Is the Existence of God a Matter of Probabilities?

To treat the question whether God exists as a matter of probabilities seems to some people completely natural and to some utterly perverse. Believers and non-believers are found in both camps. I agree with Duncan Richter in finding such a way of thinking deeply wrongheaded, but I find his attempt to say what is wrong with it unsatisfactory.

I was delighted to find my previous two posts (1, 2) on ancient polytheism and the concept of evidence cited and discussed by Duncan Richter in his blog Language on Holiday. Richter’s discussion includes a parenthetical remark that approaches some lines of thought that I have pursued. He remarks that arguments for the existence of God that are founded on empirical observations, whether concerning religious experience, miracles, or design, all try to establish their conclusion as a matter of probability. (For the sake of simplicity, I shall in this entry equate questions of the existence of a divine being with the question of the existence of God, i.e., an inherently unique deity, leaving polytheism out of account.) He says of this way of thinking:

It is a logical and ethical mistake, an error in grammar and theology, to think of the existence of God as a question of probabilities. This might become clearer if one tried to calculate the odds, although I think people have done this and not achieved the clarity I have in mind. In case it isn’t clear, it’s a mistake because it treats God as the same kind of thing as a fluke gust of wind, i.e. something whose odds we might calculate or at least estimate, i.e. as something natural, however super. To think of God this way is to misunderstand what believers believe in a way that is both simply wrong (that isn’t what they believe) and insulting (it is to treat God as something less than what they believe). This is complicated by the fact that some believers (or “believers”) are idolaters in just this way, but that isn’t the kind of belief that interests me. There’s also the question whether non-believers like me should care about the alleged badness of insulting God, but we can at least respect the feelings of believers. And I think we can respect the concept of God, too, and want to do justice to it.

I suspect that the passage was written with some haste and impatience, for two reasons: first, it is rather long and contentious, not to say blustery, for a merely parenthetical remark; and second, saying exactly what is wrong with treating the existence of God as a matter of probability is no easy matter—or so, at any rate, say I. In this piece, I will give reasons for finding Richter’s presentation of the case unsatisfactory. I hope, though I dare not promise, to make a stronger case of my own in a subsequent entry to this blog.

Richter finds fault with probabilistic discourse about theism in two respects. One concerns the way in which it treats theistic believers. According to him, it insults them by treating God as “something less than what they believe [in].” He also implies that it fails to “respect their feelings.” Now it is possible that I am missing something here, but to me such claims seem simply irrelevant. If—and this is a large “if”—there is no fundamental conceptual error inherent in inquiring whether probability favors the existence or the non-existence of God, then I can see no compelling reason why those making such inquiries should care in the least whether they hurt the feelings of theistic believers or denigrate the object of their beliefs. At most, such considerations would be reasons to pursue such inquiries out of public hearing, so that they not offend the delicate ears of believers. But one could just as credibly argue that it is insulting to believers to assume that their sensibilities require this kind of protection. In any case, if they do, then it’s hard cheese for them and nothing more.

So it seems to me that Richter’s would-be ethical objection can be set aside. The entire weight of his objection must rest on its logical and grammatical part—“grammatical” here in Wittgenstein’s sense of concerning what one can intelligibly say and under what conditions. I believe that if this element of the objection could be satisfactorily articulated, the ethical aspect would emerge by itself. In fact, if I may mix the terms of the later Wittgenstein with the phrasing of the earlier, I would say that on this point grammar and ethics are one: if we could understand exactly what is so perverse about talking probabilistically about the existence of God, we would not distinguish a logical an ethical objections. Richter seems to me to move, or at least to face, in this direction when he describes theistic believers who take the question of divine existence to be a matter of probability as “idolaters,” a term that implies perversion of both intellect and will; but to make such a heavy charge stick would require an argument than I, for one, have not got at the ready.

What, then, is wrong with trying to assess the probability of divine existence? Richter holds that to do so “treats God as the same kind of thing as a fluke gust of wind, i.e. something whose odds we might calculate or at least estimate, i.e. as something natural, however super.” To take the first point first: what are the conditions under which we can calculate or at least estimate the odds of something? Richter may be assuming that we can do this only when we are talking about a type of event that occurs and recurs unpredictably under certain specifiable conditions, such a gust of wind of such and such a character that occurs a certain number of times in a certain location over a certain period of time. Given such specifications, we can observe a sample of cases and calculate the relative frequency of the event in question. The larger the sample that we have observed, the more confidently can we identify this relative frequency with the probability of a gust of wind occurring under the specified conditions.

