People love coincidences. I love coincidences. But I get jumpy when people try to find meaning in them.
Take the story in the video I embedded above. It's charming, it's moving: A woman and the son she gave up for adoption find each other in the bakery she runs, where it turns out he has been a regular for years. When she falls ill, he takes over running the bakery. It's like the string of coincidences in Oedipus Rex, only with a happy ending. "You can't tell this story without talking God, because I was led the entire way," the son tells the TV reporter, as the camera pans over inspirational mottoes and a battered Bible. You could say the same about Oedipus.
Here's another story, also from Chicago.
The owner of a construction company is remodeling the bathroom of his parents' house, and finds a Christmas present behind the drywall; it fell there in 1978. Hashtag Christmas miracle! -- I take it that's the TV station's label, since the man himself is pleasantly wry about it all. "It's worth tens of tens of dollars," he says of the mint, unopened package of Thunder Jets.
Do I need to say that I'm happy for these people? Of course I am, just as I was happy for the friend who lost her car keys. Her friends on Facebook had prayed up a storm for her, but I didn't, so maybe it was my fault that she only found them only after paying a couple of hundred dollars to replace them. I was also happy that a seven-year-old boy who was hit by a van and spent some time in an induced coma recovered and became a chef; I was not so happy that his mother said on NPR that the accident was God's way of nudging her to become a nurse, a career path she had resisted until then. I'm more neutral when believers kvell that the Lord preserved a Bible, or a stack of Bibles, or some holy icons (via), when a church or residence burned down; I think they're flaunting a lack of moral sense, but as moral failures go this one is relatively mild.
When something terrible happens to someone by coincidence, nice people are apt to chalk it up to karma, not-so-nice people will call it a judgment. But believers disagree on specific cases, and I've never been able to get them to explain the criteria they rely on. Some believe that the COVID pandemic was God's judgment on America (the rest of the world doesn't exist for them); but the same people are apt to believe that the pandemic was a liberal germ-warfare plot.
I love to remember something the philosopher David Hume wrote centuries ago, that your ordinary person will justify belief in the Christian god by telling "you of the sudden and unexpected death of such a one: The fall and bruise of such another: The excessive drought of this season: The cold and rains of another. These he ascribes to the immediate cooperation of providence: And such events, as, with good reasoners, are the chief difficulties in admitting a supreme intelligence, are with him the sole arguments for it." This is still true, though belief in a capricious deity easily coexists with belief in a trustworthy deity whose eye is on the sparrow and will never let his chosen stumble, let alone fall.
That Janus-faced god is not the god of the philosophers but the god of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; the god of the simple common-sense believer who has no time for the double-talk of the pointy-headed intellectuals. Not only of the superstitious doofus, though: in 1983 the late skeptic and (I presume) round-headed intellectual Martin Gardner published a book, The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener, in which he declared (Kindle edition, loc 2882):
In line with the practice I have tried to follow throughout this book, I take the word God to mean what I believe it means and has always meant to most philosophers and theologians in the history of Western thought, as well as to almost all ordinary people. As I use the term, God is a God who is in some way outside our universe, who in some manner created the universe, who has some kind of plan for humanity and for every person, a God to whom we can pray, above all a God who sustains our hope for immortality. A personal God. Yes, the God of Christianity, but not only of Christianity. The God of Judaism, of Islam, and hundreds of smaller faiths. The God of Plato (yes, Plato!) and Kant and Charles Peirce and Miguel de Unamuno and a thousand other eminent philosophers and writers who were theists unshackled by the doctrines of any organized religious institution.
There are many problems here, and I'm wondering whether I should bother to reread the entire book; but as another famous scrivener reportedly said, I would prefer not to. His argument boils down to the claim that everybody else does it, which isn't even an argument. Gardner would never have let an opponent get away with a similar assertion about belief in healing crystals, or ESP, or a "literal" seven-day creation. Notice too how he goes along with the crowd while invoking bold free-thinkers "unshackled by the doctrines of any religious institution", giving his readers the worst of both worlds.
A few pages later Gardner wrote: "Plato, remember, wanted to keep Homer out of the hands of school children because he regarded the Homeric mythology as blasphemy against the gods."
Gardner was being disingenuous here. First, Plato wanted to ban Homer and other canonical Greek poets from his ideal republic, not only to protect school children but all its subjects except for the small minority of philosopher-kings who ruled it. He suggested instead a "noble lie" of humanity composed of different metals according to the roles they played in the republic, which the ignorant Many would believe and their rulers would not. Second, the god of Plato (yes, Plato!) was not a creator but a craftsman, not an interventionist personal god but a philosophical principle, and certainly not the god of Christianity. Gardner tried to explain away the difficulties of his position by pointing out that "educated" Christians don't take Christian mythology literally. Nor, I would add, do uneducated Christians: both groups interpret their mythology opportunistically and incoherently.
Gardner thought he was staking out a middle position between atheism and fundamentalism, but his position was the false one that all religions basically believe in the same god. In one sense he was correct, in that the god of Hume's "vulgar" believers probably is like the gods of most lay believers in all religions. But in another he was completely wrong: the god of the philosophers, including Gardner himself, is an explicit rejection of the gods of popular piety. Like another famous preacher, Gardner was trying to be all things to all men; but what was he offering except yellow stripes and dead armadillos?
If someone wants to believe that a god led them to the bakery owned by the mother who gave them up for adoption, no one is harmed by that. It's not even harmful if someone believes that a god nudged her to become a nurse by nearly killing her young son, since she didn't cause the accident herself. But what if someone believes that a god saved Donald Trump from the assassin's bullet? From which it would follow that a god didn't save John F. Kennedy or Martin Luther King Jr. from the assassin's bullet. Or as I've asked in a non-Christian context, do earthquakes happen because the spirits are understaffed, or inattentive, or hungover? In my experience, most believers try to avoid following their logic to its conclusion in matters like these; I don't think they should be allowed to get away with it.
Lately I've been thinking more about useful atheist responses to missionary activity. The standard attacks on belief in gods, or on established religion, are generally valid but tend to miss the point. Like Christian apologists, we sometimes move the discussion to topics we are prepared to address, instead of meeting our opponents head on. I've been noticing a lot of books on Amazon or in the library which claim to help apologists and missionaries deal with the "new" secularism, and to avoid alienating potential targets. It doesn't appear that they offer anything new, which may be a mercy. But I find I have other questions, other objections, which go deeper and I think will be useful to explore. I want mainly to ask: what are they selling, and how are they selling it?
--------------------------------------------
*Gardner wrote a critical review of his own book for the New York Review of Books - under the pseudonym George Groth, as he apparently acknowledged at the end of the piece. It's paywalled, so I can't read it.
