Peter Kirk on the Haitian Disaster: Defending the Indefensible

I'm amused most of the time at what it takes to defend the Christian faith. I am even more amused when a defender of the faith lacks the required thinking skills to do so, like Kirk. Remember, he's the one who assures us that it wasn't God's fault for the Haitian disaster. Nothing personal here, but with critical thinking skills like this no wonder he believes. Let's take a look:

Kirk wrote:

But in answer to some of your questions, yes, God could have for example spoken to King Charles X (or for that matter to today's bankers) and asked him to forgive Haiti's debts. Very likely he did speak to him. But the king, as a selfish and sinful man (like all of us), didn't do what God asked him, or would have asked him. God could have forced him to do it, but only by turning people into robots.

I responded:

Notice first the kind of biblical literacy Kirk puts on display. No, by these same standards God could not stop Abraham from killing his son, nor could God convince Moses to go to free the Israelites from slavery, nor could he free those slaves, nor could he convince Gideon to do as he wished, nor Jonah to preach to the people of Nineveh, nor Joseph not divorce Mary, nor convince Paul to stop persecuting Christians. Naw. God just cannot do those things without turning them into robots, ya see. For Christians are conveniently illiterate when it comes to the Bible and they see things in terms of black and white fallacies when defending their faith. Oh, I see it now. God cannot turn people from their ways unless they are made to be robots. Yes. That's the answer. You see, any answer will work when looking for one.

The fact is none of us have very much free will in the first place, so there seems to be little or no moral reason to limit it further when we seek to do horrendous evil. We don't even value free will when it comes to people who do wrong. Why should we? Just lock criminals up in jail, which is a much more humane way of treating bad people than killing them and sending them to hell due to an earthquake.

In the comments Kirk wrote:

You are the one lacking biblical literacy. If you actually read the Bible you will find many people who regularly disobeyed God, and a minority like Abraham, Moses, Gideon etc who you name who obeyed him some of the time. So much for your theory that God makes people obey him.

Remember, I was talking about King Charles X and suggesting how God could have convinced him not to extort so much money from the Haitians. I never said God makes people obey him. I said that as far as Kirk knows on occasion God can get people who are rebellious to change their mind. And if changing King Charles X mind would have saved nearly 170,000 lives then I would think this was an occasion where doing so was warranted. You see, I'm not requiring an all or nothing from God where he keeps people from committing minor offenses. I'm merely pointing out those times where it would seem that he would want to intervene.

Kirk wrote:

And he [God] did show the Haitians that their country was an earthquake zone, through devastating earthquakes in the 18th century. But they went ahead and built unstable buildings there anyway.

[By the way, this seems to be such a nice way of showing the Haitians they live on a fault line rather than simply having a prophet warn them, right?]

I responded:

Kirk probably did not watch the video I linked to earlier. Human beings have always been attracted to live on fault lines around the earth, and this was so before they knew of the devastating consequences of doing so. We want what they give us and since we're risk-taking creatures we do so knowing the dangers. That's how God created us from the very beginning, they say. Still, I wonder if many people who live in these zones around the earth do so because they have faith that nothing disastrous will happen in their lifetimes. That's what faith can get ya. Los Angeles and Istanbul will probably be decimated within the next half century because of earthquakes. In any case, why do these fault lines offer us so much when a perpetual miracle working God could give us what we want without them at all? Why didn't God add wings on our backs to fly to safety when one took place?

Kirk commented:

But I totally agree with you in not believing in "a perpetual miracle working God". I believe in a God who set up the world to run according to laws of nature and who only occasionally intervenes to work in ways which don't seem to follow those laws.

Notice that Kirk gets this wrong (unless the word "not" is a typo). I think that if an omnipotent God exists who created the very laws of nature then by definition he is a perpetual miracle working God. In fact, there is no basis, on theistic grounds, for denying that how the universe operates is because of perpetual miracles. On what grounds would Kirk want to argue that God cannot do this? I'd surely love to see his argument. In any case Kirk offers nothing from the Bible to show us that his view of how god works is the case. Nada. Zip. Zilch. How did he come to this position? In the Biblical and ancient world everything was considered a miracle, including a birth, the sunrise, the rain and so forth, because they thought God was at work constantly in the world. And while they too knew the difference between regular occurring events and stupendous ones like an axe head that could float, God was always seen as intervening in the world. That's also why they had a much more difficult time in determining if something happened when a story teller told his tale. Why? Because these kinds of things, given a God who intervenes regularly in the world, were on the boards, so to speak. If a sincere person said his ass talked then it may very well have done so. In today's world we would not believe his story until he made his ass talk in front of us because we have learned, contrary to this pre-scientific superstitious world, that it takes evidence before we will believe that the natural laws were suspended, violated, or otherwise were nullified.

