If Virginia Tech reminded us of the fragility of human life, public discourse in the wake of the shootings has reminded us — once again — of the frailty of human logic, particularly for those who find it necessary to buttress their religious belief systems whenever senseless tragedies occur.

For example, this is from a blog post last night by Dinesh D’Souza:

Imagine if there was divine intervention to prevent Cho from doing what he did. Leave aside the issue of what happens to human free will. Just focus on the consequences. Cho would have been–let us say by miraculous intrusion–disarmed, the shootings would have been prevented, and life would go on.

In short, life would proceed as if God had not intervened in the first place. So God in this view becomes a kind of cosmic errand boy, who is supposed to do our chores and clean up our messes and we then wish him a very good day and return to our everyday lives. But perhaps God’s purpose in the world (I am only thinking aloud here) is to draw his creatures to him. And you have to admit that tragedies like this one at Virginia Tech help to do that!

Once again, it’s absurd to blame God for what happened. Blame guns, blame Virginia Tech’s security system, most of all blame Cho. But not Allah or Brahma or Jesus. Even so, it’s not unreasonable to suppose that there’s a providential purpose behind history, and if human horrors show us our dependence on God’s love and restorative powers, that’s not such a bad thing, is it?

Let’s analyze the elements of this argument for a moment:

1. D’Souza assumes that people must expect “miraculous intrusion” by God in order for human tragedies not to occur. What if, instead, we asked why God would conceive a world where such tragedies could occur in the first place? That seems the more logical question to address.

2. D’Souza says God would be reduced to a “cosmic errand boy” for preventing such tragedies, implying that it is almost silly for us to ask him to intervene in our little lives to ease our suffering. If that is the case, what is the point of Christian prayer at all? Isn’t the idea that if we pray hard enough, he just might intervene on our behalf?

3. D’Souza says that — even though God had nothing to do with the massacre itself — such tragedies may “not be such a bad thing” because they bring us closer to God.

Let us get this straight: 33 kids were brutally murdered to teach us, as one of D’Souza’s commenters put it, a “Bible lesson”? That’s the best you’ve got, Dinesh? What a base (not to mention baseless) insult to the victims, to our intelligence — and for that matter, to the Bible.

OK, now back to our question in No. 1, which is really at the heart of the matter: “Why did God conceive a world where such tragedies occur?”

D’Souza hints at the answer he would give: “Free will.” God gave us free will, which is the basis of that heaven-or-hell judgment at the end of our lives.

Unfortunately, that’s the most hollow argument of all — particularly in a case like that of Cho Seung-Hui.

Cho was mentally ill. He did not choose to be mentally ill. So he will go to hell for eternity for that?

We’re reminded of the tale of Phineas Gage, the 19th-century railroad construction foreman who was nearly killed when a tamping iron passed through his skull in a workplace accident. Gage survived, but because the iron pierced his brain’s frontal lobes, he was never the same.

Basically, Gage, formerly an all-around nice guy, became a jerk. His doctor called him “fitful, irreverent, indulging at times in the grossest profanity … pertinaciously obstinate, yet capricious and vacillating … In this regard his mind was radically changed, so decidedly that his friends and acquaintances said he was ‘no longer Gage.’”

So, did Phineas Gage go to hell?

Ultimately, here’s the only truth that stands up to analysis: We don’t know.

About Phineas Gage. About Cho. About God.

Dinesh, you are free to believe what you want — but don’t try to justify your beliefs with logic. The whole point of faith is that it doesn’t require logical proof or material evidence. I’d suggest you take advantage of that loophole and stop making a fool of yourself.