Previously, I wrote a blog entry about an unfair “out” that believers have when they explain how something happened: “God did it.”
However, that is not the only trick up the believer’s sleeve. There is also the situation in which something does happen, but which an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving God would not want to happen. Polio, floods, wars, drug wars, genocides, rapes, slavery, psychopathy, psychopathic killers, torture, child molestation, other religions existing, atheism, errors or contradictions in the Bible/Koran/Torah/etc., animal cruelty: the list goes on.
Why would God allow these things to exist? They do not help the case for religion in the slightest. However, a quick rejoinder solves all this: “God works in mysterious ways.”
Ah, yes! The “get out of jail free card” of religion. It works for anything that conflicts with one’s particular religious beliefs.
This is, however, not as great a solution as one might think. Why? Consider this.
After 9/11, many people might have said, “How could Osama Bin Laden have planned such a terrible act?”
Well, the answer would be simple, wouldn’t it? “Osama Bin Laden works in mysterious ways!”
“Oh, no! No, no, no! This cannot be applied to anything other than God, that’s not fair!” one might say.
Well, that’s partially correct, at least. It isn’t fair because it isn’t a fair argument.
It is an unfalsifiable statement. Although unfalsifiable sounds great (as in, “Wow! It can’t be falsified! It must be true!); unfalsifiability is not a measure of a statement’s strength, it’s actually a demonstration of it’s weakness, for precisely the same reason why it can be used to legitimize Bin Laden, or any other terrible act, for that matter. It can be applied to anything and still work. If something is true, it needs to have a method for testing it’s truth — an unfalsifiable statement cannot be tested and is therefore not a fair statement, logically.
If religious people can use “God works in mysterious ways,” then everyone can use “x works in mysterious ways” to prove anything. This is obviously not an effective way at getting to the truth in any matter, so the only other option is for nobody to use this manner of arguing. God does not work in mysterious ways: unfalsifiable statements work in mysterious ways.
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thegreatantagonizer 
And the theist will answer that Satan works in mysterious ways also. For them, everything is magic. They do not believe in reality or facts. You might as well tell them that Pythagoras already proved that god does not exist in 372 bce. It’s called the Pythagoras theorem. Just ask any high school teacher if the Pythagoras theorem is correct! They will tell you! Honest!
Ya, totally agree. I forgot to mention that the problem of evil for Christians is such a problem that they have a whole branch of theology devoted to the study of why bad things happen to good people and of course, why good things happen to bad people: theodicy. The existence of theodicy, I think demonstrates the lack of confidence that the religious have in their own beliefs. Why does this need to be studied if you really trust God’s plan? There should be no distinction between theology and theodicy if a Christian truly believes that God’s plan is all-good.
Yep, and they will invent more as we go along toward the death of religion. Any new drama to keep it all going. sigh…
I will start using that standard reply, onyango works in mysterious ways and viola i have explained everything.
Haha, ya, or whenever you mess up at work.
Boss:”Why did you tell our best customer to ‘eat a dick’?!?!”
Me:”sir, I work in mysterious ways”
Hi there, I hope you’re well. Happy New Year!
I’m afraid you’ve set up a straw man argument, that is also based on an incorrect understanding of religious views – at least Christian views. I’ll give a very quick response.
Most Christians would not say that God caused evil to happen. God only ‘allows’ it because God has given us the great gift of free will. It is not his will for evil to happen, according to Christian belief. If it was, why would we pray, “God’s will be done on Earth, as it is in Heaven”? God’s will for us is always that we should love.
Also, I’ve never heard a Christian friend use the term ‘God works in mysterious ways’ to explain anything.
🙂
Never heard it? How about when someone dies, especially unexpectedly? I hear that all the time in that situation.
Also, it is not a strawman because God does still create evil even in your scenario. Why? Because God is supposedly all-knowing. As soon as he made man he knew man would sin. He knew every event that would happen after creating man. Therefore, who created the sin truly? God.
This also demonstrates that we do not have free will. We were supposedly designed by God and God knew every choice we would make because he is omniscient.
This also answers your question about praying: it’s pointless. Why would God reconsider his grand plan for the whims of a lowly finite being?
This was perhaps my greatest response ever… I hope you don’t gloss over it and really consider what I’ve said here. 🙂
Oh, and sorry, Happy New Year, by the way 🙂
Actually the “mysterious ways” idea is quite biblical. Take the Book of Job, for example, which addresses the question of why righteous people suffer. You’ll recall that God allows Satan to kill off Job’s kids, ruin his fortune and wreck his health, simply on a dare from Satan. Job and his friends spend much of the rest of the book arguing about whether or not Job deserved what he got. Job insists that God has been unfair. Finally God answers in chapter 40. Consider verses 8-14 (NIV):
““Would you discredit my justice?
Would you condemn me to justify yourself?
9 Do you have an arm like God’s,
and can your voice thunder like his?
