Chapter 41 — What the Creator Forgot to Tell Us

A question about supposedly timeless moral authority: where are the clear protections concerning trauma, child development, coercion, grooming, consent, dissociation, memory, safeguarding and the vulnerabilities of developing human beings?

A Different Question ↑

There is an easy answer to the question suggested by this chapter's title.

Ancient religious texts did not contain modern psychology, neuroscience, trauma theory, safeguarding practice or child-development science because the people who produced those texts did not possess that knowledge.

That answer is historically unsurprising.

It becomes more interesting when the texts are also presented as carrying the authority of an omniscient creator.

The question is not why an ancient scripture failed to describe modern diagnostic terminology.

The better question is why an all-knowing moral authority did not make some of the underlying principles unmistakably clear.

Not Aeroplanes ↑

I am not asking why scripture failed to explain aeroplanes.

Or antibiotics.

Or genetics.

Or computers.

Those are discoveries about how the physical world works.

My question concerns human vulnerability.

Children.

Power.

Coercion.

Consent.

Fear.

Memory.

Trauma.

The ease with which adults can exploit the dependence of a child.

Those are not merely technological questions.

They are moral ones.

If You Designed the Species ↑

If I were designing a species whose young remained dependent on adults for years, I would regard that dependence as a major vulnerability.

A child believes adults.

A child needs adults.

A child can be frightened by adults.

A child can be made to comply.

A child can be told that obedience is goodness.

A child can be taught that resistance is sin.

A child can be groomed long before the child has language for what is happening.

If those vulnerabilities were known from the beginning, clear protections would seem more useful than leaving later generations to discover them through accumulated suffering.

What Human Beings Had to Discover ↑

Human beings eventually had to work out that a child is not simply a small adult.

That memory is not a perfect recording device.

That terror can change behaviour.

That compliance is not the same as consent.

That silence is not proof that nothing happened.

That trauma can affect memory, emotion, relationships and the body.

That grooming can make exploitation look like trust.

That authority can make resistance dangerous.

That institutions can protect themselves.

That adults who are believed automatically over children can create conditions in which abuse survives.

We learned much of this slowly.

Often after people had already been harmed.

The Safeguarding Manual the Creator Could Have Written ↑

It would not have required modern terminology.

Do not place a child alone under the unchecked authority of an adult.

Do not demand secrecy from children about what adults do to their bodies.

Do not confuse obedience with goodness.

Do not threaten a child with supernatural punishment for disclosure, resistance or doubt.

Believe that adults in positions of trust can still abuse that trust.

Listen when a child says something is wrong.

Investigate the powerful as readily as the powerless.

Do not place the reputation of an institution above the safety of a child.

Those principles would have required no MRI scanner.

No laboratory.

No computer.

Only clarity about power and vulnerability.

The Modern Words Are Not the Point ↑

It would be unfair to demand that an ancient text use the vocabulary of twenty-first-century psychology.

I do not need the word dissociation to ask whether extreme fear can alter consciousness.

I do not need the word grooming to warn that trusted adults may prepare children for exploitation.

I do not need the phrase power imbalance to say that the stronger person has additional responsibilities towards the weaker.

The words could have been different.

The protections did not need to be.

Religious Texts Also Contain Protection ↑

This is not an argument that religious traditions contain nothing humane.

They contain compassion.

Care for strangers.

Condemnations of cruelty.

Obligations towards the poor and vulnerable.

Warnings about hypocrisy and misuse of authority.

Those things matter.

The question is why protections against some of the most predictable forms of human exploitation were not made equally unmistakable.

Was the Message Lost? ↑

A believer can propose several answers.

Perhaps human beings misunderstood the message.

Perhaps institutions corrupted it.

Perhaps revelation was necessarily limited by the cultures through which it passed.

Perhaps human freedom required uncertainty.

Those are theological possibilities.

But each moves some responsibility away from the supposedly perfect source and towards the imperfect human channel.

At some point the human fingerprint becomes difficult to ignore.

How Many Miracles Have You Performed? ↑

I have sometimes wanted to ask a simpler question.

How many miracles have you performed so far?

I have been told many times that human beings were created in the image of God.

I appear to have missed some of the equipment.

I have never turned water into wine.

I have never raised the dead.

I have never multiplied food.

I have never suspended the ordinary operation of nature.

I do not claim that Catholic theology promises me those powers.

It does not.

My problem is the asymmetry.

Extraordinary power is attributed to God when explaining creation, revelation and miracle.

Yet when that power might reasonably be expected to protect a child, expose abuse, prevent war or restrain those exercising religious authority, its absence can become mystery.

Power explains the miracle.

Mystery explains the silence.

That arrangement makes the proposition remarkably difficult to test.

How Many Voices Can Heaven Hear? ↑

I understand that “the right hand of God” is not supposed to describe an infinitely expanding row of celestial chairs.

It is theological language.

But the theology makes another claim which interests me much more.

The Catholic Church teaches that those in heaven remain connected with those on earth and continue to intercede.

That creates a question.

After centuries of intercession, what should we expect to see?

Millions upon millions of believers have died.

