Last night I heard Dr. Steve Langford, my Methodist pastor, talk about the God who answered Job “out of the whirlwind.”  Just when I thought I was too damn educated to learn anything from a preacher I ran into Langford.  This guy changes my thinking every time I listen to him–something I didn’t think was possible.

As I waited for the Bible Study to begin I was thinking about Scott Henson’s recent blog post on the Cameron Todd Willingham case.  Willingham’s ex-wife spent years telling reporters that Todd was an abusive husband, but no murderer.  But recently Stacy Kuykendall has been saying that her ex-husband confessed to the vile deed on the verge of his execution.  Henson (like the New Yorker’s David Grann)  thought this change of story was more than a little suspicious.

Then the Bible study began.  Pastor Steve had spent several weeks dissecting the tangled words of Job and his pious companions–tonight it was God’s turn to speak “out of the whirlwind”. 

“Who is this,” God asks, “who darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?”

Then the Creator takes Job on a whirlwind tour of creation.

“Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?  Tell me, if you have understanding.  Who determined its measurements–surely you know!”  God asks Job about the birds of the air and the beasts of the field; about the wind and the waves; about the great Behemoth and the fearsome Leviathan. 

Pastor Langform told us that “the sea” is often used as a symbol for chaos in the Hebrew Scriptures.  Horrifying beasts like the Behemoth (described as an alligator in Job) and Leviathan (described as a crocodile) were also mythological symbols of death and destruction.  Yet all are creatures of God.

This means that evil, death and chaos are God’s creatures.  God let them loose in the world and set strict bounds beyond which they dare not roam.  We don’t know why God created the forces of chaos and the Book of Job, by design, doesn’t shed much light on the subject.  That’s the whole point.  If we could understand God’s life and death struggle with chaos we would be God. 

“What if you were in my position?” Yahweh asks Job.  “Do you think you could handle it?  Are you are up for a wrestling match with death and hell?”

Job thinks about it, bows his head, and succumbs.  “I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear,” he says, “but now my eye sees you; therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes.”

All of which took me back to Scott Henson and Todd Cameron Willingham.  Scott hasn’t been arguing that the Corsicana native is innocent.  Perhaps Willingham did  intentionally set fire to the house in which his darling babies slept.  All Henson is saying (and all any of us can say) is that the folks with the best scientific tools don’t believe that, given the available evidence, a strong case can be made for arson. 

Rick Perry, the immaculately groomed governor of Texas, assures the electorate that Willingham is a guilty ‘monster’ (Leviathan?) the conclusions of pointy-headed pseudo-intellectuals notwithstanding. 

But if Perry is so confident that Texas executed a guilty man why is he so intent on blocking an objective investigation?  And why did he eliminate several members of the commission tasked with evaluating the work of the state’s forensic experts?  Does the governor protest overmuch?

No one is deriding the good men and women who listened to all the expert and eye-witness testimony in the Willingham case and made their decision.  The issues were exceedingly complex.  So much depended on the inner workings of the defendant’s mind.  Was this guy a dysfunctional slob with a gift for poetry or was he every bit the Behemoth Mr. Perry believes him to be?

The comment section at the end of Henson’s post was bristling with indignation.  Some said Scott had it dead right; others decried the blogger’s obdurate refusal to admit a self-evident truth.  Some thought Willingham was guilty as hell; others were convinced the state of Texas executed an innocent man.

Might it be that the facts of the Willingham case are too much for mortals.  We are too prone to error, fancy and blind prejudice to evaluate the guilt or innocence of Todd Willingham or hundreds of other people who have been dragged before the bar of justice in recent years.

I’m not saying that all murder cases are too complex for a human jury, or even that most of them are.  But the recent parade of DNA exonerations must give us pause.  How could well-intentioned juries have been so thoroughly bamboozled?  Why have so many prosecutors pressed ahead with bogus cases and withheld exculpatory material from defense counsel?  And why have so many eyewitnesses testified so convincingly of things that never were?  What were these people thinking? 

Were they thinking at all? 

Yes and no.  Juries, judges, police officers and prosecutors are rational creatures . . . so far as human rationality goes.  But sometimes it doesn’t go very far.  David Brooks, the staid NYT columnist, wrote an interesting piece last week on recent advances in the field of neuroscience.  Here are his cursory conclusions:

The work demonstrates that we are awash in social signals, and any social science that treats individuals as discrete decision-making creatures is nonsense. But it also suggests that even though most of our reactions are fast and automatic, we still have free will and control.

Many of the studies presented here concerned the way we divide people by in-group and out-group categories in as little as 170 milliseconds. The anterior cingulate cortices in American and Chinese brains activate when people see members of their own group endure pain, but they do so at much lower levels when they see members of another group enduring it. These effects may form the basis of prejudice.

The still-misty world of neuroscience should give us a renewed respect for the presumption of innocence.  The mere fact that a defendant has been arrested, indicted and formally charged should not be equated with guilt.  Yet how many jurors will vote “not guilty” just because the facts are fuzzy?  Not many.  What role does prejudice play in the courtroom?  What if we find that white and black jurors view the same facts in an entirely different light?  How often is sweet reason mugged by fear and anger?

And we haven’t even talked about blind ignorance.

Who are we who darken counsel with words without understanding?  When the criminal justice system casts mere mortals (jurors, prosecutors, judges) in the role of God, we have cause for worry.  Sure, somebody has to referee the game of life and death.  But when a frail human soul hangs in the balance, we must always err on the side of mercy.  Every few years we are called down to the courthouse to wrestle with chaos, death and hell.   Sometimes we’re just not up for the challenge.