Archbishop Doubts God, Carries on Regardless

In the Sunday Telegraph the other day, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, wrote an article in reaction to the Asian earthquake and tsunami disaster, in which he says the following:

The question: "How can you believe in a God who permits suffering on this scale?" is therefore very much around at the moment, and it would be surprising if it weren't – indeed, it would be wrong if it weren't. The traditional answers will get us only so far.

Interestingly, the Archbishop does not go on to provide a non-traditional answer. Instead, he poses another question:

So why do religious believers pray for God's help or healing? They ask for God's action to come in to a situation and change it, yes; but if they are honest, they don't see prayer as a plea for magical solutions that will make the world totally safe for them and others.

That's an interesting question. Why do believers pray for things, since most of the time, they don't appear to expect action from God in response? The Archbishop doesn't answer that question, either. What he does do is go on to state in quite bald terms the problem of evil:

If some religious genius did come up with an explanation of exactly why all these deaths made sense, would we feel happier or safer or more confident in God? Wouldn't we feel something of a chill at the prospect of a God who deliberately plans a programme that involves a certain level of casualties?

There's an admission there that it would take a "religious genius" to make sense of of a great disaster like this in terms of some sort of divine plan, and that no-one has yet come up with a plausible explanation of that kind. Rowan Williams has presented, quite clearly, why it is that disasters like this often cause religious believers to lose their faith, and non-believers to be confirmed in their lack of faith, in a benign God. What's odd is that he doesn't give anything recognizable as a reason why believers should keep their faith. He merely says—

The extraordinary fact is that belief has survived such tests again and again...

—which is something unbelievers can assent to, though unbelievers would ascribe the persistence of faith to indoctrination or the power of suggestion. It's not clear that Archbishop Williams would disagree. In his article, he explains that believers

have learned that there is some reality to which they can only relate in amazement and silence.

Again, this is nothing an unbeliever would disagree with. Believers are stunned into silence by "some reality", because such reality cannot be accounted for by the system they believe in. The most astonishing passage comes next:

These convictions are terribly assaulted by all those other facts of human experience that seem to point to a completely arbitrary world, but people still feel bound to them, not for comfort or ease, but because they have imposed themselves on the shape of a life and the habits of a heart.

Christian convictions are "terribly assaulted" by evidence that the world is really arbitrary, rather than guided by benign supernatural forces, yet they stick to those convictions because of self-imposed habits. That's an argument that atheists use against religious people! Why is the Archbishop of Canterbury using it? Well, the Archbishop is arguing for religious belief, it turns out, but not by presenting any counterarguments to the Argument from Evil, which he seems to accept cannot be countered. Rather, his strategy reveals itself in the following:

The odd thing is that those who are most deeply involved... are so often the ones who spend least energy in raging over the lack of explanation. They are likely to shrug off, awkwardly and not very articulately, the great philosophical or religious questions... Somehow in all of this, God simply emerges for them as a faithful presence. Arguments "for and against" have to be put in the context of that awkward, stubborn persistence.

In other words, shrug off your doubts, don't get involved in arguments "for and against" (because there are no arguments for), but just stick stubbornly to your belief, despite that the evidence shows you are wrong. In short, shut up, don't think, believe. The only reason given why you should follow this suggestion is that, according to the article, religious believers are more compassionate than unbelievers. That's a very dubious claim, and the Archbishop's main evidence for it is that religious people are

so obstinate and inconvenient when society discusses abortion and euthanasia...

I'm impressed by the casuistry of this, given that the Archbishop's office is itself is rather flexible on such matters!