Paine, Darwin, and Cruel and Capricious Gods

A disdain for the character and conduct of the deity as promoted by religious believers has always inspired an element of religious unbelief. For some, it is not just that the foundations of religious belief are poorly conceived or inadequately constructed; the deity held up for worship seems to possess a despicable temperament made manifest in deplorable acts. Is a deity that apparently instigates injustice and incites genocide worthy of homage? Most monotheists claim that their God is good and loving, generous and compassionate, deserving of adoration and entitled to praise. But what are unbelievers and sceptics to make of such statements when God is implicated in disastrous events that lead to indiscriminate suffering and widespread misery?

Shortly after the February 2009 Black Saturday fires destroyed vast areas of bushland in Victoria and killed more than 170 people, Pastor Danny Nalliah of the evangelical Christian organisation Catch the Fire Ministries (CTFM) issued a media release. Pastor Nalliah said he “was not surprised by the bushfires due to a dream he had last October relating to consequences of the abortion laws passed in Victoria”. Nalliah told his colleagues:

I saw fire everywhere with flames burning very high and uncontrollably. With this I woke up from my dream with the interpretation as the following words came to me in a flash from the Spirit of God: that His conditional protection has been removed from the nation of Australia, in particular Victoria, for approving the slaughter of innocent children in the womb.

Pastor Nalliah announced that “these bushfires have come as a result of the incendiary abortion laws which decimate life in the womb”. The release concluded with a call to “all Australian Bible-believing God-fearing Christians to repent and call upon the Lord Jesus Christ for His mercy and protection over Australia once again”. Nalliah’s comments drew a sharp response from civil and religious leaders, and a minor furore resulted.

The Sri-Lankan born Pastor Nalliah is no stranger to controversy. Together with Pastor Daniel Scot (who was born in Pakistan), Nalliah was behind the March 2002 “Jihad seminar” which the Islamic Council of Victoria later claimed in proceedings before the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal had violated the state’s Racial and Religious Tolerance Act. The case, which dragged on for more than five years, was simultaneously cited by advocates and critics of the legislation to show why it was enacted and why it needed to be repealed. While media attention remained focused on abstract principles of free speech and whether civil law has the capacity to distinguish strong criticism from flagrant abuse, there was much less comment on the conduct of the two men as Christian leaders and as Australian citizens, and little discussion of their failure to show the respect for Muslims that was consonant with Christian charity and with basic standards of civility.

While it would be easy to dismiss Nalliah’s comments on the Victorian bushfires as yet another instance of intemperate speech from a religious hothead, there was no shortage of support for his “prophetic utterance” on the CTFM website and among like-minded local religious groups professing a strong counter-cultural outlook.

While Nalliah was praised by some supporters for his courage and boldness in pronouncing God’s judgment on fallen Victoria and its iniquitous abortion legislation, others insisted he had been misrepresented and badly treated by the media. In restating Nalliah’s position with added clarity, they contended that Nalliah never said the bushfires represented divine judgment, condemnation or punishment, despite his assertion that the fires were the “result” of the legislation. Black Saturday happened because divine protection had been “removed” from Victoria which was now vulnerable to the works of Satan who, Nalliah’s supporters insisted, was the real cause of the fires and the consequent destruction of property and loss of life. That Nalliah’s dream pre-dated the fires and, from what I can detect, he took no action to warn Victorians of impending physical danger was overlooked by secular and religious commentators.

Whereas non-religious critics were readily dismissed as apostates by Nalliah’s supporters, Christian leaders who objected to his remarks were chastised for spiritual blindness and their neglect of biblical truths. They were, it was alleged, ignoring the warnings of God and failing to read “the signs of the times”. Here was yet another instance, Nalliah’s supporters complained, of mainstream churches reflecting the prevailing secular mood. When asked by the Sydney Morning Herald whether his remarks were “in extreme bad taste”, Nalliah replied: “I must tell people what they need to hear, not what they want to hear.” He had apparently spoken the truth whereas his detractors were, one can only presume, telling lies. It was obvious that Nalliah was not willing to concede any fault on his part and if anyone was offended by his remarks, that was a matter for them and God.

