When Good Things Happen to Bad People

2600 words, 12 minute read

“Why do the wicked live on, growing old and increasing in power...their homes safe and free from fear… Their bulls never fail to breed; their cows calve and do not miscarry… They spend their years in prosperity and go down to the grave in peace.” (Job 21: 7 - 13)

Job, a ‘good’ person by all accounts, is the victim of horrendous tragedy, robbing him of children, possessions, social status and good health. Yet, he is less concerned with his own misfortune than he is with the undeserved prosperity of the wicked.

Rabbi Harold Kushner’s 1981 signature work, When Bad Things Happen to Good People, confronted head-on theology’s so-called ‘hard problem’: the Problem of Evil (PoE). But Job is more concerned with the Problem of Good (PoG): Why do good things happen to bad people?

Job’s argument: God may have his reasons for tolerating evil but there’s no justification for rewarding evil doers with progeny, prosperity, longevity, and good health.

(Sidebar: Job would be at home in today’s political climate where folks are less concerned with eradicating poverty (14% of the US population) or ameliorating ‘wage slavery’ (85%) than they are with punishing the remaining 1%.)

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You’ve heard it 100 times before and you’ve probably said it yourself, or at least thought it, a time or two: How can an all-powerful and all-good God cause, permit, tolerate or condone suffering? Surveys show that non-believers cite PoE as their #1 reason for rejecting Judeo-Christianity. Who can blame them?

The Buddha tells us that relieving suffering is the greatest good. 2500 years later, Mother Theresa personified that ethic in a Christian ministry. If God is the Summum Bonum, he should want to do the greatest good, i.e. relieve suffering; and if God is omnipotent, he should have the power to eradicate evil, root and branch. So why doesn’t he? Christians pray, “Deliver us from evil!” So do it already!

Framed this way, the argument is virtually irrefutable. Since Plato, philosophers and theologians have tried to reconcile the suffering world with a benevolent God. We’ve been told that Adam and Eve are to blame, or that suffering is just punishment for sin, personal or collective, but we are not convinced!

Before we “abandon all hope” (Dante) and “join the Rosicrucians” (Leonard Cohen)…or the nihilists, we need to look more deeply into the construction of the argument itself. Are there hidden assumptions that are throwing us off the scent? Or probative data that we are not considering?

To begin with, PoE (as framed above) ignores the Bible’s very first verse: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth…” (Genesis 1: 1) The operative word is created. To ‘create’ something is to endow it with being and being requires freedom, agency, and self-determination. God created the heavens and the earth - aka endowed them with being.

The greatest theological fallacy is that God ‘creates the world’ the same way we ‘make the things’ that populate that world, that he plans events like we plan vacations (Travelocity). In fact, we create nothing (we bring nothing into being) and we enshrine that fact in our Physics: the conservation of mass/energy and information. The things we make do not enjoy freedom, they do not have agency independent of us, and they do not determine their own destinies. (Works of art constitute a hybrid class which we ill not be able to explore in this essay.)

We imagine, design, assemble, build, and manufacture; our paradigms are Legos and Minecraft. God creates! We arrange deck chairs; God ‘builds’ boats; but, once built, God’s boat sets its own course. Once the bottle of Dom has smashed across the bow, God’s job is done…well done!

Those who claim that God plans, dictates and controls events in the world ignore scripture: “…God created…” They recast God as architect, general contractor, site foreman, and shop steward. But what use has God for Legos (ordered elements) when he himself is logos (order per se)? 

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According to Genesis, God created the world in 6 stages (‘days’)…and “on the seventh day he rested from all his work.” (Genesis 2: 2) Obviously, we are living in God’s ‘rest period’. But God is not lazy; his rest is not a function of uncaring sloth. God respects his creation, the process of creation per se, and ultimately himself as creator. Creation is an act of love and only free agents are capable of a loving relationship.

While God does not compromise the freedom, agency, or self-determination of the created world, he is far from care-less. He has carefully structured the world to ensure that it can (and ultimately will) evolve toward an Omega point characterized by what we refer to as The Good.

