disenchantedbunny.

        The sitcom has been one of the most popular genres in televisions history. Australia has only produced a handful of lasting sitcoms (Acropolis Now, Kath and Kim), so all the sitcoms that make it down here are either American or British. Europe has a Catholic majority, so it’s no surprise to see shows like Father Ted gaining popularity and Catholicism populating a majority of BBC sitcoms. But what I found odd is that I cannot think of one instance of a Protestant church appearing in an American sitcom. Everyone is Catholic. From Malcolm in the Middle to The Nanny, alters and priests abound. Scrubs, New Adventures of Old Christine, Friends, Everybody Loves Raymond – why is it that a largely (fundamentalist) Protestant audience has sitcoms set in a Catholic environment?

         My first thought was to the nature of the genre. A sitcom sets out to ridicule and is often very camp and exaggerated. Physical characteristics such as age, race, gender and deformities are prominent in sketches. Protestantism sought to break with the perceived out-dated traditions and rituals of Catholicism to focus more on the individual’s relationship with their deity. But these traditions make for excellent ridicule: think of all the things that happen to the holy water! Making fun of Catholic rituals has long been a Protestant tradition in itself. And in my personal experience, Catholics are very fond of making fun of Catholic rituals as well.

        My second reason was based more on personal experience. Protestantism seems to take itself and its deity very seriously. Jokes about Jesus getting nailed don’t go down very well with a Protestant audience. Which can make it even funnier to others around - but that’s irrelevant. In the Catholic sitcom setting there is room to mock organised religion without offending any serious Protestants. There is even room to throw in a theistic moral to the story, like the one in the Scrubs episode I looked at last. “Churches are made up of bumbling fallible people, but if we trust in God we’ll be fine!” You get the idea.

 

         I’m waiting out for a sitcom that can poke fun at all religions. If you can think of one don’t hesitate to tell me.

    In the compulsory Christmas episode of the medical comedy Scrubs, ardent Christian surgeon Turk (denomination unspecified, but probably Catholic) begins to question his faith after countless people die and turn up injured on Christmas Eve. “How can I believe in a God,” he asks, “who lets innocent people suffer?” When confronted with the problem, his girlfriend Carla is also unable to give an answer. To understand this statement a major point needs to be clarified. If there is a deity or a god worthy of worship it must be omniscient, omnipotent and omni-benevolent. That’s the traditional theistic definition of god (the rejection of this argument being atheism). If your ‘god’ has a different set of characteristics then the atheist / theist positions are irrelevant to you, and no, you are not a theist. Now that that’s out of the way, let’s extend on Turk’s worries and chuck it into standard form, eh?

P1. A god is by definition omnipotent, omniscient and perfectly good.

P2. A perfectly good being would do everything in its power to increase good and decrease evil (unless an evil necessary for the greater good or to avoid a greater evil)

P3. An omniscient being knows all evils.

P4. An omnipotent being can eliminate all evils.

P5. There is a gratuitous amount of evil in the world, i.e. unnecessary evils that do not add to the greater good.

C. It is unreasonable to believe in a god.

    The show sends Turk on a mission to save his faith; after all, it feels so good for him to have faith in his god. We can’t have one of the show’s lead characters being content without some type of religious belief, can we? How can Turk account for all the seemingly unnecessary pain and suffering that he just witnessed? What we need here is a miracle; not an overtly religious message, but enough coincidence and luck to suggest that ‘higher forces’ are at work. So without any rational reason for his behaviour, assumedly just urged on by divine forces, Turk runs down the road to find a girl giving birth and saves the life of a baby or something like that.

    What is meant by ‘miracle’? Perhaps a miracle is a logically impossible event that does occur. But Turk’s ‘miracle’ is not logically impossible; similar unlikely things happen by chance all the time. Perhaps they mean a miracle is something that is unexplainable. As a sceptical philosophy student, I experience things daily that are unexplainable; to me, anyway. But they aren’t miracles. We often just lack a decent explanation for phenomena. It would have been silly for early 16C biologists to just assume that babies were miracles because they where unable to account for how foetuses develop. Perhaps they mean that a miracle is just a low-probability event that occurs, perhaps without a good explanation. When patients unexpectedly die without reason on the show they do not run around calling it a miracle, so it should probably be added that Scrubs defines miracles as being morally good events as well.

    Let us just assume that miracles in this broad sense do happen, that such low-probability events occur and are indeed unexplainable. In this reading, Turk would be using the god hypotheses to explain away the improbable and unexplained good deed that just occurred. Let us even assume that this act would be logically impossible to occur: rather, that the event entails a logical contradiction of natural laws and supernatural forces logically must be at work (assume that this is possible for a moment, fellow sceptics). Even with all these assumptions, it does not follow that Turk should retain his belief in a god. For Turk’s concern was with the gratuitous amount of evil and suffering that he witnesses working in the hospital. The fact that unexplained good occurs fails to account for the unexplained evils that make up P5, and all the premises of the argument from evil remain intact.

    So in the end it seems as though Turk has mastered self-deception. But watching this episode reminded me of reading David Hume’s Dialogues… although Cleanthes is said to come out on top of the debate, the points the Philo makes are left unscathed. I hope the wishy-washy miracle conclusion didn’t stop viewers of this show from considering its earlier reasoning.

bUCKET__