Rape and God’s Will
by David Atkins
By now you’ve probably read about this:
Indiana Republican Senate candidate Richard Mourdock said Tuesday when a woman is impregnated during a rape, “it’s something God intended.”
Mourdock, who’s been locked in a tight race with Democratic challenger Rep. Joe Donnelly, was asked during the final minutes of a debate whether abortion should be allowed in cases of rape or incest.
“I struggled with it myself for a long time, but I came to realize that life is that gift from God. And, I think, even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happened,” Mourdock said.
Forget the repulsive misogyny for a moment, and consider the theological implications.
By far the biggest challenge to the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) is the theodicy, also known as the problem of evil. The God of Abraham is supposed to be omnipotent (all-powerful), omniscient (all-knowing), and most importantly omnibenevolent (all-good.) Yet evil exists. How? Most other religions don’t have this problem, as they believe in fallible deities. But an infallible deity shouldn’t allow evil or suffering. Or at the very least, the suffering needn’t be as harsh as it is.
There are two main kinds of evil that create a challenge to the Abrahamic God. The first are acts of evil beyond human control: tsunamis, pandemics, earthquakes, childhood leukemia, etc. These are actually more problematic because the answers (greater goods, necessary punishments, “tests”, etc.) are so inadequate.
But evil perpetrated by human beings is different. Most theologians resolve it by the simple hand-wave of “free will.” God, we are told, gave humans free will as the greatest good of all, and we can use that free will to do good or evil. That does create a challenge for His omniscience: does God know what we’re going to use our free will for before we do it? If so, is it our will? If not, given the complexities of interactions, how can He know what will happen five minutes from now, let alone the end of time?
But absent the omniscience challenge to free will, it’s a fairly comprehensive answer. The poorest free person is supposed to be better off than the most comfortable slave, so permitting people to perpetrate evil acts is supposed to be better than denying them the freedom to do so (which is also why we allow children to play with grenades!) But what is unthinkable is that a loving God would actually create a world in which Jeffrey Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy and Adolf Hitler were not only free to perpetrate their evil, but were encouraged or compelled to by a God who actually planned for that evil to happen and felt that the world would be a better place for letting it happen than for stopping it.
Which brings us to rapists. If God is powerful enough to stop rape from happening, knows rape is going to happen, and doesn’t want people to rape one another, then how could He allow rape? It has to be free will, right? Because giving people the freedom to rape one another is a greater good than preventing rape? Otherwise, God isn’t a particularly likeable fellow.
So what do we make of this?
Indiana Republican Senate candidate Richard Mourdock said Tuesday when a woman is impregnated during a rape, “it’s something God intended.”
It can’t be a loving God. Unless, of course, Richard Mourdock doesn’t see rape as particularly evil.
.