How To Be An Agnostic
were told, and it was striking how much of a role God played in
the telling. There are no atheists in a foxhole, it’s said; none in a
collapsed mine apparently beyond hope, either.
For those at an emotional distance from the story, and with
a preference for reason not faith, this raises the familiar issues
about the problem of evil. Why did God save the 33 but not the
hundreds who died in an earthquake a few months previously?
Why allow the mine to collapse at all? Only, such questions are
for the seminar room, not the disaster zone.
Psychologically, the quick answer is to say that turning to God
is about comfort: hope beyond hope. It’s easy to be patronising:
who could deny an individual in such a predicament the con-
solations of faith, even though you yourself believe it empty?
But I wonder whether there’s something more profound in the
turn to God when your fate seems set in granite, as it must have
done for the miners.
Sometimes that which is way greater than you, indifferent
to you, silent, is actually a blessing. This might be called the
‘no atheists up a mountain’ phenomenon, when you’re hit by
the sublime, that which is fearful and mirrors your fear, and
yet by also being indifferent to your fear helps create a distance
from your fear. It’s the impersonal that apparently doesn’t care
which may be a help in dire predicaments. This may be another
meaning in the book of Job, when God ‘answers’, were you
there when the world was created?
Put it this way. The miner who falls to his knees no doubt prays
for a literal rescue. He also prays for comfort. But perhaps when
you’re clear you’re to die, touching cold eternity is a relief for mere
morals. It provides reconciliation and allows you to give up the
ghost. Which, should you be rescued, paradoxically may mean
you survive the ordeal better than if you’d struggled to the end.
This turn to God is unnerving to the secular mind. In fact, in
all honesty, it is unnerving to the Western religious mind too
since it seems to lack the resentment that is the natural response
in those who have come to believe that it is almost a right not to
have to suffer. Science can patch things up, so reading of people