in Jesus we see God himself not as the perpetrator but becoming the victim with us. And for us.

When Jesus saw his friend Mary after her brother had died, he wept. God weeps. And after I’d watched the video I started to imagine, what if Stephen Fry really did get to say that to God, to stand before Jesus and say those words? And I am sure that if he did, when he’d said his piece and he looked up, he would see tears in Jesus’ eyes. And he would see the wounds in Jesus’ hands. I think this is why for so many people who are oppressed, whose lives have been devastated by suffering, Jesus makes sense.

And I also think he makes sense to people because he isn’t just sympathetic but then powerless to help. He is the true source of hope. He came back from the dead, and he tells us that we are right that injustice and suffering and pain are wrong, that they are not the way things should be, and he says to us – Look. I was dead, but now I am alive, and it will not be this way forever. Evil will not prevail forever, cancer will not exist forever and one day death itself will die. There will be no more tears.

Walter Wink once said, ‘Against some images of God, the revolt of atheism is an act of pure religion.’ So what I’m saying is, Stephen Fry is so, so right. We are right to hate evil, and injustice, and pain. But I don’t believe he’s right about what God is like. If God were like he thinks he is, I would hate him too; but I think God is revealed in Jesus, who wept, and died, and rose, and so I love him.




You can watch the original interview here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-suvkwNYSQo#t=35

3 comments:

  1. This is an interesting post, and has some good points that I hadn't thought of, theres just a couple of things I still don't understand.

    Firstly the Loa Loa worm is not evil. Something can only be evil if it understands the consequences. A lion is not evil for killing a gazelle, it's just following its instincts as an animal, the worm in itself is just living it's life and has no concept of the suffering it has caused. Similarly bone cancer, and all diseases are random mutations or products of other living things. None of these are evil. Awful, horrible, painful yes but malicious? Evil? No.

    So even if we accept that evil can exist in this world created by God, (which is another debate for another post.) that doesn't explain why disease and parasitic worms do. According to your bible, God created the animals, therefore God CHOSE to create the Loa Loa worm with that life cycle, and the bacteria/viruses that cause disease in the garden of eden before anyone even looked at any forbidden fruit. This is not the product of any earthly evil, you cannot suggest that this was anything but maliciousness on Gods part, or chance and evolution.

    Secondly regarding the 'sense of good and evil' you describe; that comes from empathy, and it's frankly insulting to say we need a divine creator to be empathetic toward other humans. Empathy is a product of consciousness and the fact we are social creatures who evolved to live in a community.

    If we look at the animal kingdom, social creatures such as dolphins will help other animals in a way that we would perceive as 'moral,' because it is beneficial to them to live in pods with others. Meanwhile lions will kill all offspring of another lion if he takes over his pride to ensure only the genes of the strongest lions are passed on. This is clear evidence that morality is not God given but evolved where beneficial, and therefore it makes perfect sense that we have this sense of right and wrong in a universe created by chance.

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    1. Hi! Thank you for the comment, and if you'd like to stop being anonymous and chat about it I would love to.

      Incase we can't do that, just a quick response. As I've said in a reply above, I don't believe in a chronological Perfect-world; then humans; then sin; then fall; then bad world because we do bad things narrative. Or to be more precise, I believe what that narrative tells us about responsibility and causation is true, but that it is not a literally accurate chronology.

      So what I mean is, the story of Genesis goes like this (I'll tell it in infuriatingly childish language): God creates a world which is good. No evil, no pain, no Loa Loa eye worm. God finishes this creation with human kind, created in his image with the capacity to love, which necessarily involves the capacity to not-love, the freedom to act in one way or another, to love or not love. Humankind chooses to not love God back. This breaks the world. Firstly it breaks humans' relationship with God. It also breaks humans' relationship with each other. It also breaks humans' relationship to the creation, the world, and breaks that world itself. From then on people die, which means people suffer, sometimes as the result of the brokenness of their relationships with each other, sometimes as the result of the brokenness of the world itself and their relationship to it.

      I don't beleive that in Genesis God is seeking to give us a chronological account of how the universe came into existence, but I think he is trying to give us an account of why the world is as it is. So the argument of the bible the whole way through is, 'God doesn't want the world to be like this - he doesn't want you to hurt each other and he doesn't want the creation to be broken and hurt you - but he gave people freedom to love or not love, and fundamentally connected to that freedom and people's decision to not love him is the brokenness of the world (as a whole, and people as a whole, we're really not talking 'God sent that hurricane because America has turned its back on him' here).

      I personally am convinced by the science behind the idea of evolution, I think that happened, so I think there was suffering and death in the creation long before humans came into existence. But I think the bible isn't trying to claim otherwise. It's not saying Loa Loa worms are evil because it's their fault, nor is it claiming that they didn't exist before the exact moment at which people sinned and stuff went wrong. But it is saying that God would not wish them to be as they are, but that they, and the rest of the suffering and brokenness that is now part of the world, is causally connected to humanity's freedom, and our choosing to not love God.

      I don't expect you to find this account of the causality convincing, there's no reason to believe it if you have no reason to trust the biblical account. All I want to say is that it is coherent, it does make sense of God being loving and the world being as it is. And I believe it not cos i love it as an idea, but because I am convinced by the evidence - both historically and what I've seen in my life and the lives of others - that Jesus is real, and he rose from the dead.

      Hope that helps, realise this is way too long for this sort of thing, please do get in touch if you want to chat further!

      Thanks,
      Mike

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