The apostle John summed this up in the opening verses of his Gospel: “In the beginning was the logos and the logos was with God and the logos was God... Through him (logos) all things come to be and without him nothing that comes to be comes to be. In him was life and that life was the light of the world. The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.” (John 1: 1-5)

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In addition, God’s creative process is much different from our own. God does not ‘make be’, he ‘lets be’ (light). God does not manufacture; he gathers and separates (water and land). God does not design; he evaluates. He sees what is good and confirms it and makes that confirmation available to the world (revelation). Thus God plays a determinative role in the world without compromising the absolute freedom of any event, any agent, in that world.

This is not as strange as it sounds. We do the same thing! Anthropologists aim to study cultures without disrupting them. Trekkies honor the Prime Directive.  Quantum mechanics probe the behavior of ultra-sensitive particles without disturbing their superposition. A certain disreputable auto mechanic (you know who you are) generated a 4 figure repair bill without ever opening the hood of my car.

Alpha and Omega reflect (and embody) God’s nature: they are fixed points. Everything in between is radically free. We know where we are and we know where we’re going (Heisenberg notwithstanding), but how we get there is entirely up to us, all of us: humans, bacteria, molecules, and quarks.

The ontological ‘tilt’ toward Omega does not compromise the freedom of the created world; it is part of what Sartre calls its facticity. It is reflected in what cosmologists call ‘fine tuning’, what philosophers call ‘boundary conditions’. Events themselves are causa sui, sui generis, and pro se. Spacetime is a feature of the created world. It’s the inert stage on which agency struts its stuff. Alpha and Omega transcend spacetime.

Imagine you live on a 2 dimensional manifold which happens to be the surface of a sphere. You are free to move across the manifold in any direction you choose but because the curvature of the manifold is convex, your trajectory will inevitable describe a circle.

We live in an amped up version of Robert Frost’s NH wood (The Road Less Traveled). Before us, we have an Archimedean plane and we are free to set off in any direction across that plane; we are free to trace any trajectory, no matter how convoluted and inefficient. Just think of your own life history, its unexpected and unaccountable twists and turns, the chance events that sent you off on totally unplanned and often unwanted tangents.

But the topology of the Archimedean plane is Riemannian: all lines converge; all roads lead to Rome (home). What we call ‘coincidence’ is a manifestation of this non-Euclidean topology: trajectories converge, lines intersect! It is fashionable today to say that there is no such thing as coincidence. Concealed in that meme is an ‘idolatry of causality’. But in fact, as David Hume demonstrated, all events are coincidences.

In the sense that any event is ever ‘determined’, it is over-determined (Marx); it is the intersection of multiple trajectories, none of which is determinative by itself. Events are defined by the intersection of multiple trajectories. Ingmar Bergman captured this sentiment in his iconic film, Wild Strawberries: “I began to see a curious pattern taking shape in this chain of unpredicted, entangled events.” (7 years before Bell’s Theorem)

Perhaps the Swedish Bergman was drawing on Norse mythology: Three Norns , Shakespeare’s witches in Macbeth, weave the fate of the universe from three strands of rope. In some versions, events are represented as knots. It’s fitting: knots are recursive, the rope doubles back on itself. Events emerge as ‘islands in the stream’. (Dolly Parton, Heraclitus).

Einstein said that the most important thing about the world is that it has a slight bias toward the Good. As usual, he was right! In my view, cosmologies that don’t recognize that bias inevitably lead to nihilism and despair.

The implications of the world’s ‘topological tilt’ are unexpectedly pervasive and profound; they compound like bank interest…or (note to self) credit card debt. Over indefinite time, a quantum (Planck scale) tilt at Alpha (Big Bang) evolves to envelop the spatiotemporal universe, reducing it to a singularity at Omega (Heat Death). Thanks to this tilt, the Universe itself is recursive; it’s also a knot…and therefore an event in its own right.

Events do not have consequences, as we supposed, but they do have repercussions. Whether events themselves are good, bad, or indifferent, the repercussions may be unaccountably good. It is the bias of the Universe toward The Good that makes this possible.

