Angina Monologue 12

His Majesty was almost creepily cheerful this morning.

All right. His Majesty is creepy pretty much any time he isn’t angry. There’s something about anger that brings out the authentic Palpatine.

Fortunately, he’s angry much of the time. It reminds me of the black humor in one of the songs from one of my favorite musicals:

You know he has a temper,
He’ll beat you every night.
But only when he’s sober,
So you’re all right.

Fiddler on the Roof is a great musical, in part, I think, because it so effectively and sympathetically opens up a different culture. I feel the same way about some of the novels of Chaim Potok, such as The Chosen and My Name is Asher Lev. The latter is one of the most wrenching novels I have read. I think a similar thing is true of T.H. White’s The Once and Future King, which presents a surprisingly down-to-earth picture of Medieval England underneath the magical tale and the social commentary. Given the flaws in its social commentary, it’s the best explanation for why I am so fond of it.

I mentioned previously that His Majesty is on a Shakespeare jag. I think his good humor this morning can be credited to last night’s offering: Titus Andronicus.*

Lord Vader, you might find this story interesting. A young mother drove her car off a road and it ended up upside down in a river. The mother was killed in the accident. Her very young daughter was suspended upside down in her car seat, just above the water level, for many hours. When the car was spotted, all four responding law enforcement officers claim they heard a woman call for help, which prompted them to hasten their rescue efforts.

The comment thread at that story has more than its share of jackassery, but some interesting points are nonetheless raised.

Let me offer the usual disclaimer: I report His Majesty’s words as accurately as possible, even when they wax colorful. However, I reserve the right to substitute a euphemism were absolutely necessary.

There are, of course, some legitimate questions of fact. Did the officers really hear a voice calling for help? All four agree that they did, and (contrary to some of the jackassery in the comments) at least one is not a devout Mormon religious nutcase. All four also agree that the voice said “Help me”, though this might be dismissed as post hoc collusion (which is not necessarily a conscious thing.) Was the woman still alive to cry out? The officers report that she was already clearly dead when they finally got access to the car’s passenger compartment.

Could it have been the toddler? It’s not impossible for a child to cry out for help at that age, and I suppose it’s possible her cry might have sounded like an adult woman saying “Help me.” On the other hand, she was apparently in something like a hypothermic coma when the officers got the car turned over. So this explanation seems quite improbable.

One of the commenters suggests that perhaps a bird or other animal nearby gave out a call that sounded like a woman crying “Help me.” The officers don’t think so, and having all four simultaneously mistake an animal cry from elsewhere for a woman crying “Help me” from the passenger compartment also seems improbable.

But it all really depends on your priors. If you disbelieve in miracles and other supernatural manifestations, then one of these explanations, however improbable, is preferable to believing God or an angel spoke to the officers. If you believe in miracles, then God’s Voice may be the better explanation, from a strictly probabilistic point of view. I am myself inclined to think the autopsy will show the woman was hanging on to life and literally cried out for help with her last breath. However, the geometry of the situation suggests her head may have been under water for many hours, so I’ll take as a fall back position that the officers heard an unrelated sound (such as an animal cry or air leaking from the car) and interpreted it in a way they were primed by training and the situation to hear.

But, really, this all misses the point.

Miraculum refers to an event that inspires wonder in the observer. Even though there are naturalistic explanations for everything associated with this event, it is still miraculous, in that it inspires wonder in many observers. The survival of the toddler for so long is itself a miracle, perhaps a greater and more significant one than an unexplained call for help. Of course, it’s understandable that the responding officers might be more impressed by the latter.

The sense of wonder is a healthy response to novelty. Mystique serves important social and biological functions.  Consummating a marriage is a matter of discovering each other’s nakedness, even though we knew all along that, underneath our clothing, we are all completely naked.

I continue to be surprised by His Majesty’s insights into marriage. So far as I know, he has never been married, and he professes to be opposed to marriage in general, on the grounds that cloning affords superior quality control. But once in a while his insights are right on the money.

I’m not saying this is one of those cases.

The sense of wonder drives much scientific progress. Applied science can be driven by greed, but the engineer who is in it for the money is going to maximize personal short-term gain rather than long-term benefit to the mystical collective of humanity. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)

Of course, the sense of wonder can be perverted. Pornography comes immediately to mind.

But aside from quibbles over whether a miracle actually took place, based on the fact pattern, there are a number of objections of the form “A->B. Not B. Therefore Not A.” This is sound enough logic, but only if the premise is correct. The premise is that a loving, omnipotent, just God would not have saved the daughter without saving the mother as well. In other words, we’re back to the problem of evil.

This problem has been around a while. Why, the problem is even older than the people raising it at the comment thread <cackle>. I find it touching that anyone can be so blessedly naive as to think they can resolve the question in three hundred words or less at the comments thread of a Fox News affilate.