Obviously, none of this is applicable to the existence of God, since that is not a repeatable event. So, if those who think of the existence of God probabilistically operate with a frequentist interpretation of probability, then they are hamstrung from the outset. But, of course, they do nothing of the sort; or at least, they need not do so. Here is the philosopher and Christian apologist—and, if Richter’s assessment is just, idolater—William Lane Craig on his website Reasonable Christianity answering a correspondent who is perplexed by the application of probabilistic terms to the question of the existence of God. Craig’s correspondent understands probability not in terms of relative frequency but according to what is known as the classical interpretation of probability, in which probability values are equated with the ratio of the number of cases in which a certain event occurs to the total number of possible cases. But Craig’s reply is equally applicable to the frequentist interpretation:

Probabilities are always relative to some background information. . . . Now the atheist says God’s existence is improbable. You should immediately ask, ‘Improbable relative to what?’ What is the background information? . . . The interesting question is whether God’s existence is probable relative to the full scope of the evidence.

Had you asked that question of your friend, it would have been evident that he is considering no background information at all! He seems to be talking about a sort of absolute probability of God’s existence Pr (G) in abstraction from any background information B and specific evidence E. That’s a pointless exercise. He seems to be imagining all the possible deities that could exist and asking, “What are the chances apriori that a certain one of these exists?” How silly! That’s like inquiring about the absolute probability that a certain person, for example, you, exists, given the infinite number of possible persons there could be. Nobody is interested in such absolute probabilities, if there even are such things. What we want to know, rather, is the probability of your existence or God’s existence relative to our background information and specific evidence: Pr (G|E & B).

Craig operates with a subjectivist or, as it is widely known, Bayesian interpretation of probability. On this interpretation, the values that are assigned to probabilities of events represent degrees of confidence in the occurrence of those events. Such assignments do not require that the events be repeated or repeatable at all: one can attribute a degree of probability to any event whatever, even the existence of God (or of a god of some specific description). (“Event” here is a technical term in probability theory for that to which a probability value is assigned and is not contrasted with “fact” or “state of affairs.”)

The competition among interpretations of probability is a vast and complicated issue, into which I don’t propose to enter any farther. My point here is simply that, if one holds there to be a confusion inherent in treating the existence of God as a matter of probability, one cannot support that claim by simply assuming an interpretation of probability that requires a repeated event or a countable set of possible outcomes, as there are interpretations of probability that don’t require those things. To Richter’s remark that to talk of the existence of God in probabilistic terms treats it as “something whose odds we might calculate or at least estimate,” Craig would reply, or anyway could reply, “Yes; so what?” So, for that matter, could Richard Dawkins.

I can imagine one of these probabilists saying to Richter (and, for that matter, to me): “I suspect that the reason why you dislike this talk of the probability of God’s existence is that it seems to kill all the existential drama and to make the business of believing or not believing in God out to be a matter purely of the intellect. But, look you, I am not touching at all on the question of what moves people to believe or disbelieve in God, or what difference their belief or lack of belief makes to their lives. I am just assuming that when we ask, ‘Does God exist?’, we are posing a genuine and well-formed question—one that has a correct answer. The correct answer is either ‘Yes, God exists’ or ‘No, God does not exist.’ To determine which is the correct answer, one has to determine where the preponderance of evidence lies. To do this is to assess the probability of the proposition ‘God exists.’”

I do not think that this argument is unanswerable, but I do think that to answer it is not easy. In any case, I leave the task for a later post.

You Have Been Spammed

Attempted intrusions into the “comments” section by abusive visitors have compelled me to introduce, to my regret, moderation of comments.

Eric Idle and Graham Chapman
Image is linked to video clip of scene on YouTube

Mrs. Bun. Have you got anything without Spam in it?

Waitress. Well, Spam, eggs, sausage, and Spam—that’s not got much Spam in it.

Mrs. Bun. I don’t want any Spam!

—Monty Python’s Flying Circus, episode 25

On the Internet, we are all like Monty Python’s lady customer at the Viking restaurant: we don’t want any spam; but we can’t escape it.

