There is a signal moment in Joseph Heller's novel Catch-22, when his anti-hero Yossarian is having an argument with his mistress, Lieutenant Scheisskopf's wife. The insanity of war setting the context, they are disputing which of them is the better atheist. He throws at her all the standard arguments, which boil down to the dilemma thateither God created and/or condones evil (making God a rather unsavory character) or else, were God to exist, he would choose to do something to avert it. Her reply: "But the God I don't believe in is a good God, a just God, a merciful God."

The question at the back of their argument is an old philosophical chestnut: If God is good, he is not God; if God is God, he is not good. This dilemma has been in the air a lot lately. As if December's tsunami and Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma weren't enough, this past month alone simultaneously saw hundreds killed and entire Guatemalan towns swallowed in mudslides from Hurricane Stan, and the horrific South Asian earthquake that killed tens of thousands in the Kashmir region of Pakistan and India. And ever looming on the horizon, there is the menacing specter of an avian flu pandemic.

How can a good God allow such horrible things to happen? Actually, the question has been around as long as people have been talking about a god. Technically, it's called the "theodicy" problem, or the problem of "justify(ing) the ways of God to men," as the poet John Milton phrased it in Paradise Lost, his own 10,565-line stab at an answer. It has been, if not exactly a trick question, nonetheless a tricky one, on exams in college philosophy and theology classes for centuries. And most students, like most philosophers and theologians, get about as far with it as Heller's fictional characters did.

These kinds of answers never satisfy because - as specialists in religion will be the first ones to tell you - the question itself is a bad question, assuming far more black and white than this morally gray universe of ours affords. That we keep asking it ultimately tells us more about ourselves than about God because ideas about God are, at base, ideas about power.

On that score, in the current political climate, the theodicy question might indeed be relevant. The more absolute one's notion of power is, the more polarized will be one's view of the "battle" between good and evil in the world, with the correlative assumption that God is either with us or against us.

So, for example, after9/11, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson commiserated about God's withdrawing his protection from the USA because of the evil wrought here by feminists, gays and political liberals. Shortly thereafter, fundamentalist Army Lt. Gen. William Boykin gained notoriety preaching to soldiers about how Muslims worship a false and evil god. Meanwhile, President Bush proclaimed a new crusade, declaring that anyone who is not with the United States is in league with the terrorists (a.k.a. Satan, Dark Prince of the Axis of Evil).

Pundits deduced that the 2004 presidential election was won on the issue of "moral values" (code for the divisive debates over abortion and gay marriage), and on the idea of strength of leadership - even if that leadership was heading in the wrong direction (better to be strong, though wrong). If any of these assertions were to be dropped into an essay question, my undergraduate students would know precisely how to dismantle them, based upon their comprehension - historical as well as philosophical - of how futile and shortsighted the oppositional thinking that undergirds the theodicy question is in the first place.

It is only worth asking where God fits into the greater scheme of things if it spurs people to re-examine their ideas about power and about the way a simplistic kind of religious thinking, and the language that goes with it, have inserted themselves into our political and social discourse. After all, if it takes an Intelligent Designer to account for tsunamis and Katrinas, then it's clear that that Designer has some very bad hair days.

More to the point might be George Burns' cunning revelation to John Denver in the first Oh, God! film, that religion of that simple-minded sort is not really God's line of work.

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