Each mass shooting brings the problem of evil once again into the media spotlight. While the specifics change with each horrible incident, the basic question remains the same: why does God allow evil to occur? I have considered this matter in various other essays, but here I will look back at what two prominent members of America’s religious right said back in 2012 as their remarks are still relevant. As I have noted in another essay on gun violence, while the names change, almost nothing else does.
Is response to the killings at Sandy Hook, former governor and one time presidential contender Michael Huckabee said “We ask why there’s violence in our schools but we’ve systematically removed God from our schools. Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage because we’ve made it a place where we don’t want to talk about eternity, life, what responsibility means, accountability.”
While Huckabee’s remark was taken as claiming God allowed the massacre because American public schools do not have religious activities (such as prayer) and religious education (as opposed to teaching about religion), there is an alternative interpretation. Rather than claiming that God was being spiteful and allowed children to be slaughtered because He was experiencing divine anger, Huckabee might have meant that the killings at schools occur because public schools failed to offer the right religious education and experience. One could argue that if people received the correct religious education in public schools, then such killings would be less likely to occur.
The idea that the correct moral education reduces bad behavior was developed extensively in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. As such, if Huckabee claimed school shootings are caused by a failure of moral education, this has some degree of plausibility. Of course, whether putting Christianity into public schools would reduce violence in America is another question. While people like Huckabee claim that society has grown worse as it has allegedly “removed God”, Steven Pinker argued in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature that violence has been on the decline. Crime statistics also show a reduction in violent crime, although there was an upward trend after the valley of the last pandemic. While correlation is causation, this does raise an interesting question especially since Thomas Hobbes noted that a major cause of violence is disputes over religion.
Turning back to the problem of evil, Huckabee’s explanation did not address this concern effectively. While it might explain why people do bad things, it does not explain why God would have allowed the slaughter at Sandy Hook. Bryan Fischer did, however, take this on directly.
Speaking about Sandy Hook, Bryan Fischer said “And I think God would say to us, ‘Hey, I’ll be glad to protect your children, but you’ve got to invite me back into your world first. I’m not going to go where I’m not wanted. I am a gentlemen.”
Fischer’s explanation was straightforward: God is too polite to go where He is not invited and hence, He allowed the slaughter of children. This is an odd but interesting claim, especially since it makes God a bit like a vampire: He must be invited in on Fischer’s view.
On the face of it, Fischer seemed to claim that God’s etiquette trumps His morality so that He would allow evil rather than be impolite. This is an implausible claim as can be shown with an analogy. Suppose I was accustomed to stopping by a friend’s house to get a drink from his garden hose while on my summer runs. But then his wife gets the house during the divorce. While she does not dislike me, she asks me to no longer use the hose. Suppose I am running by one day and she and her daughter are being attacked in her backyard. While I could easily defeat the attacker and save them, I just keep running because I am no longer invited to use the hose. That would be morally wrong of me—I should at least do something. Also, if my reason for not acting is that I am not invited, then there are two obvious responses. First, it is intuitively plausible that my moral duty to help people in danger outweighs my moral duty to not be impolite. Second, it seems reasonable that my friend’s ex-wife and daughter would be happy to invite me to help them. Obviously, since I am a decent person, I would rush to help them. If God is at least as good as me, He would do the same. Also, God has nothing to worry about—the attacker would pose no threat to Him. God is, after all, supposed to be omnipotent.
Another point of interest is that Fischer suggests God would be glad to protect children if He were invited back. If He were right about this, this would seem to indicate that God would protect children in such circumstances. However, he seems to be exceptionally wrong about this. After all, God has allowed people of faith to die. He even has allowed children to be murdered in His churches. As such, the idea that God would protect children if we only asked him seems to be absurd. People have obviously asked and God has done nothing.
Of course, it could be countered that people have failed to properly invite God—that is, God would have helped if they had asked in the right way. Going back to the analogy given above, this would be like me running past by friend’s ex-wife and daughter and refusing to stop because their cries for help were not worded properly or otherwise defective. However, I would obviously help them regardless of how they requested aid—that is what a decent person would do. As noted above, presumably God is at least as good as I am, so if I would help regardless of the wording of the invite, so would God.
What is striking is that some Trump supporters claimed that God saved Trump from an assassination attempt. But they could not, obviously, claim that God saved Charlie Kirk from the assassination attempt that killed him. Atheists would argue that God was not involved in either incident because He does not exist. But those who believe that God intervenes must struggle to provide an explanation as to why God allows the slaughter of children and the murder of Charlie Kirk while He saved Trump.
Overall, Huckabee and Fischer did not give an adequate response to the question of why God allowed the slaughter to occur. To be fair and balanced, this is unsurprising as no one has solved the problem of evil. But the problem remains.
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