The debate created by Nalliah’s comments turned on what they revealed of divine character and conduct: was God the ultimate cause of the terrible fires and the effective author of widespread loss and pain? If so, and given the indiscriminate nature of the death and destruction wrought by the fire, was it still possible to describe God as loving or even good? The qualification that God might have “removed his protection” from Australia generally and Victoria in particular did not alter the moral force or effect of these questions. Put simply: if God could have halted the bushfires and prevented loss of life but chose not to do so, then God was willing to let men and women, presumably including active and committed Christians, suffer and die as a consequence of attitudes and actions they might not have shared.

I have no doubt that among those Victorians who lost their worldly possessions were individuals deeply troubled by state-sanctioned “abortion on demand” and strongly opposed to the Victorian legislation. And what of the native animals and farm livestock that were burned to death? Were they of no value to God? They played no part in the passage of Victoria’s abortion legislation but died painfully just the same. This was apparently irrelevant to a deity said to be “gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love” (Joel 2:13).

The letters pages of the nation’s newspapers and a range of blogs carried expressions of deep dismay about the character and the conduct of the God proclaimed by Pastor Nalliah. This God appeared to be capricious and cruel, idle in times of crisis and unmoved by human affliction and animal suffering. Even those who opposed the new abortion law denounced Nalliah because they were appalled at his association of the divine will with such a dreadful tragedy.

Although I was dismayed by Nalliah’s complete lack of judgment in issuing such a badly-worded media release when the fires had generated so much raw emotional energy, I was surprised by those who apparently shared Nalliah’s views or felt the need to shield him from criticism. Plainly, a section of the Australian Christian community believes that fear and retribution are integral to a revival of religious belonging and behaving. And yet, these same people evidently could not see how ugly and unlovely was the deity on whose behalf they claimed to speak and whose actions they now sought to defend.

Opposing this kind of odious deity were two unlikely figures for whom 2009 is a year of symbolic importance. The first died 200 years ago; the second was born 200 years ago. Thomas Paine (1737–1809) and Charles Darwin (1809–82) were deeply troubled by the God they encountered in popular religion. Paine was adamant that God did not promote injustice or underwrite oppression; Darwin was convinced that God was not the author of personal misadventure or physical calamities. They resisted attempts to interpret temporal affairs in a manner that implied God was capricious and cruel, and hinted at the ways in which many depictions of God served purely temporal objectives. In this article I want to outline the theological reasoning of Paine and Darwin, to acknowledge their part in changing perceptions of divine character and conduct, and to admonish Pastor Nalliah and his supporters for defaming God, before commending reticence in attributing divine origins to contemporary events.

Tom Paine and Capricious Gods

The English political radical Tom Paine played a leading role in the founding of both the American and French republics. Paine was simultaneously one of the most revered and reviled men in all of Europe as he promoted and then led campaigns against the tyrannies of monarchy and the privileges of aristocracy. He wrote three best-sellers: Common Sense (1776), The Rights of Man (1791) and The Age of Reason (1795). Despite his political achievements, philosophical influence and literary fame, there were only six people at Paine’s funeral. Two centuries on, he is seldom acknowledged.

The shunning of Paine, particularly in the United States where he lived until his death, is an enduring consequence of his alleged atheism. The profession of religious belief has always been an important element of American public life, and politicians are expected not only to profess religious belief but also to practise religious devotion. Although there is a constitutional separation of church and state, an atheist is unlikely ever to occupy the White House. In the past, presidential candidates have felt the need to denounce atheism, which was thought synonymous with various totalitarianisms, especially communism.

Despite his crucial role in the American Revolution, Tom Paine has been the subject of personal vilification. Theodore Roosevelt described him a century ago as a “filthy little atheist”. Paine’s reputation has yet to be rehabilitated. In his inauguration speech earlier this year, Barack Obama paraphrased portions of Paine’s writings and claimed commitment to Paine’s values. But there was no reference to Paine himself.

Although Paine never professed atheism or discouraged religious observance (he feared for the future of the French Republic when religion was prohibited and “the people of France were running headlong into atheism”), his name and memory are synonymous with godlessness and the political baggage that goes with religious unbelief in the United States. This is a shame because Paine agitated for significant religious reforms that most Americans now take for granted.

