In his Dialogues, Hume delivered a classic statement of the problem of evil as an argument against classic theism. None of the participants in the dialogue is an atheist, but Philo, the character who perhaps is closest to reflecting Hume’s actual views defends a minimal sort of theism/ deism that denies the moral attributes of the deity. Philo acknowledges that it is reasonable to infer that something like a human mind, though possessed of much greater powers, created our world. But what he emphatically denies is that the creator is good in any sense resembling the ordinary meaning of that word. Moreover, he insists that affirming such a deity is functionally identical with atheism since his existence has no practical or religious implications. Indeed, the most probable judgment is that the creator is simply amoral, with no concern whatever for either good or evil, since our world is a puzzling mixture of both of these

Philo argues that the creator is not good, and that reason is that our world clearly was not built for the happiness of its inhabitants. Despite the fact that it is a mixture of good and evil, it is not conducive to the flourishing of its sentient creatures. The misery of the human condition in particular is spelled out in eloquent terms by both Philo and Demea, the latter of whom is an orthodox believer who defends God’s goodness on the ground that everything will be made right in the life to come

In the conversation, Philo employs an analogy to argue that this world is not at all the sort of world we would expect a very powerful, wise and benevolent deity to create:

Did I show you a house or palace where there was not one apartment convenient or agreeable; where the windows, doors, fires, passages, stairs, and the whole economy of the building were the source of noise, confusion, fatigue, darkness, and the extremes of heat and cold, you would certainly blame the contrivance without any further examination . . . .you will always, without entering into any detail, condemn the architect

It is very much worth emphasizing that, while Hume made much of the problem of evil, in one sense he simply dissolved the problem. For one of his key arguments was that this world is not the sort of world we would expect, a priori, that an all-powerful, wise, and benevolent deity would create. Given the clash between our a priori expectations, and the actual world, we have no reason to believe it was created by such a God. The problem, then, persists only for those who believe in such a God

By contrast, however, if the Supreme Being is amoral, if he is simply indifferent to good and evil, and to whether or not we are happy, well, the world as we know it is not at all surprising. Suffering and misery is a problem for those who believe God is all-powerful, knowing, and good, because it is hard to account for on those terms, and requires some sort of explanation of how it is compatible with the existence and purposes of such a God. But if God is morally indifferent, there is no good reason to think such evil is fundamentally at odds with him and whatever purposes he may have, and indeed, perhaps it is as much to be expected as any other scenario. In that sense, evil is not a problem in the classic sense of the word. It still poses practical problems to be sure, and challenges to cope with it, but it is not at odds with what we should expect, and it should not elicit the same sort of perplexity and outrage as it should if it is profoundly at odds with ultimate reality. Indeed, Hune insisted that happiness was not even to be dreamed of, and that the best course to take in light of this was to maintain “as far as possible, a mediocrity, and a kind of insensibility, in everything”

In her book Evil in Modern Thought (2002), Susan Neiman tells the story of how the modern world increasingly came to cope with the problem of evil by denying its reality, decreasing its scope, or defining it out of existence. Particularly after the Lisbon earthquake, the natural world was stripped of moral significance, and natural evil was eliminated as a meaningful category. Moreover, as the modern period moved more explicitly in the direction of naturalism, eventually even moral evil was diminished as human beings came increasingly to be seen as part and parcel of the larger natural order. The final chapter of her book is tellingly entitled “Homeless” and there she reiterates the dilemmas that must be faced by inhabitants of our world who experience it as hostile to our happiness and flourishing, but cannot dispense with moral judgments. “For those who refuse to give up moral judgments, the demand that they stop seeking the unity of nature and morality means accepting a conflict in the heart of being that nothing will ever resolve”

Later in the chapter, she notes Kant’s conviction that our drive to seek reason in the world “is as deep as any drive we have. It’s this urge that keeps the problem of evil alive even after hopes of resolving it are abandoned.” This urge manifests itself in our deep rooted conviction that the is and the ought should converge, and it is this conviction that drives the metaphysical enterprise. “We proceed on the assumption that the true and the good, and just possibly the beautiful, coincide. Where they do not, we demand an account”

If the Supreme Being shares the moral judgments he has structured us to make, we have reason to believe He desires our happiness and wants to promote it (here I will ignore the option that God could be evil. I offer some argument against taking this option seriously in other works of mine). But to believe this is to embrace the problem of evil with all its jagged edges, and acknowledge that the way the world is leaves us far short of the happiness we crave. It is to continue to make the moral judgment that the world is not the way it ought to be, and frankly to own the fact that we are not at home in the world as it currently is. However, to embrace the problem of evil in this fashion is better than merely dissolving it as Hume and other modern thinkers did. To hold fast to the conviction that the world ought to be different than it is because it is at odds with the ultimate purposes of a God who is perfectly good as well as all powerful and knowing is to hold out the hope that it will eventually be the sort of world it ought to be. It is to have reason to believe that we shall yet arrive at home

