Godforsaken – Dinesh DSouza

These are the processes—including earthquakes and volcanic eruptions—that give us land and water and air and warmth. In the past, it was intellectually respectable to conjecture that these processes were optional or incidental, so that a truly good God could have subtracted them and we could all live happily in an environment without some or most of these processes.

Voltaire could get away with that two centuries ago, but today his position is an intellectual embarrassment. Today it is scientifically ignorant to say that we can do without natural processes like earthquakes, destructive and dangerous though they may sometimes be, and yet have our kind of a planet with humans in it. The same natural phenomena that are indispensable to our existence on earth are also responsible for our natural calamities, yes— but these calamities are not gratuitous but rather intrinsic to processes that are fundamentally life affirming.

Why We Get Sick Now we turn to a second broad source of natural suffering, which is disease. Whereas earthquakes and tsunamis can kill spectacular numbers of people in a single day, disease typically gets us one by one but kills far more systematically and effectively. A few years ago, the writer Joan Didion lost her husband unexpectedly.

Didion’s account of her suffering, the well-known The Year of Magical Thinking, is heartbreaking. And eventually she points the accusing finger at God. “No eye,” she concludes, “was on the sparrow.”112 Like an earthquake, disease appears to be a crime of nature, another “act of God” that cannot be blamed on human action.

In his book Plagues and Peoples, however, historian William McNeill argues that this is not entirely so. Many diseases and virtually all plagues are spread and exacerbated by human behavior. For instance, the domestication of animals, useful in many respects, also imported a whole range of diseases that were previously confined to four-legged creatures. Wars and migrations, such as the Mongol conquests of large parts of Central Asia and Europe, and also the European discovery of the New World, brought in their wake deadly diseases to which native populations had no immunity.

The Native American population, for example, was severely thinned not by genocide but largely by epidemics of malaria and diseases to which the indigenous peoples had no resistance.113 Even cancer, at its current levels of magnitude, is related to our modern way of life. In Why We Get Sick, Randolph Nesse and George Williams write that the incidence of breast and ovarian cancer in women is connected to the number of children they have.

Visit Tyndale online at www.tyndale.com. TYNDALE and Tyndale’s quill logo are registered trademarks of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc. Godforsaken: Bad things happen. Is there a God who cares? Yes. Here’s proof. Copyright © 2012 by Dinesh D’Souza. All rights reserved. Author photo copyright © 2010 by Dixie D’Souza. All rights reserved. Designed by Jessie McGrath Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004, 2007 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188.

All rights reserved. Scripture quotations marked NIV and in the epigraph are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version,® NIV.® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com. Scripture quotations marked KJV are taken from the Holy Bible, King James Version. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data D’Souza, Dinesh, date. Godforsaken : Bad things happen. Is there a God who cares? Yes. Here’s proof. / Dinesh D’Souza. pages cm Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-1-4143-2485-2 (hc) 1. Suffering—Religious aspects—Christianity. 2. God (Christianity)—Goodness. 3. Christian life. I. Title. BV4909.D84 2012 231´.8—dc23 2011049946 OceanofPDF.com For Lee and Allie Hanley, whose love of our country and our Lord is a great inspiration to me OceanofPDF.com Table of Contents Part 1: Introduction Chapter 1: An Immigrant’s Journey Chapter 2: Wounded Theism Part 2: A Universal Conundrum Chapter 3: The Limits of Theodicy Chapter 4: Atheist Delusions Part 3: Moral Evil Chapter 5: Free to Choose Chapter 6: Choices and Consequences Part 4: Crimes of Nature Chapter 7: Acts of God Chapter 8: Red in Tooth and Claw Chapter 9: A Fine-Tuned Universe Part 5: The Character of God Chapter 10: Create or Not Chapter 11: Rage of Yahweh Chapter 12: Abandon All Hope Part 6: Conclusion Chapter 13: Not Forsaken Acknowledgments About the Author Notes OceanofPDF.com My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

PSALM 22:1 OceanofPDF.com Part 1 Introduction OceanofPDF.com Chapter 1 An Immigrant’s Journey The Paradox of Suffering That to the height of this great argument I may assert Eternal Providence, And justify the ways of God to men.1 JOHN MILTON, Paradise Lost Each one of us, at some point in our lives, will find ourselves staring death in the face. None of us can escape that grim reality.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

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