Does God Really Have Time for This? Why Divine Retribution is bad logic.

The United States won its independence from Britain in no small part because a Philadelphia dabbler learned to control lightening.

Here's a question for you? If God is immortal, omniscient and omnipotent, why would he (or she) resort to nature to punish people for bad behavior?

Throughout the vast majority of the human experience, lightening scared the be-Jesus out of people. For the Greeks it was Zeus-- the god of the heavens-- doling out retribution (with deadly precision and devastating effect) a bolt at a time.

Later theologians, while acknowledging that lightening could be a sign of divine displeasure, somehow also failed to notice that it was usually the church that first burned to the ground.

In Candide, Voltaire skewered the "divine retribution" argument that, no matter the disaster, something always "happens for the best." But it was his more practical (and agnostic) contemporary from the New World, Benjamin Franklin, who ultimately put god in his place with regard to natural disasters. His lightening rod saved barns, churches and people; and for the populace of his time, was even more magical than rockets and the internet are to us.

So great was Franklin's prestige, that when he came to France (an aristocratic Monarchy so far from the American ideal at the time that the difference was truly glaring) he was very hard to ignore. Where John Adams had logic and passion; Franklin had notoriety, charm, and the lightening rod and in the end, the lightening rod won.

But we shouldn't dismiss Voltaire and his point as well. Although Candide is both savage and satirical in its recitation and approach, there has always been a side of it that (for me) espouses a great hope for mankind. While I do not personally believe that any god punishes people with anything from nature, I do believe that natural adversity does happen for a reason, and often the benefits of that natural adversity are hard to appreciate at the time, but they are there all the same. Suffering is a horrible thing, but to discount that suffering by attributing it to divine retribution would only underscore the horror rather than justify or diminish it.

Franklin's lighten rod saved lives and property; gave him the popularity, and prestige to convince the French to support a cause that would eventually topple their regime; and paved the way for all the electronic wonders of the 20th and 21st Centuries. Who knows what wonders the next natural adversity may unleash.

If you truly believe that any god is immortal, omniscient and omnipotent, at least try to take Voltaire's side (without the cynicism) that maybe-- just maybe; it really is all for the best.