By GREG BENFORD - 50 VOICES OF DISBELIEF
Added: Tue, 24 Nov 2009 00:00:00 UTC

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It all started with experience, as most philosophical positions should. What’s an idea worth if it cannot withstand the rub of the real?

My mother taught English and my father taught agriculture in Robertsdale High in southern Alabama. Except for his three years of fighting in The War. My twin brother and I were born in 1941 and sensed that he was gone, and only when he returned in August 1945 did the reason why he went dawn on us.

I recall a big party with much celebration, and I asked my father in the 1980s what that had been about. I expected that he would say it was for his return. But he told me it was because the bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima and everyone knew he wouldn’t have to go to Japan for the invasion. Many had died, but in Robertsdale there was a party. Life was like that. It always had been.

He was a forward observer in field artillery, fighting across France, the Bulge, and through Germany to Austria. I believe he was the only beginning forward observer in his battalion to survive the war, and suspect that his farm-boy field smarts made the difference. In 1945 he returned to teaching, developing an agriculture training program for the whole state. Then in 1948 the Cold War called him with a Regular Army appointment, which he seized as a way up into a world he had glimpsed in the war. We went with him, first to his training post in Oklahoma at Fort Sill (where in 1967 he retired as commandant), then to Japan for 1949–51. Into the world beyond blissful America.

My father served on MacArthur’s general staff, and we saw the whole range of Japanese life, hard and strange, with communists rioting in the streets and farmers working the rice paddies only miles away, in a fashion unchanged by millennia. With my brother, I lay in bed at night in our compound housing and listened to marines firing at communists trying to get inside. One morning we sneaked out of our house before dawn and watched the Marines pull bodies out of the rice paddies. I realized that the world was a lot bigger and tougher and darker than sunny Alabama knew.

As the Cold War deepened, its chill winds blew the Benfords to Atlanta in 1952, then Germany in 1954, where I saw the colossal damage wrought by the Big One, the greatest of all wars, and the suffering that had followed. That shocked me, coming out of my Episcopal upbringing. Both of my parents had firm religious faith. My brother and I were acolytes in the church and confirmed in formal ceremony in 1954. But my experience in devastated lands meant that more and more I thought about theodicy, or the problem of evil—if God is omniscient, omnipotent, and omni-benevolent, then why do bad things happen to good people?
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