Perhaps Walls is correct that Heaven is our true and best hope. Or perhaps one might accept the view of some of the Jewish sages, of Melville, and of Ivan Karamazov, that the greatest problem we face is how we can forgive God

מי אני האט געשריבן: ↑זונטאג יאנואר 14, 2024 8:02 pmדר. האָד האָדסאן טענה'ט אז "זמן"/ספּעיסטיים ארבעט עפ"י די גראָאיִנג בּלאַק יוּניווערס מאדעל. דאס באדייט אז ספּעיסטיים איז בעצם א וואקסענדיגע בּלאַק, וואו די עבר און הוה זענען "עכט" וקים, בשעת די עתיד (נאך) נישט (ועיין כאן וכאן). "הייפּערטיים" באדייט וואו עס זענען דא מערערע פון די סארט בּלאַקס (וכעין א מאָלטיווערס, נאר ביחס צו פארשידענארטיגע ספּעיסטיימס). און ער טענה'ט אז עס איז יתכן א "הייפּערטיים היפּאטעזיע", וואו עס זענען פארהאן מערערע ספּעיסטיים בּלאַקס. ועפי"ז טענה'ט ער אז צו טענה'ן קעגן מציאות הא-ל בעד די רעות וואס מ'זעהט, דארף מען נישט נאר אָננעמען אז דאס איז נישט דאס בעסטע וועלט שייך, נאר מ'דארף אָננעמען אז אונזער ספּעיסטיים איז ניטאמאל א חלק פונעם בעסטן וועלט מעגליך - מיינענדיג, אז מ'דארף דאס שוין טענה'ן אויף די גאנצע סעט פונעם הייפּערטיים, וואס איז יתכן אז אונזער ספּעיסטיים איז א חלק פון. און דאס איז שוין א שווערערע טענה.

ער טענה'ט נאך מער, אז מעטאפיזיש גערעדט, איז עס פונקט אזוי מסתבר אז אזוי ווי די ספּעיסטיים בּלאַק קען וואקסן, וואס עס טוהט דאך כסדר כנ"ל, קען עס בעצם קלענער ווערן און עס קען "אפגעשניטן" ווערן דערפון; עס איז נישט בעצם מן הנמנע. וא"כ וויל ער עפי"ז קלערן אז מ'קען בעצם זאגן אז סיי מעשה בראשית אזוי ווי עס שטייט אין די תורה כפשוטו ממש, און סיי די סייענטיפישע קאנסענסוס ווי אזוי עס איז צוגעגאנגן, וועלכע איז בהדיא דערקעגן, זענען ביידע אמת ביינאזאם. און דאס איז ווייל מעיקרא איז די בּלאַק געווען און געוואקסן אזוי ווי עס שטייט אין די תורה און אזוי האט זיך עס פארמירט. אבער לאחר חטא אדה"ר וצאתו מגן עדן, האט הקב"ה אפגעשניטן דעם עבר פון דעם בּלאַק, און צוגעטשעפעט דערצו די עבר פון אַן אנדערן בּלאַק אין הייפּערטיים, וואס דאס איז די עבר פון די סייענטיפיק קאנסענסוס וועלכע אונזער ספּעיסטיים האט כהיום, לאזענדיג דעם הוה וואו אדם און חוה זענען געווען יעצט צוזאמען מיט אנדערע האָמינידס וכדומה. דר. דאָסטין קראָמעט טענה'ט אבער אז וואס איז די סיבה אז ג-ט זאל אזוי טוהן מחמת חטא עץ הדעת? (אזא סארט בונה עולמות ומחריבן, און דאס וואס הקב״ה האט געזאגט לאדה״ר בנוגע עצי הגן, קה״ר ז יג, תן דעתך שלא תקלקל ותחריב את עולמי ע״ש.)

ועיין בדברי דר. האָדסאן לעיל.

איך האב געקלערט אז מ'קען אפשר זאגן בדרך רמז בזה אז די ערשטע ברכה פון ברכות ק"ש של שחרית הייבט זיך אָן מיט וואס איז מיוסד עה"פ בישעיה (מה ז) יוצר אור ובורא חשך עשה שלום ובורא רע, ועיין בברכות יא:. וא"כ קען מען זאגן אז דערפאר זאגט מען אין די ערשטע ברכה של ברכות ק"ש של ערבית, משנה עתים ומחליף את הזמנים. והיינו, לרמז אז ג-ט האט באשאפן מערערע ספּעיסטיים בּלאַקס, ועכ"כ אז ער האט געטוישט פון איין בּלאַק צום צווייטן וכדברי דר. האָדסאן כנ"ל, וואס די געדאנק טוהט פארמינערן פונעם תלונה פון דעם אז עס איז דא א בריאת רע בהעולם וכנ"ל, וואס פון די פסוק בישעיה פון "בורא רע" איז די נוסח פונעם ערשטן ברכה מברכות ק"ש של שחרית מיוסד.