I used to think that “spam,” in Internet parlance, referred only to uninvited bulk advertising sent through e-mail; but the term applies more broadly. One definition reads: “Spam is flooding the Internet with many copies of the same message, in an attempt to force the message on people who would not otherwise choose to receive it.” I think that this captures the essence of the matter. Whether the content is advertising or something else, and whether it comes through e-mail or through a Web site, is not relevant. It is the tedious and insensate repetition made possible by the medium of the Internet that defines spam and makes it so revolting.

A few days ago, I posted a comment on an entry in John Loftus’s blog Debunking Christianity in response to another visitor’s comment on the same entry. As I subsequently learned, the writer of the comment—I have since learned who he is, but I shall refer to him here simply as “Mr. Loony”—has been posting the same text all over the Web since at least 2008. You can read about him, and about the threats he made on the life of one writer, here and here, and you can find the text of his comment by doing a Web search for the phrase “the really sharp end of Occam’s razor.” (This guy thinks that a razor is sharp on the end?) The comment is a blustering denunciation of skeptics and atheists, who, it says, “start begging when they start dying.” I responded:

Supposing—contrary to all evidence—that atheists start believing in God when they are facing death: is that supposed to strengthen the case for belief in God? Surely it is rather evidence that such belief is a product of desperation and fear, as contrasted with sound judgment. If you have to be scared out of your wits to believe in God, surely that is reason to conclude that belief in God is a superstition, not that it is true.

For the record, I do not believe that belief in God is in every instance a product of desperation and fear, or that it is in every instance a superstition. My point was merely that, if there were any truth to the assertion that theistic unbelievers become believers when facing death—an assertion that is often made by unsophisticated theistic apologists as if it somehow gave support to theism (see this video for a comparatively entertaining musical version of this argument)—it would not support theistic belief but rather the dismissal of it.

Mr. Loony’s comment also contained a rather comically ill-informed representation of a face-off between his atheistic and skeptical enemies on the one hand and himself and his allies on the other, in the form of two lists of names conjoined by “vs.” The first list named Michael Shermer, Sam Harris, P. Z. Myers, Richard Dawkins, and James Randi—a very just selection of prominent atheistic skeptics of the present day. But the list of their opponents was a bizarre mix. It comprised Nostradamus, Einstein, and a third name that I did not recognize, but which I later learned to be the real name of Mr. Loony.

Citing Einstein as a believer in God is another argument favored by naïve would-be defenders of faith. Like the argument previously mentioned, it suffers from weakness both in its premise and in the relation of that premise to the conclusion. As far as the relation to the conclusion is concerned, the supposed fact that Einstein believed in God is at best a very feeble piece of evidence—if it deserves to be called evidence at all—of the truth of that belief. As for that premise itself, when a rabbi asked Einstein, “Do you believe in God?”, Einstein’s reply was: “I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings.” In other words, as far as belief in God is concerned, Einstein was at best a deist, and, like Spinoza, denied the existence of miracles, divine providence, and most of what gives content to most people’s belief in God. In my reply to Mr. Loony I cited this famous quotation and added some words of derision upon his argumentative capacities.

Some time later, the very same text was posted as a comment on the last entry in my blog. I immediately deleted it. Some time after that, it was posted again, along with the childish taunt: “Can’t handle the truth, huh?” No, Mr. Loony, I can handle the truth; I just can’t handle deranged cretins. Mr. Loony was then joined by another crank of much the same stripe, who before that had been posting abusive comments on Loftus’s blog and who apparently was led to my blog from the same source. I initially took the second crackpot to be the same person as the first, operating under a different name; but eventually it became clear that Crackpot Number Two differed from Mr. Loony in two important respects: one, he could express himself in coherent sentences; and two, he was a pretty serious Jew-hater. (One of his comments was signed “Schicklgruber.”)

Obviously, I did not care to have such obnoxious comments appear even momentarily on my blog. I was also concerned that they might be posted during times when I was away from my computer and would not know about them. So I had to introduce moderation of comments. This, of course, provoked the infuriated Crackpot Two to much the same kind of childish taunt as my deletion of Mr. Loony’s comments had provoked him. “Why do you [and John Loftus] have to hide, like rats, behind comment moderation?”, was his virtually self-answering question.

