A second, stronger claim was lying within Mourdock’s first claim: not just that good may emerge from bad things, but that since God intends the good to emerge, he must also intend the bad things. This is a hard idea, and people naturally flee from it, but its logic is implicit in the Biblical stories that Ehrman mentions. God knew in advance everything that was going to happen to Job—indeed, it was a little game he hatched with Satan. If the great good of the resurrection was a result of the crucifixion, then it makes no sense to separate the one from the other: both events were divinely intended, divinely anticipated. I give the reprehensible Mourdock some credit, at least, for spelling out the implacable and pitiless logic of divine foreknowledge. Most believers refuse to face the implications of their own beliefs in this regard, except when it suits them: that is, when they think they have been “saved” by God from some terrible calamity. Climbing out of the wreckage of the bus accident or the gas explosion or the terrorist bomb, the relieved survivor easily praises God for “the miracle” of his survival, and sometimes even adds that “God must be looking out for me,” apparently unaware that the same God must therefore have approved the demise of the person who didn’t make it out. If God is the author of “miracles,” he is also the author of death. (And it might be added that Mitt Romney, and all those who argue that life begins at conception but who allow an abortion exception in the case of rape and incest, are also refusing to face the implications of their hesitations: for if abortion is murder but abortion is permissible in certain circumstances, then either it must follow that murderous abortion is permissible when an adult life is more important than a fetus’; or it must follow that a fetus conceived by rape or incest is simply not a human life. Again, Mourdock is coherent where Romney and others are incoherent.)
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