Baptised according to the rites of the Church of England and instructed formally in its doctrines, raised in a household committed to the Society of Friends and later touched by the spirit of Methodism, Paine had personal experience of religious intolerance and discrimination against dissenting minorities. In the end, he did not side with the Anglicans, the Quakers or the Wesleyans although he absorbed elements of their respective moral teachings and he heeded the call to altruistic living which he thought was common to most religious outlooks.

On several occasions Paine attempted to outline his religious beliefs but thought it “best to postpone it to the latter part of my life”. This became a more pressing task when he was in Paris during the Terror and “death was on every side of me”. In The Age of Reason, Paine stated: “I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life.” He was essentially a Deist although he conceded that Christianity contained “some good moral precepts” and considered Jesus of Nazareth to be “a virtuous and amiable man” who promoted the cause of equality against “the corruptions and avarice of the Jewish priests”. Paine’s God was an animating moral force—“the first cause of all things”—that had little to do with the being portrayed in the Bible or propagated by the clergy.

Although Paine struggled to be clear about what he actually believed, he was definite about what he did not believe. He was not persuaded by claims of divine revelation nor chastened by fears of heavenly retribution. Paine specifically rejected the deity promoted by some Protestant denominations because, he observed, “belief in a cruel god makes a cruel man”. Rejection of a cruel God extended to those religious systems that sanctioned inequality, endorsed discrimination, encouraged persecution and accepted enslavement on the grounds that they allegedly embodied the divine will and purpose.

Paine also refused to accept that instances of genocide, mass deportation and ethnic cleansing recorded in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures could be attributed to God. Such acts were, Paine contended, contrary to the character and conduct of the God who was implicitly disclosed in nature. Paine thought that nature quietly and consistently disclosed the true God and the real divine character. He mused: “the creation we behold is the real and ever-existing Word of God, in which we cannot be deceived. It proclaims his power, it demonstrates his wisdom, it manifests his goodness and beneficence.”

Based on these observations, Paine contended that “every child born into the world must be considered as deriving its existence from God”. This meant that “all men are born equal, and with equal natural rights”. These rights were integral to their individual being and collective interaction. Whatever disputes might exist about the nature of rights, they had a common origin when “man came from the hand of his Maker”. Paine notes that the “genealogy of Christ is traced to Adam” and insisted that the rights of man be traced to the creation of man:

The illuminating and divine principle of the equal rights of man … relates, not only to the living individuals, but to generations of men succeeding each other. Every generation is equal in rights to the generations which preceded it.

Paine thought that “the Mosaic account of the creation, whether taken as divine authority or merely historical, is fully up to this point, the unity or equality of man”. He contended that “the equality of man, so far from being a modern doctrine, is the oldest upon record”.

In his response to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, which was published in November 1790, Paine alleged that modern governments distanced man from his maker and his natural rights by a series of artificial and self-serving barriers that began with the portrayals of the divine character and will.

Paine thought that man had two duties: “his duty to God, which every man must feel; and with respect to his neighbour, to do as he would be done by”. His view of religion was straightforward: “every religion is good that teaches man to be good; and I know of none that instructs him to be bad”.

Paine believed that every man was entitled to worship God as he believed was proper and that no one should interfere with that worship or demand that it take specific forms. In the end, Paine thought, it is a matter for God to decide what worship is to be accepted. He did not think anyone was entitled to judge one religion either right or wrong, because worship involved “man bringing to his Maker the fruits of his heart” and inasmuch as “fruits may differ from each other like the fruits of the earth”, Paine thought God was at liberty “to receive the varied tythes of man’s devotion”.

Paine was, not surprisingly, opposed to officially prescribed religion and state-sponsored churches. He wrote that “all national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me to be no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolise power and profit”. In an obvious attack on the legal Establishment of the Church of England at home and throughout the British colonies, Paine contended that:

every national church or religion has established itself by pretending some special mission from God, communicated to certain individuals … Each of those churches accuses the other of unbelief; and for my own part, I disbelieve them all.