Now I don’t get a lot of comments on my blog, so I can’t afford to be picky. I am usually delighted to see that a reader has taken the trouble to write something in response to one of my posts. But I do not care to see my “comments” sections turned into a platform for lunatics, crackpots, and Jew-haters. So, at least for a little while, I am obliged to subject comments to moderation. I just wish that the likes of Mr. Loony and Crackpot Two would subject themselves to it.

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Pat Robertson, Propagandist for Atheism?

There have been many reports of what Robertson said about Haiti and many condemnations of it; what is missing from public discourse is an account of what exactly is outrageous about what he said.

First, just so that it’s clear what I’m talking about, here are the notorious words uttered by Pat Robertson on his program The 700 Club on January 13, 2010 (transcription from Media Matters, where the video can also be seen):

And, you know, Kristi, something happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French. You know, Napoleon III and whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, “We will serve you if you will get us free from the French.” True story. And so, the devil said, “OK, it’s a deal.” And they kicked the French out. You know, the Haitians revolted and got themselves free. But ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after the other. Desperately poor. That island of Hispaniola is one island. It’s cut down the middle. On the one side is Haiti; on the other side is the Dominican Republic. Dominican Republic is prosperous, healthy, full of resorts, et cetera. Haiti is in desperate poverty. Same island. They need to have and we need to pray for them a great turning to God. 

Of course, Pat Robertson’s notion of what constitutes a “true story” can be gauged by the crackpot theory of a two-hundred-year-old plot for global domination by Jewish bankers, Freemasons, the “Illuminati,” and other Satanists that he expounded in his 1994 book The New World Order. An account of its contents may be found in Michael Lind’s Up from Conservatism: Why the Right Is Wrong for America (New York: Free Press, 1996), pp. 99–120, or on line in “New World Order, Old World Anti-Semitism,” an article by Ephraim Radner that appeared in Christian Century for September 13, 1995. A single paragraph from Radner’s article will give you the flavor of Robertson’s thinking:

Robertson traces the historical progress of this conspiracy, back to Lucifer and his machinations in antiquity. In the modem era the conspiracy has been promoted through a small secret society founded in late 18th-century, Bavaria called the Illuminati, whose members purportedly infiltrated Freemasonry, organized the French Revolution, recruited Friedrick Engels and other communists to their cause and orchestrated the Bolshexik takeover of Russia. Through their control of international banking, the Illuminati-dominated servants of Satan, according to Robertson, have imposed a system of national and private credit and interest that has saddled the nation with debilitating and enslaving debt, robbing the American people at once of their independence and their control over their religious life.

Getting back to Robertson’s more recent outburst of paranoiac idiocy, one should note that his so-called “true story” actually has what might be described, if misleadingly, as a historical basis. The event that presumably caused his febrile brain to conceive that the Haitians swore a “pact to the devil” was a religious ceremony that reputedly took place on August 14, 1791, at Bois Caïman in what is now Haiti under the leadership of a slave and vodou priest or houdon named Dutty Boukman. (Whether this event actually occurred seems to be a matter of dispute.) Boukman reputedly prophesied on that occasion that the slaves of Saint-Domingue (as the colony occupying the territory of what is now the Republic of Haiti was then called) would rise up and overthrow their white masters. On August 22, an uprising began, in the course of which Boukman was captured and killed by the French authorities. The revolt continued without him, and in two years’ time, slavery in Saint-Domingue was at an end. By the end of 1803, the Haitians had overthrown and expelled the French (who, by the way, were under the rule of Napoleon Bonaparte at the time; Napoleon III was not born until 1808).

The idea of a pact with Satan, as far as I can gather, is just more of the sort of lurid fantasy habitually extruded by the brains of right-wing religious fanatics like Robertson. I suspect that in his view any religious practice much different from the Evangelical Protestantism with which he is comfortable is Satanic worship.

But the benighted and delusional character of Robertson’s version of history, however interesting, is really not the issue. What has made his remarks notorious is the fact that they identify the earthquake in Haiti, and other misfortunes that have dogged the history of that nation, as divine retribution. This sort of utterance on his part is nothing new. As Media Matters points out, Robertson has a record of indulging in such prophecy:

• Remember when Jerry Falwell said, two days after the events of September 11, 2001, “I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the A.C.L.U., People for the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America, I point the finger in their face and say, ‘You helped this happen’”? He said that when he was appearing as Robertson’s guest on The 700 Club, and Robertson’s reply was, “I totally concur.” Though Robertson seems subsequently to have tried to put some distance between himself and Falwell’s remarks (he described them as “totally inappropriate,” a phrase that in the perverted moral discourse of the present day passes for severe condemnation, though really it only faults Falwell’s choice of occasion and not the content of what he said), he also issued a written statement that made his stance on this issue perfectly clear: “We have insulted God at the highest level of our government. Then, we say, ‘Why does this happen?’ It is happening because God Almighty is lifting His protection from us.”


