Donald ducks

The other day I was putting up a light in the kitchen. I'm a cautious electrician and always switch off the circuit at the fuse before messing about. On this occasion, the fuse was in a galaxy far away and would also switch off a number of other things. The light was off at the switch, but being a safety first person I checked the circuit with a multimeter. No power – dead as a doornail. So we should change 'always switch off' to 'almost always switch off' the fuse.

I was bending the wires into position when there was a big flash, a big bang, smoke and two scorched cable ends. The fuse flipped anyway. I was very lucky – the wires shorted between themselves and not through me, so I am still here to tell the tale. I was not saved by divine intervention, I was nearly killed by my own stupidity. Lesson learned.

The problem of evil

The trouble is, when someone avoids death or serious injury by what is essentially just a stroke of luck, the religiously minded often attribute the escape to divine intervention. God, they assert, either directly or through the agency of a guardian angel took a hand to change the course of human affairs.

Many people seem unable to accept luck as a neutral thing, mere dice rolling, but instead strain to find some purpose in the happy outcome. If there is a Maker of the Universe and he had been watching me while I was messing around so incompetently with the wiring in my kitchen he would have probably muttered 'serves him right' and gone off to intervene in some worthier cause. I can't thank God for saving my miserable life, only blame myself for my error.

After a major accident such as a plane crash, for example, we usually don't have to wait long for survivors to tell us of their miraculous escapes. After them we hear from those who should have been on the crashed plane but who were delayed or held up for some reason, causing them to miss the doomed flight. Many people can't just be lucky – they have to be lucky for a reason.

Those who missed the flight tell us that God (or a guardian angel) caused the traffic jam, the lost passport, the computer glitch and so on that made them miss that flight. In the same way, survivors of the crash feel they were saved for some reason. The question is rarely asked though: why didn't God intervene to save the other 250 people who were on the plane? What were their guardian angels doing when they were needed? Does the lucky person feel that he or she has more right to life than the dead passengers?

Two events stick in my memory of occasions when guardian angels were missing in action. The wheel of a large truck detaches at speed on the German Autobahn, keeps rolling then bounces over the central reservation onto the other carriageway and demolishes an oncoming car, killing the family in it.

A rock weighing several tons breaks from a roadside cliff in Switzerland and falls right on top of the drophead Golf of a German couple who happened to be motoring past on a tour of Alpine passes. If these objects had missed their victims there would be two good hand of God stories to tell. As it is, the believers have to tell us where the hand of God was when it was so needed.

It only needs a moment of reflection to see such hand of God feelings for the nonsense they are. Luck is luck, day in day out – sometimes we have it, sometimes we don't. It is random, an outcome not predicated on anything else, not derived from some value judgement.

When I was at school this theological difficulty was referred to as 'the problem of evil'. Nowadays it is termed 'theodicy'. It has been debated for a long time without resolution.

A milestone in this debate was the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, which is estimated to have caused the deaths of at least 40'000 people. It struck on the morning of 1 November, All Saints' Day, one of the most widely observed and emotional feast days in the Catholic Church. Many of the victims were on their knees in churches when the buildings tumbled on top of them. All Saints' Day is commonly celebrated together with All Souls' Day which follows it immediately. Throughout the city candles were flickering in memory of departed loved ones, a fact which is assumed to have caused the widespread intense fires which swept the city – these days we would call it a firestorm. On top of everything a tsunami arrived shortly afterwards, sweeping many out to sea.

The thinkers of the Enlightenment asked the question: why didn't God intervene in the human world to prevent the slaughter of so many of his followers, the faithful ones observing his rites?

Christian theologians have devoted much sophistry to the problem of theodicy, but the solution is really not that difficult. There are three answers, all of which are unacceptable to believers: One, there isn't a god; two, if there is he doesn't care what happens to humans; three, if there is a god he is not the almighty, he is completely powerless to intervene in the world of men.

Finally, we think of the innocents who happen to have been born to psychotic parents and spend their short lives being bestially mistreated. We read of such cases frequently. The guardian angels are always missing from these stories.

