FATHER FRANK’S RANTS - 2010 Horoscope

Rant Number 378 31 December 2009

A rich man gave a banquet. Wanting to offer his twelve guests some milk, he despatched a servant to the market to buy it. As this is a tale of old, the woman went along carrying a large, lidless pot on her head. After getting the milk, as she walked back, unbeknownst to her a kite alighted on the pot. Now, the kite held a snake in its claws. Squeezed tight by the bird of prey, the snake vomited its poison into the pot. The servant, noticing nothing, returned home. The guests all drank the milk and they died amidst atrocious pains. Dismayed, the lord of the house summoned seven wise men and begged of them: ‘Tell me, o philosophers, who is responsible for this terrible tragedy? Who is guilty?’

The first replied: ‘You are guilty. You should have got the servant to taste it first and only after that given to the guests.’

Another philosopher disagreed: ‘It is the snake’s fault, surely.’

‘Nonsense’, another said, ‘You can’t reproach the reptile. Grasped as it was in the kite’s claws, the snake was forced to eject its poison. Hence it cannot be blamed.’

A fourth wise man opined: ‘Well, then it follows it is the kite’s fault.’

The fifth philosopher was yet of another opinion: ‘You forget that God has created every animal so that it may feed on what is appropriate to its nature. Hence the kite is driven to eat serpents and the like. How could you blame him?’

That did not convince a sixth thinker: ‘Irrelevant. It all goes back to the careless woman. She should have covered the pot with a lid. Nothing would then have happened.’

Lastly the lord of the house, perplexed, turned to the seventh wise man: ‘And you – who do you say is the guilty one?’

The answer was that each of the previous respondents had grasped a bit of truth but not the whole truth: ‘My fellow philosophers are not wholly wrong, but in reality the tragedy has befallen your guests simply because fate had so ordained – they just had to die the way their did. Too bad.’

Is that right? Fate – is that the lord of us all? Is people’s responsibility for their actions a snare and an illusion? Were the Stoic thinkers correct in seeing all events as the inevitable effects of what has preceded them? Like physicist Laplace, who believed that everything that happens in the physical world is the inevitable result of antecedent causes and circumstances. If so, an omniscient caster of horoscopes could well predict what will happen to you and I and everybody else in 2010, couldn’t he?

Fate is not the same as Providence – God in his protective care of nature and men. ‘God was at work behind the death of the twelve guests’, a naive believer might say. Like some people argued about the horrors of 9/11. Asked how God was involved, the believer could fall back on mystery. A cop out! Mystery is fine, sure, but not in intellectual, rational matters. ‘The twelve guests were sinners’, the naive believer fights back. ‘They deserved to die.’ Well, if sinners qua sinners deserved instant death the world would be a huge graveyard. Mortal sin, the most grave sin, is a different matter. Some of the guests might have been guilty of dreadful crimes but surely not all of them? ‘God knows something you don’t know’, my believer retorts. Absolutely. Could not agree more. Maybe he knew one of the guests was going to father another Stalin or Pol Pot or Tony Blair – Divine Providence wanted to spare us that. But, again, not all twelve of them? Ditto for the victims of 9/11. Never mind how implicated some of them might have been in the criminal worlds of rip-off investment banking and dodgy high finance, they cannot have been all equally guilty.

‘God is the Lord of all life. What he gives, he can take away whenever he wishes.’ Could the priest disagree with that? But what kind of God are we talking about? The dark lord of Zoroastrianism, Ahriman? An evil God? Because only such deity would deliberately kill the innocent. The God of the Christian revelation is love and mercy. And Muslims constantly invoke Allah, ‘the Compassionate, the Merciful’. To act otherwise, to murder the innocent, would be contrary to God’s nature, his goodness – something incoherent, self-contradictory, absurd.

No, the naive theist’s answer won’t do. Nor will it the quantum physicist’s defence of human free will invoked by upholders of man’s freedom versus determinism. The indeterminacy of sub-atomic events. (Old Epicurus tried it, with his atomic ‘swerve’.) Quantum physics abolishes physical determinism all right but it cannot establish human freedom. Sub-atom events may be random but freedom is not randomness.

In fact, the strongest argument for human free will, as Carneades pointed out long ago, lies in introspection. Your subjective experience of freedom. The innate feeling human beings have of being free agents, not robots. Dr Johnson’s answer to Boswell suffices: ‘We know we are free, sir, and that’s the end of that.’ Perfect.

Back to the initial story. The priest’s tentative, imperfect response. The snake and the kite obviously bear no guilt, because beasts are beyond moral responsibility – unlike human beings, who have duties towards animals. The lord of the house should perhaps have taken more care in what he served to his friends. The servant was definitely negligent in not covering the pot but she did not intend anyone’s death, of course. I am glad the Stoic writer Manilius is not a judge in this case – he would have executed the poor woman anyway, not because she bore any substantial guilt but as a warning to all careless people to take more care in future. Tough, but then Stoics were like that.

Fate and Providence are not identical. The nexus, the weaving together of causes that led to the accidental deaths of the guests constitutes what we call fate but God can turn the workings of fate to his own ends. So Fate is subordinate to Providence.

As to 2010 horoscopes. They are all nonsense. The only exceptions are divine horoscopes. Those God would cast. His omniscience assures us of that. True, some misguided people, like the heretical Anglican theologian Keith Ward, hold that God cannot know the outcome of genuinely free action. Stuff and nonsense. Ward’s god is useless. A eunuch’s god. Not the supreme, all-knowing Lord of Scripture and of the best theistic philosophy.

Here is the priest’s own, general horoscope for 2010 - after that excellent woman, Julian of Norwich: ‘All will be well and all will be well and all manner of things will be well.’

Revd Frank Julian Gelli