Father Frank - My response to Stephen Fry's idiotic atheism. THE FOOL 620

‘The Fool has said in his heart: there is no God’, states majestically the Psalmist. Why does that make me think of unfunny comedian Stephen Fry?

Fry’s god is not quite non-existent. He simply is ‘utterly evil, capricious and monstrous’, this modern fool asserts in an interview. Because God’s world is a place of ‘pain and injustice’, the portly, double-chinned nincompoop continues. Yawn…the old problem of evil. It has a kind of prima facie cogency. Evil exists. So does stupidity. Why does God allow or tolerate the existence of creeps like Tony Blair or of puffed-up imbeciles like Stephen Fry? Why?

Rowan Williams, a wise fool, has observed that Fry did not wait for God to reply. But God’s silence is part of the answer. It shows he is a deity kind enough to put up with tiresome idiots. Yet the priest wished to pursue another line. I imagine foolish Fry suddenly seized with the ghastly realisation of his own nullity, of the utter senselessness, the hollowness of his being. He muses: ‘I may be a best-loved figure in moronic middle-class Britain and yet I know I am a fake, I am nothing. Why, o why am I like this? It is cruel, it is tormenting, it hurts me…Why is this? Whose fault…maybe God’s?’

So now Fry, in the grip of existential Angst, addresses his Creator, like Job: ‘Your votaries claim you are the benevolent, beneficent One. That you care for your creatures. Why then have you made me, not just a fool, but also into a fool painfully aware of my meaninglessness? My absurdity? My uselessness? It is too awful! Please, I implore you, change me! Cause me to have been created different. As a truly wise, better person.’

God, the Loving One, hears the voice of the repentant fool and takes pity. So he sends one of his angels to take Fry into a magical mind’s journey. To an immense palace that displays all human destinies ever been, of which the angel is the custodian. Like on a cosmic, well-nigh infinite screen, the palace’s galleries show the representation of both what happens and what is possible. ‘You see, Stephen, before God created you in this world in which you rightly feel so useless, he reviewed in his infinite mind all possibilities. Behold these possible worlds here on show, as if contained in God’s eternal plan. I will show you a possible world in which you are different from what you are now. One in which you are a genuinely clever, intelligent person. Another one in which you are a saint. Still another one in which you are a rampant heterosexual. Another in which you are a dustman… In sum, all sorts of Stephen Frys, in an infinity of combinations.’

‘Now note how this immense palace forms a pyramid’, the angel says. ‘See how gorgeous the galleries become as you look higher and higher? It is because the possible worlds exhibited there get better and better. Contrariwise, you cannot see the pyramid’s bottom. Because it is infinite, as there are no limits to less perfect possibilities. But now look at the pyramid’s top. How shiny, how beautiful! That is so because it shows the best of all possible worlds. It is our world, our actual reality, which God has chosen to create. Look and see your own life there. How you make inane jokes. How pathetic a scribbler you are. How you rightly feel despair at your own emptiness. You ask the Creator why he has made you like that? But if he had made you into a virtuous and wise Fry, it would not logically be in this world, our world, would it? And yet it flows right out of God’s nature, of his infinite goodness that he chose to create this particular world. The world at the pyramid’s top, which is the best. Had he acted otherwise, God would have not have created the best. He would have contradicted his own wisdom, see?’

Fry’s tiny mind cannot grasp high angelic reasoning. ‘But…Is it not still my Maker’s fault that I am a bonehead?’

Patiently, the angel responds: ‘God has not created you stupid. God only allowed your possible existence to be actual. You were stupid from all eternity but because of your own choice, your own free will. Had you chosen to investigate the matter of God’s existence and nature for real, instead of spouting cretinous comments, you would have got it. In his infinite wisdom, God saw how your stupidity enters into the reasons for this world. What’s that? To make thoughtful and sane people aware of the foolishness, the idiocy, the mindlessness of atheism. Part of the divine economy. It is called Providence, you big thicko!’

OK, I admit it. The philosopher Leibniz has inspired the above reasoning. In God’s world all things and events, even bad or wicked or idiotic ones, work for the best. So you can smile at drivelling atheists and scoffers like Fry. Unbeknown to him, he serves the Creator’s purpose. Believers need not fear or get angry. 

As the Apostle Paul proclaims: ‘’O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgements and how inscrutable are his ways…For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory for ever. Amen.’ 

Revd Frank Julian Gell