Events define trajectories and because even ‘parallel’ trajectories converge, trajectories intersect more surely and more frequently than they would in a flat, Euclidean space. These intersections constitute what we call ‘society’ (family, culture, civilization) and ‘enduring objects’ (bricks and mortar). (Whitehead)

Life itself is serendipitous; it evolved only once in the 4.5 billion year history of Planet Earth…yet it has endured. A miracle? Yes and no. It is certainly improbable and fortuitous, but it does not reflect an intervention by God in the material world; it was enabled by logos, the ‘tilt in the topos’.  

Where does this leave us? For example, does prayer make sense in such a world? As a strategy to capture God’s attention or change his mind, no! But as a way to align your will with his, reinforcing and perhaps amplifying the primal tilt, most definitely!

The Book of Psalms is Judeo-Christianity’s prayer book; the psalms conform the will of the prayerful to God’s values. Since most of what we do is done unconsciously, such habitual conformation is essential.

And where is God in all this? Reduced to a supporting role in the cosmic drama? By no means! It is solely because of God that there is something rather than nothing and that that something manifests The Good. The fact that there is ‘good’ in the world and that we can perceive it – that is the evidence that proves, empirically, not just logically, the existence of God.

Of course, secular humanists argue that there can be Good without God ; but God is The Good so the occurrence of good is prima facie evidence that God exists; our recognition of good is Faith. When we say ‘God’ we merely personify The Good. Good is what God is, so if there’s Good, there’s God (QED). We echo St. Dallan, a medieval Irish poet: “Naught is all else to me save that thou art!” Nailed it. I mean, what else could possibly be anything other than naught?

In recent centuries, even theologians have tended to build fences around God’s agency: whether it’s 18^thcentury Deism or 19^th century ‘God of the Gaps’, divinity has been marginalized. Far from joining in this trend, AT places God at the center of all things (Shekinah) and at the apex of everything.

People who speak of ‘science or religion’ or even ‘science and religion’ are missing the point entirely. There is no corner of human existence and no avenue of human inquiry that is not thoroughly suffused with divinity. Science is religion…and religion science. We are merely restoring to God the status enjoyed during the times of Abraham (c. 2000 BCE), the Judges (c. 1000 BCE), Jesus (c. 0 CE), and Pope Sylvester II (c. 1000 CE).

So how is the existence of God manifest in today’s world? Check out our title. God brings greater good out of what is lesser good. Bad things happen to good people (Kushner) because the created world (all of it, not just human beings) consists solely of free agents and free agents do not always make optimal choices. Good things happen to bad people (above) because God is no respecter of persons. The primal bias benefits every entity, the good, the bad, the ugly, and the inanimate.

Testimony for this is provided by God himself in the Book of Job: “Who (else) cleaves a downpour's channel and a path for the thunderstorm to rain down on land without people, on wilderness with no human in it, drenching utter wasteland and sprouting grassy growth?” (Job 38: 25 - 27) and confirmed by God’s 20^thcentury, anti-clerical alter-ego, James Joyce: “Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland…falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling…upon all the living and the dead.” (Dubliners)

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St. Paul wrote, “I do not do the good I want to do but the evil I hate to do – that I do.” (Romans 7: 19) He was, of course, correct and anyone of us could say the same. But this is not the whole story. Paul might have added, “but in spite of that, much happens that is good.” We do not do the good we intend but God has ensured that the good he intended from the moment of creation (Big Bang) eventually occurs (without compromising the freedom of any agent).

The much maligned Leibniz (c. 1700) has outraged generations with his contention that we live in the best of all possible worlds. How could a world rife with tornadoes, earthquakes, and conflagration, where babies die of cancer, children die of starvation, adults die by the hands of others (war), and seniors routinely die incompetent, incontinent and in pain possibly be as good as it gets? Like Paul, Leibniz leaves the thought unfinished: Any world created by God is as good ab initio as any world can be…consistent with the absolute freedom of all its agents.   

“Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil for you are by my side…surely goodness and kindness follow me all the days of my life and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.” (Psalm 23: 4, 6) That’s us…lurking in the shadows, terrified but trusting. Deo gratia.