10 Then adorn yourself with glory and splendor,
and clothe yourself in honor and majesty.
11 Unleash the fury of your wrath,
look at all who are proud and bring them low,
12 look at all who are proud and humble them,
crush the wicked where they stand.
13 Bury them all in the dust together;
shroud their faces in the grave.
14 Then I myself will admit to you
that your own right hand can save you.
If you read God’s full reply, he basically says, “Job, can you kick ass like I can? No? Well, then shut up!” And then God refuses to explain anything.
So criticizing “mysterious ways” is no straw man argument. This is the Bible. And don’t try to dodge it by saying it’s the Old Testament. The New Testament writers quote Job as Scripture (see 1 Cor. 3:19, for example).
Thanks for the specific Biblical reference. I suppose it would be hard to deny the “God works in mysterious ways” mentality considering your reply.
I’m curious what Liliesinthefield will say in response. I genuinely can’t think of a response to our comments. I think we pretty much covered our bases here.
Well done! 🙂
Thanks! I like your blog.
I have, and you can’t possibly know what most Christians would say. “Your friends” is not a broad enough sample size.
The thing about it is…
God makes ALL things to work together for good – for the children of God.
So what about all the cruelty that goes on on this planet. Think of how cruel it would be here if no one had a God to help keep them in check? If everyone was living just to satisfy their fleshly lusts? Not everyone has an inner gyroscope that points directly upward, pointed only to good. Without a God to help stay the line, we’d be in a horrible mess I think. A mess of evil so horrible we couldn’t even conceive of it. The evil goings on would be without any limits. Thank God there is a being of some goodness to which we want to raise our faces upward.
Claire, how then do you explain the suffering that ain’t caused by actions of man but end up killing tens of thousands of people if not millions?
I don’t think god is needed to be good in fact a lot of evidence points to the fact that having god is not necessary for being good. I live in a country that is so religious and our penitentiaries are full unless you want to argue that the guests of the state are all irreligious.
There is untold suffering that we have done to one another but why would a loving god allows us to suffer?
Well said 🙂
My question is, how do you KNOW there is some being watching out for us? You are making a claim which no one has been able to prove for thousands of years. You can’t simply posit that a god is watching over us; you must provide evidence. The Universe, however, is full of good and bad, randomness, chaos, order from chaos, and it’s unpredictable in most ways yet predictable in others. This is exactly what one would expect in a Universe that is the result of natural happenstance and not a massivelt intelligent, all-knowing, supremely benevolent being.
I’m speaking from personal experience. I was a person bent on evil. I call what I did “survival”. That’s all there was for me – survival. I had no God back then. Only me. When I got this God in my life at the age of 27, I’d done just about everything short of murder – and I could have killed someone from drunk driving [it was only luck that kept that from happening]. Now that I have God, He is slowly turning me into something resembling a “human being”.. He is fixing me so that when I look back on who I was back then, I wouldn’t dream of doing the evil things I did without thought or remorse.
Claire, if you changed your ways, don’t thank ghosts holy or otherwise, it was your effort. If your life is as you described it, you realize you were on a road of self destruction and you changed for among other reasons we like to self preserve. The only way you were going to do that is to change how you lived, no god required.
You are fixing yourself, I know you are going to claim transcendence but in all honesty the one person desiring a pat on the back is you for turning around your life, I could be wrong but this is what I think.
Sweetie, you are fixing yourself. Give yourself credit for how hard you’re working!
Hey,
I am Totally on you with this statement. But lets poke the statement on Osama for Fun just to entertain the Believers reading this.
You said the Osama thing, well, for believers he is not Omnipotent. So This sentence cannot apply to him. That is what the believers would say. But there is one thing i would like to point out. Osama is Quite Omnipotent. He has free will. I mean God also does not have that power. God has to constantly watch us, analyse our actions, see if we commit a sin, or pray or help others. On the Other Hand, Osama could simply Choose to Blow up the building, or invest the same interest and money in his country’s development or any other social work for that matter. You see god does not have that choice. So we have the right to say Osama Works in Mysterious ways, but We cannot Say “God works in Mysterious ways”. I hope you got my point there. Also it applies for any other humans and not God.
And lastly, For a Non-believer, when 2 atheists have a conversation, “God works in Mysterious Ways” Makes a Great Sarcastic Comment. LOL.
Great Post by the way.
Ya I definitely like how you turned the concept around! 🙂
To be honest, though, after reading Sam Harris’ book “Free Will”, I’ve come to realise that free will is an illusion… This is definitely not the default position among humans — before thinking deeply about it, I just assumed we had free will. However, the belief in free will seems to be untenable…
I do change my mind on things from time to time when someone presents me with a good counterargument: this is the most recent example for me.
We definitely Dont have free will. But we can do what we want and do not have to listen to 6billion other people. SO in a way we have more free will than god atleast. 😛
Ah, I see. It’s a different concept you’re referring to. Ya, I agree with you 🙂