Kirk commented:

Then you get into flights of fancy like "Why didn't God add wings on our backs ...?" Don't you think God had the right to choose his own design for the creatures he made? What right do you have to question him on such matters?

This question makes me laugh. What right do I have for questioning God? The right he gave me when he created me. He supposedly created me to weigh the evidence before I will believe. He created us to think, to reason, and to come to our own conclusions about what may or may not have happened. So why would he make me the human being that I am and then not grant me what I need to believe? I'm asking whether or not I should believe and he does not give me the evidence and the reasons to believe. Such a duplicitous God he is! I also wonder why, if God exists, he didn't give us a higher threshold of pain, self-regenerating bodies, and gills so we wouldn't drown. He supposedly created me to ask these questions when considering whether or not I can believe he exists. And also comes his defender, Kirk, who says I shouldn't question? That's just dumb.

The responding to Richard H Kirk wrote:

...of course God could have given us wings. That is not the issue. The issue is that he chose not to, for reasons that I will not attempt to explain.”

Perhaps Kirk cannot tell us why God did not do this? That's what I think.

Kirk further comments on Richard H:

Ultimately God makes his own decisions, and we can't understand them completely. But with the faculty of reason he has given us, and from what he chooses to reveal about his thinking, we can come to some partial and incomplete understanding of some of what he does. It is that partial and incomplete understanding that I am tentatively offering here, all the time still saying that this "is not an attempt to answer the question of why God allowed this natural disaster." I don't think I even said that this happened for a reason, so please don't put this thought into my mouth.

My claim is that Kirk has no clue what God's reasons are for allowing the Haitian disaster, when any good parent would not allow such a thing. But this type of argumentation leads us down the rabbit hole of Christian apologetics. This, then that, they argue. This, then that, they respond. I suggest that if Kirk is really responsible as a thinking adult he would want to read books that argue against his faith to see if he hasn't considered something. Can it really be true, knowing how he argues here, that he has considered everything that skeptics say in response to his apologetics? I doubt it very much and so I challenge him to take the DC Challenge.

Kirk wrote;

How about this argument: Suppose you have a teenage child who goes out, with your permission, and commits some minor offense. Are you to blame? Well, you could have locked the young person up at home 24 hours a day, so yes, by the standards you apply to God, that anything you could have stopped is your fault, you are to blame. But is that responsible parenting? No, it is child abuse. Similarly God could lock us up 24 hours a day so we are unable to sin, but that would be to abuse us, not to be a responsible and loving Father.

I responded:

Is this the only other option Kirk sees? Really? The only other option is to lock people up? Is that what good parents do who make their sons and daughters into good people? We know why kids turn bad. Sometimes it's due to faulty parenting and other times because of the influences in their lives. Is Kirk saying God cannot do what good parents do or that he cannot control the influences in our lives? Yes, that's the answer: God is perfectly good, it's just that he's impotent.

But the bottom line is that no parent will give a child more freedom than he's responsible for. Do good parents give young children a razor blade, or a shot of whiskey, or the keys to the car before they can handle this freedom? Of course not. And yes, parents do send their children to their rooms and ground them. They do so to keep their children from doing harm to others and to themselves. We do this with criminals too, but only for the most heinous of crimes not minor offenses anyway.

Kirk wrote:

Then you come to my parenting example, and I am hardly surprised to see that you totally misunderstand my point. You write: "Is Kirk saying God cannot do what good parents do or that he cannot control the influences in our lives? Yes ..." On the contrary, that is the opposite of what I am saying. I am saying that God acts just like good parents in influencing our lives for good - but like even the best of parents he doesn't always succeed in bringing up perfect children. He doesn't do the equivalent of "giv[ing] young children a razor blade, or a shot of whiskey, or the keys to the car before they can handle this freedom". But young children can and do go out and commit "some minor offence" (to quote my original example) without having been given an irresponsible amount of freedom. Indeed they are even quite capable of killing one another with sticks etc they find in the street. So when children do bad things it is not always the parents' fault. And when humans do bad things that doesn't mean it is God's fault.

I'm not all that sure what he's doing here in response to me. I never hinted that God should make us all obey perfectly, if he exists. I merely pointed out how God could have changed the mind of King Charles X, one time, for a very good reason. In any case I've already written on the Nature and Value of Free Will, so I guess I'll just let Kirk respond to that.

Kirk then says:

Sorry, John, but your answers to my points are really dumb. That's what militant atheism does to you.

And later when I hadn't responded in a timely fashion:

“There's not really a lot of point in me debating with people who clearly are not prepared to consider my arguments.”

Wow! Such arrogant ignorance. Is that what he really thinks? Okay then. Respond to this post.

Down the rabbit hole we go. Where we stop, no body knows.

This is why I wrote earlier that Defending the Faith Makes a Person Stupid. It really does! Nothing personal Peter. That's what faith does to you.