• On The 700 Club for September 12, 2005, Robertson intimated—though he did not plainly assert—that the occurrence of the Hurricane Katrina disaster and terrorist attacks on the US was due to the legality of abortion here (transcript again from Media Matters):
  
  
  

  We have killed over 40 million unborn babies in America. I was reading, yesterday, a book that was very interesting about what God has to say in the Old Testament about those who shed innocent blood. And he used the term that those who do this, “the land will vomit you out.” . . . You look at the book of Leviticus and see what it says there. And this author of this said, “Well, ‘vomit out’ means you are not able to defend yourself.” But have we found we are unable somehow to defend ourselves against some of the attacks that are coming against us, either by terrorists or now by natural disaster? Could they be connected in some way? And he goes down the list of the things that God says will cause a nation to lose its possession, and to be vomited out. And the amazing thing is, a judge has now got to say, “I will support the wholesale slaughter of innocent children” in order to get confirmed to the bench.

• On The 700 Club for January 5, 2006, Robertson attributed the stroke that paralyzed Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and the murder of his predecessor Yitzhak Rabin to their having tried to divide God’s land, in defiance of biblical prophesy. Robertson said (transcript again from Media Matters):
  
  
  

  The prophet Joel makes it very clear that God has enmity against those who, quote, “divide my land.” God considers this land to be his. You read the Bible, he says, “This is my land.” And for any prime minister of Israel who decides he going carve it up and give it away, God says, “No. This is mine.” And the same thing—I had a wonderful meeting with Yitzhak Rabin in 1974. He was tragically assassinated, and it was terrible thing that happened, but nevertheless, he was dead. And now Ariel Sharon, who was again a very likeable person, a delightful person to be with. I prayed with him personally. But here he is at the point of death. He was dividing God’s land, and I would say woe unto any prime minister of Israel who takes a similar course to appease the EU, the United Nations or United States of America. God said, “This land belongs to me, you better leave it alone.”

  By the way, the passage to which Robertson alludes is this one:
  
  
  

  For behold, in those days and at that time, when I restore the fortunes of Judah and Jerusalem, I will gather all the nations and bring them down to the Valley of Jehoshaphat. And I will enter into judgment with them there, on behalf of my people and my heritage Israel, because they have scattered them among the nations and have divided up my land, and have cast lots for my people, and have traded a boy for a prostitute, and have sold a girl for wine and have drunk it. (Joel 3:1–3, English Standard Version)

  Setting aside the question of how anyone in his right mind can take a bit of ancient literature purported to record divine utterances as a title deed to an entire country, it is obvious that the passage promises divine judgment upon foreign nations that have conquered the land of Israel and dispersed the Israelites among other nations, not upon Israelites in possession of the land who have given away some of it.
  
  

So Robertson has been at this sort of thing for a while, and we can expect that as long as he is with us he will provide more of it. What I find curious, and rather frustrating, about the reaction to his remarks in public written media is how elliptical the comments have been. Trolling through the Google and Google News search results for “Pat Robertson Haiti,” what I find, besides bare reports of what he said, consists almost entirely of remarks or exclamations on how outrageous, offensive, absurd, insane, moronic, insensitive, inhumane, and so on it is, or he is. What I have not found is an explanation of what exactly is outrageous, offensive, and so on about it.

Perhaps it is felt that the point is too obvious to merit explanation. Well, I grant that it is obvious that what Robertson said is outrageous and so on. I do not question that for a moment. What I want to know is: why is it outrageous? What makes it so? Is it the idea that the catastrophes that have befallen the people of Haiti—mutatis mutandis the people of New Orleans, of New York City, of the United States, and so on—are in some measure the fault of the victims? Is it the idea that the victims, or some of them, or some of their ancestors, have incurred God’s wrath? Is it the pretense to prophetic knowledge of how God works in the world? Is it not the thoughts themselves but merely the act of giving public utterance to them? (Were they merely, as Robertson said of Jerry Falwell’s remarks about the September 11 attacks, “totally inappropriate”?) It may well be that different people have different reasons for being outraged by Robertson’s remarks. But if there are so many reasons, why have I heard so little about any of them?