Generations have prayed about war.

Children.

Disease.

Hunger.

Corruption.

Violence.

Clerical sexual abuse.

The protection of offenders.

The silencing of people who disclosed what had happened.

If those in heaven remain concerned with the world, and if their intercession has consequence, at what point is it reasonable to ask what consequence we should be able to observe?

This is not the childish question of how many people can physically sit beside God.

It is an evidentiary question.

What would the world look like if the claimed mechanism were operating?

And how would we distinguish that world from one in which human beings pray, events continue according to natural and human causes, and favourable outcomes are later attributed to divine intervention?

Sincere Belief Is Not the Same as Evidence ↑

I do not need to accuse billions of Catholics of lying in order to ask this question.

A person can be completely sincere and still be mistaken.

A proposition does not become established merely because it has been repeated for centuries.

A person can truthfully report that they experienced an answer to prayer.

That establishes something about their experience.

It does not by itself establish the cause.

There is a difference between:

assertion,

belief,

testimony,

evidence,

scientific evidence,

and a metaphysical claim.

Those categories should not be collapsed simply because the subject is religion.

The One-Off Miracle ↑

Suppose somebody recovers unexpectedly from a serious illness.

The recovery is observable.

The timing may be observable.

The diagnosis may be documented.

The medical team may be surprised.

All of that can be evidence.

But “God caused the recovery” is an additional claim.

It requires an additional step.

The extraordinary nature of an outcome does not tell us automatically which explanation caused it.

What About Silence? ↑

There is another capacity I apparently failed to inherit.

I have never developed a religiously convenient ability to remain silent when I possess evidence concerning the sexual abuse of children.

I do not regard that as a defect.

If anything, I regard the opposite as requiring explanation.

If I knew that a child was being sexually abused, possession of that knowledge would create responsibilities for me.

I could not defend silence by saying that my ways were mysterious.

I could not knowingly enable the offender and call my inaction part of a larger plan.

I could not demand praise for my goodness while refusing to explain why I had permitted preventable harm within my control.

Yet when comparable questions are directed towards an omniscient and omnipotent deity, theological language can move the discussion into a realm where ordinary standards of evidence and responsibility cease to operate.

That is precisely the exemption I am questioning.

If Power Increases, Should Responsibility Decrease? ↑

Human beings have produced tyrants.

Organised criminals.

Abusers.

And people capable of extraordinary cruelty.

We do not generally regard their silence in the presence of preventable harm as evidence of superior moral wisdom.

Why should adding unlimited knowledge and unlimited power lower the standard rather than raise it?

The Human Fingerprint ↑

One possibility increasingly interested me.

Perhaps the creator did not forget to tell us.

Perhaps people wrote what people at the time understood.

Perhaps later people attributed a higher authority to those writings.

That possibility does not disprove a creator.

It changes the question of authorship.

A universe may have an origin without every ancient proposition about that origin becoming divine instruction.

Science Is Not Perfect Either ↑

None of this makes science an infallible replacement priesthood.

Science is performed by human beings.

Human beings make mistakes.

Research can be poor.

Results can be overstated.

Institutions can resist unwelcome findings.

The difference I value is methodological.

A scientific claim is supposed to remain answerable to evidence.

It should be possible, at least in principle, for the evidence to win.

The Feynman Problem ↑

The principle I take from Richard Feynman is not that scientists are always right.

It is almost the opposite.

The investigator has to work particularly hard not to fool themselves.

That includes looking for evidence which could destroy the preferred explanation.

I find that method difficult to reconcile with an explanation which can claim success as miracle and absorb failure as mystery.

This Does Not Prove There Is No God ↑

I need to keep that distinction clear.

Failure to establish one description of God does not establish that no creator or deity exists.

The universe remains extraordinary.

There remain questions I cannot answer.

I am comfortable saying:

I do not know.

What I resist is turning uncertainty into permission for somebody else to claim certainty without evidence.

If Humanity Knows Better ↑

We now know more about safeguarding children than the societies which produced ancient scripture.

We know more about trauma.

Memory.

Development.

Coercion.

Institutional abuse.

Consent.

That knowledge creates responsibility.

Whatever explanation somebody gives for why it was absent or obscure in the past, we possess it now.

We cannot hand responsibility back to antiquity.

God May Be Claimed to Be Mysterious. The Paperwork Is Not. ↑

Whatever remains unknowable about God, priests, bishops, institutions and governments are not unknowable in the same way.

They leave documents.

They make decisions.

They receive allegations.

They move people.

They spend money.

They report or fail to report.

They protect children or fail to protect them.

Once human beings act in the world, “mystery” is no substitute for evidence.

God may be claimed to be mysterious.

The paperwork is not.

Responsibility Returns to Humanity ↑

That is where this chapter leaves me.

Whether there is a creator or not, the responsibilities in front of us remain human responsibilities.

We know children can be harmed.

We know authority can be abused.

We know institutions can protect themselves at the expense of vulnerable people.

We know fear can produce obedience.

We know silence can preserve harm.

We know more than enough to act.

The question in the next chapter is what happens when inherited mythology is allowed to arrive before measurement.