The Atheism of "God's Will"

Have you ever, in the face of tragedy or some sad circumstance, heard someone say, almost casually, perhaps even stoically, "we just have to accept that it's God's will"? Apparently there are atheists out there who have rejected God in part because they've had such an experience, an experience which instantly and with clarity caused them to deny any such notion as manifestly absurd. My sister just died of an agonizing bout of cancer, and for no apparent reason, and "this is God's will?" You can almost instinctually respond, along with our now-atheist, to hell with such a god. Indeed, but there's more than one way to put it, and more than one way to go from there.

First of all, we have to recognize that such a reaction, if indeed legitmate (not just a rationalization, or worse, a fabrication), stems from the conviction that human beings really are precious, and that suffering and death really are tragedies. But this all implies that, therefore, there is a real good as the source of our conviction; otherwise it's all in our head, the logic of which means the loved who just died of cancer really wasn't precious, and her death really wasn't a tragedy -- the universe could just as well have caused one to delight in such circumstances. In other words, to reject God is to reject any meaning (meaning is about something else), which led to the rejection of God in the first place.

But more to the point, I think that the person who utters the bit about "God's will" implicitly has in mind, or at least he should, some things which qualify his statement, and which are evidently lost on our now-atheist hearers. For example, can anyone really imagine that our unwitting offender does not have in mind something like Romans 8: "18 For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us...28 And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose"?

You see, it is only in the face of an atheistic assumption in the first place that tragedy and human worth cannot be taken up and viewed in a broader context, which includes the reward of eternal joy to which "the sufferings of this present time" cannot be compared. The now-atheist all along assumed what C.S. Lewis called "a materialist ethic, a belief that death and pain are the greatest evils." In short, the now-atheist is reacting to his own limited assumptions. But these assumptions, unfortunately, are found in certain Christian worldviews as well.

Protestant Christians are often incurable Cartesians. They'll appeal, for instance, to God as the clock maker of the universe; this appeal is in perfect keeping with a Cartesian denial of secondary causes, or substances, in the philosophical sense (see the blog entry before the present one). In such a view it logically follows that God directly acts on the world, and thus is the direct cause of pain and suffering. Let me contrast this to the Catholic worldview, which is, quite literally, the common sense worldview.

Whenever I perceive something with my senses, I then understand it with my intellect, or what we'll loosely call mind. For instance, my senses tell me there's something round, and red, but it's my mind that tells me what that something is; we cannot say, there's a red, or there's a round -- those are incomplete sentences. There must be a noun, thus our intellects furnish us with an abstract concept, so that we can say there is a red apple, there is a round apple; or, at it's most indefinte, there is a red thing, or a round thing. Our minds know that apple abstractly, but what they know abstractly is called substance.

Substance is that in which the qualities (accidents, like redness and roundness) we perceive inhere. In Catholic philosophy, God has created substances, or natures, to act on their own. He sustains them in existence, but they directly cause the effects, which we then perceive in the sense world. What this means, simply put, is that God doesn't cause pain and suffering, He allows it through secondary causes, which ultimately has it's origin in human wills. God's original will, His 'antecedent will', which did not depend on the existence of pain and suffering, became His permissive, or 'consequent will', once man chose to take things into his own hands, i.e., after the fall.

In sum, therefore, the sentiment which caused us to find contempt in ascribing God's will to real pain and suffering of real people we know, and then to utter, to hell with such a god, is really a sentiment not directed at the true, living God, the God of Jesus Christ, but at certain false understandings of God; understandings which would have us a) reject His existence in the first place, consequently rejecting real human dignity, and b) reject our common sense in favor of idealism, and, consequently, accept a God of pure will, that is, whim, not one of reason and will. To put it bluntly, the rational foundations of our sentiment, logically expressed, should cause the now-atheist to say, rather, to hell with my now-atheism and any form of Christianity which leads me to it.