A Lot of Explaining

On Inside the Actors Studio, a television interview program, the host asks the actor Robert De Niro whether or not he believes in God. De Niro gives him a perfect look (“Are you lookin’ at me?”) and says: “If God exists, He has a lot of explaining to do.” The line gets a big laugh from the audience, which seems instantly to recognize and agree with the point De Niro is making: How can we take seriously the proposition than an omnipotent and all-loving God created a world shot through with evil and suffering? 

Several years ago, also on TV, I saw the comedian George Carlin do a whole routine based on this apparent logical absurdity. Let me get this straight, Carlin said. God is in charge and God made everything. He made traffic jams, mud slides, famine, Hitler, infant death syndrome, child abusers, war, the Black Plague, cancer, depression, birth defects, and all the other diseases, afflictions, and human atrocities and stupidities that strike us almost purely at random and cause pain beyond measure. And one more thing: He loves us very much! Huge laugh.

During the Second World War, at Magdalen College, Oxford, in England, C.S. Lewis gave a remarkable talk on what he called the problem of futility: the fear and belief that life ultimately is without the possibility of success and makes no sense. As was often the case with Lewis, especially when dealing with the biggest questions, he did not try to say everything. But he did say one powerful thing. Quoting A.E. Housman’s line, “Whatever brute and blackguard made the world,” Lewis makes his stand on the fact that “there is a catch. If a Brute and Blackguard made the world, then he also made our minds. If he made our minds, he also made the very standard in them whereby we judge him to be a Brute and Blackguard.” Well, now. It seems that our pessimism has a contradiction at its center: “You must trust the universe in one respect even in order to condemn it in every other.”  

Lewis won’t let up: “The more seriously we take our own charge of futility the more we are committed to the implication that reality in the last resort is not futile at all. The defiance of the good atheist hurled at an apparently ruthless and idiotic cosmos is really an unconscious homage to something in or behind that cosmos which he recognizes as infinitely valuable and authoritative: for if mercy and justice were really private whims of his own with no objective and impersonal roots, and if he realized this, he could not go on being indignant. The fact that he arraigns heaven itself for disregarding them means that at some level of his mind he knows they are enthroned in a higher heaven still.”

That’s very good, but as I recalled De Niro’s bemused defiance, what follows is better: “I cannot and never could persuade myself that such defiance is displeasing to the supreme mind.” There is something that Lewis views as unintentionally “holy” about an angry challenge of this sort: “the man who accepts our ordinary standard of good and by it hotly criticizes divine justice receives the divine approval: the orthodox, pious people who palter with that standard in the attempt to justify God are condemned.”

Very, very good. The world makes no sense?  Well, we make sense whenever we reason, and whenever our denunciation of reality contains within it a hidden loyalty to that same reality that is the only possible source of our norms of judgement. Of course, that’s not all the explaining that needs to be done. But it’s an interesting start. That is what I have been wanting to say to Robert De Niro.

Sources: C.S. Lewis, Christian Reflections (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdman’s Publishing, 1996), 66-67, 70.

First published Winter 2000.