John Cleese over on X, reacting to the claim that God saved Trump from death in Pennsylvania, asked “Why did God put the shooter on the roof in the first place?”
As you know, I’m an atheist—and, if you didn’t know, an admirer of John Cleese for his comic genius. Nobody can take away his body of work. But what Cleese says here grossly distorts the Judeo-Christian view on divine intervention. No, I don’t think Cleese is being funny here. He has established a pattern concerning matters of religion.
Contrary to Cleese’s straw man, Christians and Jews believe that man’s capacity for free will is a feature of creation. God didn’t need to put a shooter on the roof. The shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, had his own motivation—and he represented the will of a great many people, as we have seen in polling on the question. Indeed, we infer his motive based on popular sentiment, since Crooks cannot be questioned because of the fact that he is deceased, shot dead by a Secret Service sniper.
The actual question is why God prevented the shooter from accomplishing his goal, the very question Cleese is trying to avoid or obscure. That’s a question of divine intervention. Divine intervention is a species of miracle. Miracles are extraordinary events, not the routine force behind human action or natural processes. God set the universe in motion and only occasionally intervenes. Miracles are for major course corrections or assists. God leaves everything else to the unfolding, a big part of which depends on the successes and failings of men, which we know as history.
Human agency is a vital part of God’s plan, and its importance is revealed straightway in the Bible. The first woman, Eve, transgresses God’s command that she and her mate, Adam, not partake of the Fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil God planted in the Garden of Eden. God made Eve so that she could be deceived by a serpent. The meaning of the story is that it’s left to all of us to make good and right judgements, not be forced by God to do so. Eve should have resisted temptation. She didn’t, nor did Adam, and for that they were kicked out of Eden. Their wrongful deed was ultimately a good thing; as Erich Fromm notes in his 1941 Escape from Freedom, without transgression, human history would not be possible.
There is a scene in A Clockwork Orange where Alex, a juvenile delinquent who murdered a woman, is subjected to the Ludovico Technique, the name given to a form of aversion therapy, in which viewing scenes of crime and violence are paired with a nausea-inducing drug. In the process, he becomes a clockwork orange, a thing that seems outwardly normal and appealing, like a fresh orange, but internally controlled and mechanical in action, like clockwork. A clockwork orange represents a person stripped of free will and manipulated into behaving in a predetermined manner. The virtues of the therapy that made Alex such a thing are extolled by the Minister of the Interior as the future of prison reform.
After demonstrating the success of the procedure at a gathering of political elites and medical doctors, with Alex the experimental subject, the prison chaplain rises to object to the speech of the Minister of the Interior. “Choice!” the chaplain exclaims. “The boy has no real choice, has he? Self-interest, the fear of physical pain drove him to that grotesque act of self-abasement. Its insincerity was clearly to be seen. He ceases to be a wrongdoer. He ceases also to be a creature capable of moral choice.”
In this scene, the state, acting in God’s stead (the wet dream of every authoritarian), is objectionable because total power makes a bad god, one seeking to determine human action by stealing human agency. This is not God’s plan. At least not the Judeo-Christian God. His plan grants human agency, permitting humans to take matters where they wish to, hopefully pursuing good and right courses of action—and avoiding those that lead to bad ends.
This is why society punishes wrongful behavior: the actions are not determined by God (how could they be bad and wrong otherwise?) but by the free will of the wrongdoer. One must choose to be righteous—which literally means to be right in a moral way—not compelled to be such by the state or an omnipotent being. This is a sign of God’s love. God grants mankind liberty because he loves us. It’s no accident that this is the foundation of the American Republic and a free society.
Do I believe God intervened in Pennsylvania? No. Trump turned his head at the last moment to reference a chart on immigration. That is serendipity (albeit many find it unfortunate). Had Trump not turned his head when he did, he would not be our president. Moments like this happen all the time. How many times have you upon approaching an intersection where cars have crashed thought had you not been delayed in your travels you might have been among the dead or injured? “There but for the grace of God go I” is a powerful sentiment, to be sure, but it represents our reflection upon events and the need to make meaning of them.
If one is determined to criticize religious thinking and other forms of mystification, pummeling straw men will not do. Cleese didn’t think this one through carefully. A lot of those who express irreligious sentiment are guilty of this.
freedom and reason 