Paine was convinced that no religion could have gained adherents “at first by professing anything that was vicious, cruel, persecuting, or immoral”. In most instances they gained momentum by means of “persuasion, exhortation and example” but with time he thought many “lose their native mildness, and become morose and intolerant”:

persecution is not an original feature in any religion; but it is always the strongly-marked feature of all law-religions, or religions established by law. Take away the law-establishment and every religion reassumes its original benignity.

Paine returned to his underlying theme, “devotion must ever continue sacred to every individual man, as it appears right to him, and Governments do mischief by interfering”. By making religion “a political machine”, he thought “the reality of it is thereby destroyed”. In Paine’s view, religious diversity was inevitable because he “did not believe that any two men, on what are called doctrinal points, think alike”. If there were “national religions”, he thought there would be “national Gods”, which would invariably be coercive figures demanding social and political compliance as well as moral and spiritual conformity. Conversely, promoting godlessness would lead to political chaos and social anarchy.

While I would strongly challenge much in Paine’s account of Christianity and his attitude to the Bible, and think his portrayal of nature as the pre-eminent source of insight into the divine character is highly problematic, I believe Paine did identify the ways in which God was portrayed opportunistically by both church and state.

The God of eighteenth-century Western Europe demanded submission to the dictates of the church and expected subservience to state interests. This God preferred to coerce obedience to a set of convenient social conventions rather than to inspire love as the premise of a restored relationship between heaven and earth.

It is not surprising that Paine objected to depictions of God that rationalised injustice and reinforced inequality. A God who created a world that entrenched privilege and perpetuated disadvantage was not worthy of homage. If God was behind the appointment of monarchs and the installation of aristocrats, then God was despotic and oppressive. Paine did not believe this to be so. Every person was of equal worth to God. Showing favour to one person was never achieved by denying dignity to another. God did not play favourites.

Paine’s long and loud complaints created space for others to take issue with the ways in which the character and conduct of God were used to justify particular kinds of political order and specific forms of social convention. In time, God was freed from the taint of sanctioning totalitarianism and liberated from sacralising inequality. The features of political society were essentially human inventions and, Paine noted, contrary to what he understood to be the divine will mediated through natural processes.

Although he was never thanked, Paine helped expose many of distorted depictions of God promoted by Western Christianity. These falsities were fashioned to undergird selfishness and egoism.

Charles Darwin and Cruel Gods

As Thomas Paine was about to depart this world, Charles Darwin was welcomed into a family whose religious beliefs were similarly complex. Baptised as an infant in the local parish church and schooled at Shrewsbury in the doctrines of Anglicanism, Darwin rubbed shoulders with the Unitarians who featured in his wider family. Unitarianism is a non-dogmatic system of belief derived from a range of sources including science, reason, philosophy and other religions. Believing that God is a unitary being possessing a single personality, Unitarians do not hold to the Trinitarian theology of the Christian churches who regard Jesus of Nazareth as having divine status. To Unitarians, Jesus was a great man and a prophet but no more. Isaac Newton (1642–1727), the first scientist buried in Westminster Abbey, and Joseph Priestley (1733– 1804) held Unitarian beliefs.

Despite being exposed to Unitarian thinking particularly through his grandfather Josiah Wedgwood, Charles’s religious outlook appears initially to have been conventionally Christian and characteristically Anglican. At Cambridge, he became very conversant with the most popular apologetic texts of the period—Evidences of Christianity and Moral Philosophy by Archdeacon William Paley (1743–1805). On graduating from Cambridge, Darwin declared his formal assent to the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, as was required of every Cambridge man.

On joining HMS Beagle as the ship’s naturalist in 1831, Darwin subscribed to the widely held view of a static and unchanging world fashioned according to God’s design. On returning from sea in late 1836, Darwin slowly moved from orthodox Christianity to a form of rational theism, although he was still some way from devising a viable theory of evolution.

His initial drift away from conventional religious belief appears to have been prompted by the doctrine of the eternal torments of hell, a popular theme in contemporary preaching, which he personally found loathsome. Darwin later remarked that he could

hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother and almost all my best friends, will be everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable doctrine.