I have, as of the moment of writing, seen only one published comment on Robertson’s remarks that contains any analysis or explanation at all: an entry by Ronald Lindsay in the blog of the Center for Inquiry under the title “One Cheer (Amid a Chorus of Boos) for Pat Robertson.” Lindsay offers Robertson a left-handed commendation for exposing by his example the absurdity of religious belief. He writes:

In recent years, in response to increased critical examination of religion, many liberal religious apologists have claimed that these critiques of religion have it all wrong. There is no all-powerful, personal God, overseeing and intervening in our world, who guides hurricanes away or toward land depending on His will. Instead, there is only some nebulous spirit or life-force that fills us with joy, and makes us want to join hands and sing “Kumbaya.” In fact, some scholars, such as Karen Armstrong, argue that religion is not about belief in a personal God at all, but about commitment and activity.

For the ordinary believer this is all rubbish. Ordinary believers—and they do believe—have faith in a robust God, who can deliver them from evil (or not). Pat Robertson reflects the views of the ordinary believer. You see them all the time on TV being interviewed after some natural disaster. They claim they prayed to God to spare them from the tornado/hurricane/earthquake and God answered their prayers. Notably, the people who died can’t speak to the issue of why their prayers were not answered, but Robertson at least tries to offer an explanation. The victims were cursed for some reason, and in the case of Haiti it was because of an imprudent pact with the Devil. (Is there ever a prudent pact with the Devil?)

Of course, Pat Robertson’s claim is absurd. But his claim usefully underscores the absurdity of religious belief in general, instead of obscuring it with a veil of touchy-feely doubletalk.

In other words, Robertson, in Lindsay’s view, is a reductio ad absurdum of religious belief, and thus a walking argument for atheism. Sophisticated apologists for religion like Karen Armstrong try to disown the excesses of such cranks, but their notions of what it means to believe in God have little bearing on what ordinary religious people actually believe. Ordinary religious people believe in a God that intervenes in the affairs of the world to reward the faithful and punish the unfaithful—the God of Pat Robertson, or something very like it. Many of them may dislike Robertson’s conclusions, but they are committed to the same premises and the same logic. His absurdities are therefore theirs.

Thus Lindsay. Now there is an obvious non sequitur here. Granted that, as Lindsay claims, the lofty sophistications of theology do not reflect the beliefs of ordinary religious people, and granted that, as he also claims, the beliefs of ordinary religious people entail the absurd conclusions of a Pat Robertson, it does not follow that Robertson’s conclusions exhibit “the absurdity of religious belief in general.” All that follows is that they exhibit the absurdities of common forms of religious belief.

That conclusion, however, seems to me notable by itself; and it suggests to me an explanation of why so little has been said about what was outrageous in Robertson’s remarks. Most people who believe in God, I suspect, would disavow any claim to prophetic insight. They would deny that they know what worldly events may be attributed to God’s influence, or what God “means” by them. Yet nearly all such people believe that worldly events do show God’s influence and that God does mean something by them. So even if they disclaim knowledge of how God works in the world, they feel free—or perhaps “compelled” would be more like it—to venture judgments about such matters. The lone survivor of an automobile collision says, “God must have kept me alive for a reason!” Oh, and did he cause everyone else to be killed for an equally good reason? Someone makes repeated efforts to succeed in a certain line of work before finally giving up: “God must have meant me for other things.” Well, that is one way to reassure yourself that you made the right choice: pretend that your perfectly ordinary human decision had divine authorization. And so on.

People who think this way may find Robertson’s conclusions offensive because it is inhumane toward the victims of catastrophe to believe such things; or they may condemn his giving public utterance to such conclusions as “totally inappropriate”; neither objection has anything to do with the truth or falsehood of the conclusions. Such objections leave standing the possibility that what Robertson says, his historical delusions aside, may be perfectly true: they merely fault him for saying or perhaps merely believing such things. I suspect that the reason why we do not hear much about what is outrageous in his remarks is that identifying it means identifying what is outrageous in widely and strongly held religious beliefs, namely the idea that God’s actions and intentions can be discerned in worldly events.

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