Why, yes. I’m pretty sure that last sentence was dripping sarcasm.

And this was a very minor tragedy. People who want to dismiss God via the problem of evil should just adopt “The Holocaust” as a kind of shorthand for their argument. “Isn’t it wonderful that the little girl was miraculously saved? — No. The Holocaust.”

I really can’t disagree with His Majesty here. If you’re going to invoke the problem of evil as an argument against God, you might as well invoke it big. Of course, it might be well to then acknowledge that the problem has remained  unsettled for millennia, in the sense that there are still intelligent people on both sides of the question.

You would be right to suppose that His Majesty and I are on opposite sides of the question. For example, I find the argument of free will a persuasive one.

Only where willful evil is involved. In this particular case, there’s no evidence the mother willfully drove off the road, or was even  culpably negligent, or that anyone drove her off the road. And, even were that the case, there remains countless other examples of unhappy situations of no one’s making. Young mothers dying of cancer caused by random gene mutations, for example.

The argument of free will does at least take the Holocaust out of your bill of particulars against God.

Unless you hold God responsible for creating Man as a being capable of evil.

This is a problem for ex nihilo creationism, perhaps. The Mormon scriptures declare that “Man was also in the beginning with God“. This and related scriptures strongly suggest that at there is some core to the being of Man that is coeval with God. And this in turn considerably eases the problem of how God could create evil men.

Other hints are given in a certain place. Who hath ears to hear, let him hear.

This still begs the question of why God permits Man to act out his evil impulses to the detriment of others. I understand, of course, that a God who immediately smites the evildoer, as soon as he forms the intent to commit an evil act, is going to inhibit evildoers from fully exercising their free will. I never much cared for The Minority Report, though of course the fact that Tom Cruise starred in it certainly does not help.

We must therefore assume that God gives men considerable latitude to do evil, so that they can exercise their free will rather freely. The sterile fact of free will, by itself, seems insufficient to God; He appears to delight in its actual exercise, to the fullest extent possible, even when that full extent means the Holocaust.

I’m not sure why I should be expected to love and worship a God like that.

Because “delight” is the wrong word, except in the cases where the full exercise is admirable.

But if God does not delight in it, why so freely permit it? Why not construct a universe in which men freely chose to act in delightful ways? There are reasons I prefer cloning. — Oh, I know. You consider that a logical impossibility, another case of demanding that God identify a rational number whose square is 2. Fair enough.

But then you are suggesting that God chooses to experience disappointment and grief.

Why, yes. Yes, I am.

If I had to pick one Mormon scripture that sets Mormonism apart from all other branches of Christianity, that one would be an excellent candidate.

I once answered a leading survey by a couple of atheist college philosophy professors in a way that invoked the thought behind that scripture, and their response basically amounted to a  polite accusation of cheating on the survey.

And it follows that happiness consists of sorrow as well as joy. Against which evil offers only titillation and misery.

And yet there is no room in your concept of heaven for men who continue to fully exercise their free will in undelightful ways. Of course, the idea is that there will be a complete separation of the righteous from the wicked at some point. The wicked, as I understand it, will be isolated somewhere entirely separated from God and the rest of creation, as the body walls off infection in an abscess. It seems to me that the righteous will be as thoroughly caged, albeit in a golden cage, if they are no longer free to do evil.

I think the idea is that, at some point, those not damned forever will have to make a choice of how much of God’s law they are willing to accept, will be assigned a kingdom accordingly, and will have their choice forever locked into their nature. They will have no more disposition to break the law they have accepted. At least, that’s as best I understand it now. One acknowledges that an imperfect understanding of the universe does not mean the universe is wrong.

That seems like rather a drastic change in their nature. I’m not sure how it is functionally different from not having free will at all.

Imperfect understanding, etc. But I wonder if one clue is in the notion that all things will be before their faces — including their past evil choices. Perhaps Tolkien is right, that evil will be good to have been.

And yet remain evil.

Hence the Atonement.

Which I don’t understand at all. There is not any man that can sacrifice his own blood which will atone for the sins of another. I’m not at all convinced your Alma satisfactorily answered the question which he himself raised.

He didn’t need to. He had experienced the Atonement first hand. Experience trumps theory.

And here you are talking theory with me when you should be out washing lepers, or something. No?

No. Because even you, Your Majesty, is worth trying to save, however long the odds.

His Majesty cackled triumphantly at this point and went back to his newspaper, as if he had won the argument.

This probably explains why he didn’t pursue the problem of unwilled evil. I imagine there will be future conversations along that line. There are, after all, never any lack of newspaper stories to bring up the question.

* I am guessing Titus Andronicus is the play responsible for the saying, “You have never experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon.”