“If the bad things that happen to us are the results of bad luck, and not the will of God,” a woman asked me one evening after I had delivered a lecture on my theology, “what makes bad luck happen?” I was stumped for an answer. My instinctive response was that nothing makes bad luck
This is perhaps the philosophical idea which is the key to everything else I am suggesting in this book. Can you accept the idea that some things happen for no reason, that there is randomness in the universe? Some people cannot handle that idea. They look for connections, striving desperately to make sense of all that happens. They convince themselves that God is cruel, or that they are sinners, rather than accept randomness. Sometimes, when they have made sense of ninety percent of everything they know, they let themselves assume that the other ten percent makes sense also, but lies beyond the reach of their understanding. But why do we have to insist on everything being reasonable? Why must everything happen for a specific reason? Why can’t we let the universe have a few rough edges?
I can more or less understand why a man’s mind might suddenly snap, so that he grabs a shotgun and runs out into the street, shooting at strangers. Perhaps he is an army veteran, haunted by memories of things he has seen and done in combat. Perhaps he has encountered more frustration and rejection than he can bear at home and at work. He has been treated like a “nonperson,” someone who does not have to be taken seriously, until his rage boils over and he decides, “I’ll show them that I matter after all.”
To grab a gun and shoot at innocent people is irrational, unreasonable behavior, but I can understand it. What I cannot understand is why Mrs. Smith should be walking on that street at that moment, while Mrs. Brown chooses to step into a shop on a whim and saves her life. Why should Mr. Jones happen to be crossing the street, presenting a perfect target to the mad marksman, while Mr. Green, who never has more than one cup of coffee for breakfast, chooses to linger over a second cup that morning and is still indoors when the shooting starts? The lives of dozens of people will be affected by such trivial, unplanned decisions.
I understand that hot, dry weather, weeks without rain, increases the danger of forest fire, so that a spark, a match, or sunlight focused on a shard of glass, can set a forest ablaze. I understand that the course of that fire will be determined by, among other things, the direction in which the wind blows. But is there a sensible explanation for why wind and weather combine to direct a forest fire on a given day toward certain homes rather than others, trapping some people inside and sparing others? Or is it just a matter of pure luck?
When a man and a woman join in making love, the man’s ejaculate swarms with tens of millions of sperm cells, each one carrying a slightly different set of biologically inherited characteristics. No moral intelligence decides which one of those teeming millions will fertilize a waiting egg. Some of the sperm cells will cause a child to be born with a physical handicap, perhaps a fatal malady. Others will give him not only good health, but superior athletic or musical ability, or creative intelligence. A child’s life will be wholly shaped, the lives of parents and relatives will be deeply affected, by the random determination of that race.
Sometimes many more lives may be affected. Robert and Suzanne Massie, parents of a boy with hemophilia, did what most parents of afflicted children do. They read everything they could about their son’s ailment. They learned that the only son of the last czar of Russia was a hemophiliac, and in Robert’s book Nicholas and Alexandra, he speculated on whether the child’s illness, the result of the random mating of the “wrong” sperm with the “wrong” egg, might have distracted and upset the royal parents and affected their ability to govern, bringing on the Bolshevik Revolution. He suggested that Europe’s most populous nation may have changed its form of government, affecting the lives of everyone in the twentieth century, because of that random genetic occurrence.
Some people will find the hand of God behind everything that happens. I visit a woman in the hospital whose car was run into by a drunken driver running a red light. Her vehicle was totally demolished, but miraculously she escaped with only two cracked ribs and a few superficial cuts from flying glass. She looks up at me from her hospital bed and says, “Now I know there is a God. If I could come out of that alive and in one piece, it must be because He is looking out for me up there.” I smile and keep quiet, running the risk of letting her think that I agree with her (what rabbi would be opposed to belief in God?), because it is not the time or place for a theology seminar. But my mind goes back to a funeral I conducted two weeks earlier, for a young husband and father who died in a
similar drunk-driver collision; and I remember another case, a child killed by a hit-and-run driver while roller-skating; and all the newspaper accounts of lives cut short in automobile accidents. The woman before me may believe that she is alive because God wanted her to survive, and I am not inclined to talk her out of it, but what would she or I say to those other families? That they were less worthy than she, less valuable in God’s sight? That God wanted them to die at that particular time and manner, and did not choose to spare them?
