The existence of suffering in the world has made people question their faith for millennia. And yet many believers, rather than reject their faith, attempt to understand the purpose of the suffering. They see it as part of God’s plan.
A disastrous event may even enhance one’s belief in a master planner. Kurt Gray of the University of Maryland and Daniel Wegner of Harvard have proposed a dyadic template for morality: if there’s a recipient of help or harm, we assume there is someone doing the helping or harming—creating a dyad of do-ee and do-er. They argue that we make liberal use of the template: if there’s no obvious responsible party, we find a scapegoat. And what happens if no acceptable scapegoats are in sight? We credit a supernatural one.
Gray and Wegner presented subjects who believed in a higher power with one of four stories. In all four versions, a family is picnicking in a valley when the water level rises. In half the stories, lunch is ruined by the flood, and in the other half lunch is really ruined because everyone drowns. Also, in half the stories a dam worker is said to have caused the flood, and in half of them the cause of the flood is unknown. Subjects then rated how much the story’s outcome was part of God’s plan. God drew much more blame when people died and no one was clearly responsible than in the other three scenarioses. The tragedy needed an explanation, and human intervention wasn’t an option.
We’ve seen similar stories in the news. Both Christian and Muslim leaders claimed the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that killed a quarter of a million people in Indonesia was punishment from God. After Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans in 2005, Mayor Ray Nagin said God was “mad at America” for the Iraq war, while a Christian group noted a resemblance between a satellite image of the storm and an ultrasound image of a fetus, suggesting that Katrina came to avenge the “ten child-murder-by-abortion centers” in Louisiana. Glenn Beck called the earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan in early 2011 a “message” to humanity. And of course Noah would have something to say on the matter of floods. It’s no coincidence the legal term for an unpreventable natural disaster is an “act of God.”
We might even give more credit to a higher power for bad stuff than for good stuff. Carey Morewedge of Carnegie Mellon has found a negative agency bias—a tendency to attribute negative events more than positive events to agents. In one of his studies, subjects played a game of chance where an impartial other player could secretly intervene on some rounds of the game. Subjects were most likely to suspect the other player had stepped in when they lost money, particularly when they lost big.
If you’re one to see the good in people, and assume others are too, you might look askance at this negative agency bias waltzing in here and telling you that looking askance is actually something you do quite often. But wait—it can explain! We tend to think more about what causes negative experiences than positive experiences, in part because they’re more unexpected and in part because they mean something’s wrong and needs diagnosing and fixing. And our favorite types of explanations are those involving intentional agents (usually a person or animal), rather than chance or impersonal causality, because we can do more with that information. So it makes logical sense that good fortune goes unquestioned but disruptions become whodunits. In research by Ronnie Janoff-Bulman of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and collaborators, everyone in a sample of paralysis victims asked “Why me?” and all but one settled on an answer, but only half of a sample of lottery winners asked and answered the question. (Among the twenty-nine victims, ten blamed God, seven credited predetermination—a more implicit version of a divine plan – six cited benefits to the ordeal – invoking teleology – and two noted moral deservedness – and thus karma.)
The negative agency bias also results from the fact that we like to take credit for positive outcomes and blame failures on someone else.
Gray and Wegner suspected that if acts of consequence, particularly unfavorable consequence, arouse feelings of divine authorship, then those who suffer the most should have the most reason to believe in God. They propose that people believe in a “God of the moral gaps” who fills in when mortal scapegoats are unavailable. So they plotted fifty points on a chart, each representing one U.S. state. One dimension represented scores on a “misery index” accounting for such factors as rates of infectious disease and infant mortality, and the other dimension represented the strength of citizens’ religious beliefs. The pattern was clear; they found a strong positive correlation between misery and the Almighty, even controlling for income and education. The more “acts of God,” the more God. (If you ask people explicitly whether a bad event or a good event is more likely to be caused by God, those who believe in a loving God will probably upon reflection say the good event, but the bad event is still more likely to arouse spontaneous blame.)
Gray and Wegner offer an alternative account for their misery index findings: suffering leads people to seek comfort in a higher power. They suggest the needs for comfort and blame likely work in tandem: “God may be both the cause and cure of hardship,” they write. Homer Simpson demonstrated his understanding of this funky logic when he gave his most famous toast: "To alcohol! The cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems."
