Charles Petzold

Some crazy stuff pops up in the news these days, but I truly wasn’t ready for the Chief Justice of a state Supreme Court to invoke the “wrath of a holy God” in a court ruling.

Wrath is serious stuff. It’s related to anger but accompanied by punishment or vengeance of some sort. Wrath equals anger plus violence. Although the phrase “wrath of a holy God” is not unknown in English literature, the simpler phrase “wrath of God” is much more common. Checking Google Book’s Ngram Viewer, we find that the phrase shows a peak of usage in English in 1642, right at the outset of the English Civil War. It declined to lower levels thereafter, particularly throughout the 20th century, but with a noticeable uptick in recent decades.

I assumed the phrase “wrath of God” appears throughout the Old Testament, but that is not the case. The word “wrath” by itself has nearly 200 occurrences in the Bible, but a search in the King James Bible reveals just 10 instances of “wrath of God,” and only one in the Old Testament! There’s another in the book of John, three in letters attributed to Paul, and five in the Book of Revelation.

How is the wrath of God manifested in our lives? I can understand how primitive people attributed destructive acts of nature and even their own violent tendencies to the wrath of God, but does the phrase make any sense to modern sensibilities? Is there such a thing as a literal — that is, non-metaphorical — wrath of God?

For purposes of expediency, I’ll skip over the question of the existence of God. I personally tend to prefer the “quantum singularity” explanation of how the universe came to be, but I’m not sure how that works, or what it even means, and I certainly can’t prove it. Glossing over those mysteries is the role of faith.

But even if we assume that the universe didn’t just create itself and instead was created by some entity, what can we say about this entity? More specifically, does this entity express wrath?

All we can legitimately say about an entity that created the universe is that it has the capability to create the universe. We can’t claim that this entity is omnipotent. Having the potency to create the universe doesn’t imply an infinite degree of potency.

It’s even less reasonable to say that this entity is omniscient. Creating something doesn’t imply knowledge of the future progress of every tiny part of the creation. Human beings who have the know-how to create complex mechanisms of hardware or software don’t know everything that’s going on when those mechanisms are put into motion. Just ask any programmer who’s tried to debug their own multithreaded code.

It’s not even obvious that this entity is a monotheistic kind of being. I don’t know about you, but if I needed to create a universe, I’d surround myself with a bunch of experts and set up committees to handle the obviously difficult work involved. Doesn’t the incompatibility of quantum mechanics and special relativity suggest a universe designed by at least two committees that weren’t reading each other’s emails?

But now I’m just being silly.

Truth is, an entity with the capability to create the universe is so far beyond our experience that nothing we can say about it makes any sense. I understand that many people believe that God has delivered messages to us within a particular book, or expressed by a certain person or group of people, but which book and which people? There are many claimants but no evidence to whittle the candidates down to one.

The desire to bring the phenomenon of existence down to a human level is surely understandable. But does it make sense to anthropomorphize the creator of the universe and give it human emotions? Even the phrase “God loves me” is fraught with difficulties. There is no evidence at all that the entity that might have created the universe cares one way or the other about individual lives within this creation.

The idea of an angry or vengeful or wrathful God is even stranger. How can this entity feel wrath at its own creation? (Although come to think of it, if we’re living in a coded simulation, I can see how the coder might feel angry when their own buggy code behaves erratically.)

Despite the absence of evidence for the existence of God, and even less evidence for the nature and attributes of this God, a utilitarian argument is sometimes proposed that God is necessary to keep everybody in line. (“There is no God, but don’t tell that to my servant, lest he murder me at night” is apparently not Voltaire but funny anyway.) Without the threat of hell, people would be immoral. In other words, God is Santa Claus for grownups.

But in real life, religion has been used to justify all kinds of horrendous acts. Any 19th century slaveholder could rattle off a litany of Biblical justifications of slavery, and even in today’s world, holy wars are still common.

Indeed, rather than religious belief persuading people to be moral, it is instead a source of immorality.

