The tragic shootings at Virginia Tech last week still loom large in our media-saturated collective consciousness. I wish peace and comfort for those who lost family members, friends, or loved ones to the shooter’s rampage. “Mourning with those who mourn” does seem the most appropriate response at this moment. And yet I feel the need to comment on some of the religious talk that has sprung up around this tragedy.

On the afternoon of the shooting, I heard a brief snippet of one of those “human interest” interviews with a parent whose son had stayed home from his Virginia Tech classes that day because he was ill. His mother made a comment very close to (though I cannot quote it exactly), “God was protecting him today.” Obviously this is a pious sentiment, and I am undoubtedly a rank fiend for subjecting this woman’s on-camera remark to critical theological scrutiny, yet I cannot let this statement lie without comment. I object to this mother’s sentiment because it clearly implies that God was not protecting the victims of the shooting—which in turn implies that, for some reason, God cared more about this woman’s son than about the other women’s sons and daughters who were gunned down. I cannot disprove this conclusion, but I find it horrifying to think that God selectively protected this one individual and failed or declined to do so for the others involved.

Of course, whenever a sudden, unexpected tragedy grips our attention, religious folk are troubled by the question of God’s apparent “hands-off” approach to such tragedies. Though on a smaller numerical scale, the congregation I now attend was rocked by just such a tragedy on the weekend we joined the church. A vanload of teenagers from our church was involved in a devastating auto accident, resulting in one death, many physical scars and ongoing medical problems, and much, much emotional pain. Our congregation turned to lament in that time of need, and I heard some of the most honest and gut-wrenching public prayers I’ve ever experienced on that same day.

I have no answers for those who mourn the victims of last week’s shootings, or the traffic accident four years ago, or any other tragedy. To me, the “problem of evil” is deep and perplexing, and has been for a long time. The intractability of this problem does not incline me toward atheism; it does not make me doubt God’s existence, but it does cast some very long shadows over God’s character. I may write more about that later, from a theological-philosophical point of view; for now, I’ll just say that struggles with this issue go back a long, long time (see the book of Job and a number of the biblical psalms).

However, I categorically reject the insane rantings of the Westboro “Baptist” “Church”, whose spokespersons claim that God sent the shooter to kill his victims. The “church” has pulled its plans to picket the funerals of those killed in the massacre, in exchange for national exposure on Mike Gallagher’s radio show. Shirley Phelps-Roper, daughter of the “church’s” founder, tireless hatemonger Fred Phelps, told CBS that “The evidence is they were not Christians. God does not do that to his servants. … You don’t need to look any further for evidence those people are in hell.” Phelps-Roper sounds like she’s channeling Job’s friend Eliphaz, who was just sure that Job must have been guilty of horrible sins if God had inflicted such punishment upon him. One of the main theological lessons of the book of Job, and to a lesser extent of the book of Ecclesiastes, is that such reasoning is incorrect. According to the authors of these books, you simply cannot reason backwards from suffering to divine displeasure. The alternatives do not necessarily redound to God’s credit, depending on your value judgments of the pictures those books paint, but certainly these books show that Phelps-Roper’s vitriol does not reflect the full range of the biblical witness.

I am also quite put off by Dinesh D’Souza’s feeble attempt to use the VA Tech aftermath as an excuse to take a broad swipe at atheists (as is mapantsula [I don't know his or her real name], an atheist and a professor at VA Tech). I think atheists draw an incorrect conclusion about God’s existence, and I think that a number of potential problems might flow from that, but insensitivity to human grief is not a corollary of rationalism or atheism. D’Souza claims that “if it’s difficult to know where God is when bad things happen, it is even more difficult for atheism to deal with the problem of evil,” but D’Souza is just plain wrong about that. In fact, atheists and theists can explain the Virginia Tech tragedy in exactly the same way: a deranged kid went off the rails and shot up a bunch of his fellow students, professors, and bystanders. For an atheist, there is no “problem of evil,” except for the problem of how to get people to stop doing it. The “problem of evil” in philosophical theology is how to reconcile the occurrence of evil in our world with the professed goodness of God. If there is no God, there is no problem of evil. As a theist myself, I almost envy atheists for the fact that the “problem of evil” is a non-issue for them. The only issue is how to prevent lunatics from getting a hold of guns.