Remember our discussion in chapter 1 of Thornton Wilder’s Bridge of San Luis Rey? When five people fall to their deaths, Brother Juniper investigates and learns that each of the five had recently “put things together” in his life. He is tempted to conclude that the rope bridge’s breaking was not an accident, but an aspect of God’s providence. There are no accidents. But when laws of physics and metal fatigue cause a wing to fall off an airplane, or when human carelessness causes engine failure, so that a plane crashes, killing two hundred people, was it God’s will that those two hundred should chance to be on a doomed plane that day? And if the two hundred and first passenger had a flat tire on the way to the airport and missed the flight, grumbling and cursing his luck as he saw the plane take off without him, was it God’s will that he should live while the others died? If it were, I would have to wonder about what kind of message God was sending us with His apparently arbitrary acts of condemning and saving.
When Martin Luther King, Jr., was killed in April 1968, much was made of the fact that he had passed his peak as a black leader. Many alluded to the speech he gave the night before his death, in which he said that, like Moses, he had “been to the mountaintop and seen the Promised Land,” implying that, like Moses, he would die before he reached it. Rather than accept his death as a senseless tragedy, many, like Wilder’s Brother Juniper, saw evidence that God took Martin Luther King at just the right moment, to spare him the agony of living out his years as a “has-been,” a rejected prophet. I could never accept that line of reasoning. I would like to think that God is concerned, not only with the ego of one black leader, but with the needs of tens of millions of black men, women, and children. It would be hard to explain in what way they were better off for Dr. King’s having been murdered. Why can’t we acknowledge that the assassination was an affront to God, even as it was to us, and a sidetracking of His purposes, rather than strain our imaginations to find evidence of God’s fingerprints on the
murder weapon?
Soldiers in combat fire their weapons at an anonymous, faceless enemy. They know that they cannot let themselves be distracted by thinking that the soldier on the other side may be a nice, decent person with a loving family and a promising career waiting at home. Soldiers understand that a speeding bullet has no conscience, that a falling mortar shell cannot discriminate between those whose death would be a tragedy and those who would never be missed. That is why soldiers develop a certain fatalism about their chances, speaking of the bullet with their name on it, of their number coming up, rather than calculating whether they deserve to die or not. That is why the Army will not send the sole surviving son of a bereaved family into combat, because the Army understands that it cannot rely on God to make things come out fairly, even as the Bible long ago ordered home from the army every man who had just betrothed a wife or built a new home, lest he die in battle and never come to enjoy them. The ancient Israelites, for all their profound faith in God, knew that they could not depend on God to impose a morally acceptable pattern on where the arrows landed.
Let us ask again: Is there always a reason, or do some things just happen at random, for no cause?
“In the beginning,” the Bible tells us, “God created the heaven and the earth. The earth was formless and chaotic, with darkness covering everything.” Then God began to work His creative magic on the chaos, sorting things out, imposing order where there had been randomness before. He separated the light from the darkness, the earth from the sky, the dry land from the sea. This is what it means to create: not to make something out of nothing, but to make order out of chaos. A creative scientist or historian does not make up facts but orders facts; he sees connections between them rather than seeing them as random data. A creative writer does not make up new words but arranges familiar words in patterns which say something fresh to us.
So it was with God, fashioning a world whose overriding principle was orderliness, predictability, in place of the chaos with which He started: regular sunrises and sunsets, regular tides, plants and animals that bore seeds inside them so that they could reproduce themselves, each after its own kind. By the end of the sixth day, God had finished the world He had set out to make, and on the seventh day He rested.
But suppose God didn’t quite finish by closing time on the afternoon of the sixth day? We know today that the world took billions of years to take shape, not six days. The Creation story in Genesis is a very important one and has much to say to us, but its six-day time frame is not meant to be taken literally. Suppose that Creation, the process of replacing chaos with order, were still going on. What would that mean? In the biblical metaphor of the six days of Creation, we would find ourselves somewhere in the middle of Friday afternoon. Man was just created a few “hours” ago. The world is mostly an orderly, predictable place, showing ample evidence of God’s thoroughness and handiwork, but pockets of chaos remain. Most of the time, the events of the universe follow firm natural laws. But every now and then, things happen not contrary to those laws of nature but outside them. Things happen which could just as easily have happened differently.