Donald Trump and destiny

The very topical reason for these dark thoughts is President Trump's recent escape from death by a centimetre or so from an assassin's bullet. Trump acknowledges that he was extremely lucky, but also thanks God for his survival. The religious leaders among his followers have no doubt that it was the hand of God that saved him. The bullet passed very close to Trump's head, a nearness to death which quite illogically fuels the belief in divine intervention. If the bullet had passed some metres away from him the hand of God belief would hardly be mentioned.

But if the hand of God saved him on this occasion, it did not choose to save Corey Comperatore from death and two other people from very serious injury. Mr Comperatore seems to have been a fine man who lived an exemplary life and who died shielding his family. We can only say that Mr Trump was exceptionally lucky, Mr Comperatore was exceptionally unlucky, the other spectators at the event who were also close to the assassin's line of fire were also lucky.

A god who cared about the welfare of humans would surely have intervened to prevent the assassin carrying out his plan and spared himself the last-minute task of deflecting bullets. In which case Mr Comperatore would still be alive and the other casualties uninjured.

One would have thought that it would have been easier for God to move in mysterious ways to perform his wonders on the actions of the would-be assassin rather than the ballistics of the bullet. But then we would live in a world in which nothing bad happens, because the Almighty has got our backs, as the Americans say. But instead an awful lot of bad things happen and the Almighty is nowhere to be seen. From a theological point of view, humans have to be free to mess up.

But it is part of the psychotic delusion that follows such events, that the fact that one person was saved by divine intervention when others were not is also some part of the Almighty's scheme, implying that destiny sits on the survivor's shoulder.

The trouble with ascribing what is merely luck to divine intervention is that the lucky person can get the feeling that God is on their side and that their actions are part of some divine plan; that these actions are guided and thus assume a divine validity. With every future escape or near miss the conviction of divine validation grows.

For the common people this doesn't matter very much – Nemesis comes along soon enough to punish this hubris before they can do much damage. But the great and the good are uniquely vulnerable to the hand of God syndrome. Trump's extraordinary luck in dodging that bullet seems not only to have affected him personally (as it would anyone), it seems to have provided after a year of judicial setbacks and humiliation for the Trump campaign a new sense of validation and a deeply felt certainty of ultimate success. For many Christian Trump supporters, their campaign has received a unique validation.

That German geezer

Politically this may be all to the good. It may be the emotional boost the campaign has needed for the final phase of the election. But it is also dangerous. Hitler is the worst example of its dangers. He had many character defects that helped form the monster he became, but the most insidious of these was his belief in a Sendung, a divine mission. In the course of nearly twenty years, many things went well for him, each success reinforcing his sense of his god-given mission. Once you have fallen for the idea of your mission, then every decision you take is ipso facto the right one. It has sometimes been claimed that Hitler was a master strategist, far cleverer than the plodders on his General Staff. Perhaps, perhaps not.

What is indisputable though is that he was a master dice-roller who was initially on a lucky streak. His survival of the Stauffenberg assassination attempt caused him to emerge even stronger as a man of destiny. But his run of luck broke in the misbegotten invasion of Russia. After that every throw of the dice turned out badly for him. By the time the Third Reich collapsed in rubble around him, he was so far gone in his belief in the reality of his divine mission and the rightness of his actions that he went down blaming the German people for failing him.

To be clear, I am not at all in any way associating Donald Trump with Hitler. Hitler is merely the handiest and most extreme example of madmen with a mission and we are currently close to the eightieth anniversary of his survival of Stauffenberg's failed assassination attempt.

But Donald Trump probably realises that he survived the assassination attempt only by good luck and not in any way by destiny. Nemesis and the Fates are waiting and watching. So far he has himself characterised his escape as luck, but thrown a sop to the religiously minded by hinting at a divine intervention. Both feelings cannot be correct. Even if Trump remains balanced about his brush with death, many of his followers seem to have become unhinged already.

Donald Trump needs to take a few days off and read the Odyssey. The gods of the Ancient World were tricky, spiteful and often childish. Odysseus enjoyed the protection of Athena, but had Poseidon for an enemy: savour your protected status but don't push it – hubris and Nemesis are never far away. That book will do him more good than the Christian woo-woo to which he is currently exposed.