By late 1838 Darwin had already rejected one of the defining elements of Christian faith in Victorian England. Believing that human beings had improved morally as they developed socially, Darwin said it was “an intolerable thought that he and all other sentient beings are doomed to complete annihilation after such long-continued slow progress”. But, he rather sarcastically added, “to those who fully admit the immortality of the human soul, the destruction of our world will not appear so dreadful”. Darwin thought that:

the highest stage in moral culture at which we can arrive is when we recognise that we ought to control our thoughts … whatever makes any bad action familiar to the mind, renders its performance so much the easier.

But what makes an action reprehensible or bad? Darwin was not altogether clear on this point. He said, “the highest form of religion—the grand idea of God hating sin and loving righteousness—was unknown during primeval times”.

Like Paine, Darwin rejected the notion of special revelation, which meant denying the authority of the Bible. Based on his personal experience of the diverse cultures and belief systems he had encountered during his voyaging in the Beagle, Darwin explained that he had come “to see that the Old Testament was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindoos”, not only because of “its manifestly false history of the world” but “its attributing to God the feelings of a revengeful tyrant”.

The conclusion that nature displayed no evidence of design was his most significant departure from conventional belief. As a drift to non-belief was clearly well advanced before he produced his “Long Essay” on evolution by natural selection in 1844, Darwin’s scientific work served to confirm his unbelief and reinforce his attitude to religion. Subtle shifts in his thoughts about religion and approach to nature are evident in his treatment of the so-called philosophical “proofs” for God’s existence, the teleological (or final causes) argument in particular, over the next decade.

The teleological argument holds that the many evidences of design in the universe disclose the activity of a designer. Archdeacon Paley had explained this argument with the famous “watchmaker” analogy. He described the experience of a traveller who had never seen a watch before finding one lying on the ground. The traveller examines the watch and infers that it was obviously designed. It was not the product of chance. Because the watch has a particular purpose it must have had a designer. This was a feature common to the natural world as well, Paley contended. The subtitle of his best-selling Natural Theology summarised the essence of his argument: “Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature”. The hymn “All Things Bright and Beautiful”, written in 1848 by Cecil Frances Alexander, was the most widely-known attestation to design in nature. The hymn proclaimed that plants and animals were designed by a divine maker who “gave us eyes to see them, and lips that we might tell, how great is God Almighty, who has made all things well”. God was revealed in nature, where the grandeur and majesty of God were on open display.

Darwin noted the philosophical shortcomings in several of these “proofs”, especially the teleological argument, and recruited them to the contrary service of evolutionary theory. Darwin now believed “the old argument from design in Nature, as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me so conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered”. It was not science that discredited the design argument but, Darwin asserted, the insights of philosophy. When elements of the argument appeared to be illogical, Darwin tried to show that the design was scientifically very problematic while evolution by natural selection was a far superior explanation. Darwin contended that the God whose existence might have been established by such arguments was, in any event, unworthy of worship.

Darwin correctly observed that believers in design had in mind a certain kind of God with laudable attributes such as love and kindness. But why would God create a world that was incredibly inefficient in the use of resources and one notable for its in-built cruelty and inherent brutality? His mind returned to “the suffering of millions of lower animals throughout almost endless time”. Darwin thought it more reasonable to argue against design than for it. He did not think that Christians should find this objectionable because the kind of God most people had in mind would not have created the world he and his neighbours inhabited.

In Darwin’s theological reasoning, God had to be separate from this world and remote from its operation to avoid moral condemnation. If the natural world was self-sustaining and not ordered by design, God’s existence did not need to be reconciled with the reality of evil or the plight of those who suffered. The American historian Donald Fleming argued in 1961 that Darwin felt “modern man would rather have senseless suffering than suffering warranted to be intelligible because [it was] willed from on high”. Darwin explained his view to the eminent geologist Sir Charles Lyell:

One more word on “designed laws” and “undesigned results”: I see a bird which I want for food, take my gun and kill it. I do this designedly. An innocent and good man stands under a tree and is killed by flash of lightning. Do you believe (and I really should like to hear) that God designedly killed this man? Many or most persons do believe this; I can’t and don’t. [original emphasis retained]

In effect, Darwin believed he had saved Christians from the difficulty of defending the deity from the charge that God either committed, or was indifferent to, human suffering and worldly evil.