This was the compelling argument made by English mathematician William Kingdon Clifford. In 1876 he read a paper entitled “The Ethics of Belief” before the Metaphysical Society, an invitation-only debating society that existed between 1869 and 1880. He expanded this paper into an article published in The Contemporary Review, (Vol. XXIX, January 1877, p. 289) and then included in the collection of his Lectures and Essays (Macmillan, 1877, Vol. II, p. 177) published after Clifford died of tuberculosis at the age of 33. The longer version goes deeper into the bases of doubt and trust, but the original short version is fine for getting the gist of Clifford’s argument.

It’s commonly assumed that a person’s personal beliefs are their own business and have no repercussions. This is not so.

Clifford begins with a description of the owner of an emigrant-ship. “He knew that she was old, and not over-well built at the first; that she had seen many seas and climes, and often had needed repairs.” The owner has doubts that the ship can make the voyage, but he’s able to suppress that doubt in his own mind to avoid the expenses of making the ship seaworthy. “He would put his trust in Providence, which could hardly fail to protect all these unhappy families that were leaving their fatherland to seek for better times elsewhere.” He sends the ship out to sail “and he got his insurance-money when she went down in mid-ocean and told no tales.”

We act according to our beliefs. But beliefs can be based on evidence or based on whims. These are not morally equivalent. We have a moral duty to believe that which we can demonstrate as true. Clifford writes:

Belief, that sacred facility, which prompts the decision of our will, and knits into harmonious working all the compacted energies of our being, is ours not for ourselves but for humanity. It is rightly based on truths which have been established by long experience and waiting toil, and which have stood in the fierce light of free and fearless questioning. Then it helps to bind men together, and to strengthen and direct their common action. It is desecrated when given to unproved and unquestioned statements, for the solace and private pleasure of the believer…

If a man, holding a belief which he was taught in childhood or persuaded of afterwards, keeps down and pushes away any doubts which arise about it in his mind, purposely avoids the reading of books and the company of men that call in question or discuss it, and regards as impious those questions which cannot easily be asked without disturbing it; the life of that man is one long sin against mankind.

Five days ago, the Supreme Court of Alabama ruled that Alabama’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act applies to frozen embryos in a fertility clinic that were inadvertently dropped and destroyed. The entire decision is here. Page 3 asserts that Alabama’s law applies to “extrauterine children -- that is, unborn children who are located outside of a biological uterus at the time they are killed.”

This “pro-life” decision threatens to shut down every fertility clinic in Alabama, robbing parents of their ability to have and raise children. It should also be noted that Alabama has one of the highest infant mortality rates in the country, and some of the worst healthcare in the country. While bending over backwards to protect frozen embryos, the state of Alabama is killing actual children.

Up through page 25 of the decision, the court is restricting itself to legal considerations, regardless how bizarre they may seem. But then Chief Justice Tom Parker weighs in with a concurrence where he says the quiet parts out loud. Parker reveals how religious beliefs are at the root of Alabama law. Quoting the books of Genesis and Exodus, Thomas Aquinas, and John Calvin, Parker writes:

In summary, the theologically based view of the sanctity of life adopted by the People of Alabama encompasses the following: (1) God made every person in His image; (2) each person therefore has a value that far exceeds the ability of human beings to calculate; and (3) human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God, who views the destruction of His image as an affront to Himself. Section 36.06 [in what’s referred to as the “Sanctity of Unborn Life Amendment” to the Alabama constitution] recognizes that this is true of unborn human life no less than it is of all other human life -- that even before birth, all human beings bear the image of God, and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing his glory. (pp. 37–38)

If Justice Parker is merely elucidating the theological basis of Alabama law, then those laws need to be revamped. Basing laws on religion is an establishment of religion, and that is prohibited by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.

If Justice Parker truly wants to base his argument on the Biblical passage “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him” (Genesis 1:27), then he must first demonstrate to us the evidence for the truth of this statement. And if this “evidence” consists solely that this statement is included the book of Genesis, then he must also reveal to us if he believes that the universe was created in a week some 6,000 years ago.

And if Justice Parker believes that, then he’s a flaming idiot and has no business sitting on a bench in any courtroom in the United States.

In W.K. Clifford’s words, Justice Parker has been committing “one long sin against mankind.”