Even as I write this, the newscasts carry reports of a massive hurricane in the Caribbean. Meteorologists are at a loss to predict whether it will spin out to sea or crash into populated areas of the Texas-Louisiana coastline. The biblical mind saw the earthquake that overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah as God’s way of punishing the people of those cities for their depravities. Some medieval and Victorian thinkers saw the eruption of Vesuvius and the destruction of Pompeii as a way of putting an end to that society’s immorality. Even today, the earthquakes in California are interpreted by some as God’s way of expressing His displeasure with the alleged homosexual excesses of San Francisco or the heterosexual ones of Los Angeles. But most of us today see a hurricane, an earthquake, a volcano as having no conscience. I would not venture to predict the path of a hurricane on the basis of which communities deserve to be lashed and which ones to be spared.
A change of wind direction or the shifting of a tectonic plate can cause a hurricane or earthquake to move toward a populated area instead of out into an uninhabited stretch of land. Why? A random shift in weather patterns causes too much or too little rain over a farming area, and a year’s harvest is destroyed. A drunken driver steers his car over the center line of the highway and collides with the green Chevrolet instead of the red Ford fifty feet farther away. An engine bolt breaks on flight 205 instead of on flight 209, inflicting tragedy on one random group of families rather than another. There is no message in all of that. There is no reason for those particular people to be afflicted rather than
others. These events do not reflect God’s choices. They happen at random, and randomness is another name for chaos, in those corners of the universe where God’s creative light has not yet penetrated. And chaos is evil; not wrong, not malevolent, but evil nonetheless, because by causing tragedies at random, it prevents people from believing in God’s goodness.
I once asked a friend of mine, an accomplished physicist, whether from a scientific perspective the world was becoming a more orderly place, whether randomness was increasing or decreasing with time. He replied by citing the second law of thermodynamics, the law of entropy: Every system left to itself will change in such a way as to approach equilibrium. He explained that this meant the world was changing in the direction of more randomness. Think of a group of marbles in a jar, carefully arranged by size and color. The more you shake the jar, the more that neat arrangement will give way to random distribution, until it will be only a coincidence to find one marble next to another of the same color. This, he said, is what is happening to the world. One hurricane might veer off to sea, sparing the coastal cities, but it would be a mistake to see any evidence of pattern or purpose to that. Over the course of time, some hurricanes will blow harmlessly out to sea, while others will head into populated areas and cause devastation. The longer you keep track of such things, the less of a pattern you will find.
I told him that I had been hoping for a different answer. I had hoped for a scientific equivalent of the first chapter of the Bible, telling me that with every passing “day” the realm of chaos was diminishing, and more of the universe was yielding to the rule of order. He told me that if it made me feel any better, Albert Einstein had the same problem. Einstein was uncomfortable with quantum physics and tried for years to disprove it, because it based itself on the hypothesis of things happening at random. Einstein preferred to believe that “God does not play dice with the cosmos.”
It may be that Einstein and the Book of Genesis are right. A system left to itself may evolve in the direction of randomness. On the other hand, our world may not be a system left to itself. There may in fact be a creative impulse acting on it, the Spirit of God hovering over the dark waters, operating over the course of millennia to bring order out of the chaos. It may yet come to pass that, as “Friday afternoon” of the world’s evolution ticks toward the Great Sabbath which is the End of Days, the impact of random evil will be diminished.
Or it may be that God finished His work of creating eons ago, and left the rest to us. Residual chaos, chance and mischance, things happening for no reason, will continue to be with us, the kind of evil that Milton Steinberg has called “the still unremoved scaffolding of the edifice of God’s creativity.” In that case, we will simply have to learn to live with it, sustained and comforted by the knowledge that the earthquake and the accident, like the murder and the robbery, are not the will of God, but represent that aspect of reality which stands independent of His will, and which angers and saddens God even as it angers and saddens us