In the same way that Paine had exposed the capricious nature of the divine character in popular perceptions of God in the eighteenth century, Darwin had relieved nineteenth-century Christians of the need to make sense of every aspect of a world containing so much cruelty. Although Darwin, like Paine, was accused of atheism (he was, in fact, a self-declared agnostic), his writings posed many new problems for academic theologians and parochial pastors who were obliged to rethink their accounts of when, how and why God intervened in human affairs and to what extent God had made suffering and pain an integral part of the experience of most life forms. By the turn of the twentieth century, science which had abolished easy answers to complex questions about human origins and destiny, and provided compelling physical explanations for human experiences previously attributed to “spiritual” forces.

Defending God

Contrary to claims that Australians are uninterested in religion, surveys suggest that around three-quarters of all Australians maintain belief in an entity broadly referred to as God. However, many more Australians hold religious beliefs than belong to religious organisations. Why? Apart from individual apathy there is clear evidence that those who claim to speak for God in the public square do not make religious affiliation very attractive.

It is not simply the “dead hand” of institutional religion acting as a disincentive but the depressing pronouncements of religious leaders that many Australians find repellent. In trying to explain devastating natural events, like tsunamis, or terrible human catastrophes, like wars, in terms of the character and purposes of God, suggesting when and where God has blessed and cursed humankind, God is made to appear cruel and capricious. The effect is to place theology in a position where it presumes to explain what its practitioners lack the capacity to understand.

I am persuaded that Pastor Nalliah sincerely believed that God spoke to him in a dream and that he was convinced that Victoria’s abortion legislation was related in some way to the devastation of Black Saturday. And yet, he seems oblivious to the character of the God who emerges from the blur of his dream and the smoke of the fires: an angry and vindictive God from whom most people would prefer to flee. It is a similar God to the one that Paine and Darwin challenged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and it is the same deity that Richard Dawkins and the anti-theists cite as one of the reasons for their continuing hostility to theistic belief.

Regrettably, when this menacing deity is publicly denounced, Nalliah and the like-minded are led to conclude that they must be speaking truthfully and faithfully because this sinful and fallen world reacts so vehemently to their “testimony”. “Prophetic utterances” of this kind are conveniently self-authenticating. While Nalliah is, of course, entitled to act in accordance with the dictates of his conscience and to address those for whom he has immediate pastoral responsibility, he cannot presume the right to speak on behalf of the Christian church to the wider world without accountability. Before claiming a privilege that is bestowed upon very few, he needs to give an explanation of where he derives a mandate to tell anyone “what they need to hear”. I have yet to see any such explanation.

I acknowledge that my argument against Nalliah and his association of God with the Victorian bushfires leaves two compelling questions unanswered. First, why does a good God allow bad things to happen? Second, what is the point of intercessory prayer if it is not effectual? The early theologian and bishop John Chrysostom (347–407) counselled believers to be mindful that their interpretative capacities had limits. The immediate outcome of an event might not disclose its full meaning or enduring significance. In life there are few events which anyone can say with confidence reflect the plans and purposes of God.

The analysis of everyday events should, therefore, be focused on human actions and attitudes rather than on why God did or did not act in accordance with human preferences or wisdom. It is much easier for human beings to give an account of their own actions and attitudes than to presume an understanding of God who is not part of the physical order, does not possess human characteristics, is simultaneously immanent and transcendent, and is not curtailed by time or space. God’s character cannot be described by the usual methods of empirical investigation or depicted in familiar patterns of speech. God’s dealings with human beings are, therefore, beyond human comprehension and description.

It is rather ironic that Danny Nalliah’s organisation is called “Catch the Fire” Ministries, because fires can neither be caught nor grasped. They can only be exhausted or extinguished. By implicating God in Black Saturday, Pastor Nalliah has diminished the numinous aspects of God’s character and negated the mysterious elements of God’s conduct. In so doing he has come perilously close to blasphemy. We can only hope and pray that the nuance and subtlety with which God deals with this world will influence Pastor Nalliah’s future public statements at least for the sake of prospective new believers.

Tom Frame is Director of St Mark’s National Theological Centre. His new book, Losing My Religion: Unbelief in Australia, will be published by the University of NSW Press in September.