The Hypertime Solution, then, simply amounts to the thesis that the General Resurrection occurs in the hyperfuture rather than the future. Heaven lies not to the left or right, forth or back, high or low, or even in the future. From dust we came and to dust we shall (permanently) return, and yet heaven and the judgment of the living and the dead await us hyperhence. On the Hypertime Solution, to be resurrected is to be present at a special place in the hyperfuture — to be among those located in a privileged spacetime block with its own past and never-ending future, perfectly suited to host the new and imperishable, spiritual bodies that hyperwill populate it

Of course, if the Hypertime Solution has any promise, one may suspect that the roads to hell and Purgatory may cut through hypertime, as well, and there is one remarkable feature of this thought I can’t resist noting: The resources would be here available to maintain (i) that hell is a real place (i.e., yet another spacetime block confined to a different location in the hyperfuture), (ii) that it is populated, (iii) that its residents are permanent inhabitants (i.e., that assignment to hell is an eternal sentence), and (iv) that Universalism is true, nevertheless. With hell and heaven so separated, some may be consigned to eternal damnation and hyper-eventually saved all the same

In his short piece, Hudson presses the advantages of his proposal that we are resurrected in the hyperfuture rather than the future; that is, into a space-time block, distinct from ours, situated in an additional temporal dimension: hypertime. The conceptual resources of the hypertime model are fairly remarkable, perhaps even paradoxical: as Hudson notes with some bemusement, it allows, not only for a hypertime heaven but for a hypertime hell, and for the possibility that some (or all) human beings consigned to hell might also enter into eternal salvation in some hyperfuture. Might it go without saying (and Hudson doesn't say it) that perhaps some (or all) of the saved also enter into eternal perdition in some hypertime future?

Like Kierkegaard, I have had to choose between a world without the biblical God and the leap into faith. I have had a slightly different “Either-or” than Kierkegaard. I have had to decide whether to affirm the existence of a God who inflicts Auschwitz on his guilty people or to insist that nothing the Jews did made them more deserving of auschwitz than any other people, that Auschwitz was in no sense a punishment, and that a God who would or could inflict such punishment does not exist. In other words, I have elected to accept what camus rightly called the courage of the absurd, the courage to live in a meaningless, purposeless cosmos rather than believe in a God who inflicts Auschwitz on his people

I have done so as a rabbi and a theologian in the full knowledge that my choice has been rejected by my people. Nevertheless, I would rather be rejected by my people than affirm their guilt at Auschwitz

I was listening to a German clergyman interpret German defeat as the rabbis had interpreted the fall of Jerusalem almost two thousand years before. For the rabbis, Jerusalem fell because of the sins of the Jewish people. Can we really blame the christian community for viewing us through the prism of a mythology of history when we were the first to assert this history of ourselves? Does the way Jews regard themselves religiously contribute to the terrible process?

שעפטאל האט געשריבן:כ'האב דעם ר"ה געפרעגט מיין רב א האקעלען שאלה.

מ'דארף פארשטיין ווי אזוי האבן אונז אזא האס אויף מענגעלע וואס האט געוויזען רעכטס און לינקס, בשעת אונזער ליבער חנון ורחום האט א שורה עוברין לפניו כבני מרון און ער ווייזט רעכטס און לינקס?

@בּתוך עמי וואלט געזאגט: די אייבישטער מעג..

@מי אני וואלט גענטפערט: די אייבישטער טוהט טאקע גארנישט, (צולינקענדיג דעם מורה)..

האט ער צוגעצייכנט דעם זוה"ק אז די אייבישטער פסק'נט טאקע נישט. פארקערט "משפט לאלוק יעקב" ער ווערט כביכול גע'משפט.
אונז שרייבן זיך אליין אריין אין ספרי חיים וואס מיינט זיין מיט אונזער שורש. מיט דעם פסק'נן אונז פאר עם כביכול א גוט יאהר. (המגיד ממעזריטש זי"ע).

מי אני האט געשריבן:די סברא צו זאגן אז ״ג-ט מעג״ איז מכח דעם אז וויבאלד ער האט אונז מעיקרא באשאפן, מעג ער דערנאך מאראליש טוהן מיט זיינע ברואים ווי אזוי און וואס ער וויל. אבער ווי אראפגעברענגט איז דאס ווייט נישט א פשוט׳ע טענה. ועיין כעי״ז בתויו״ט בברכות פ״ז מ״ג אז מ׳זאגט שם ״אלקינו״ בברכת הזימון בעשרה, וואס דאס איז די שם הדין, ווייל הדין נותן לכלכל את ברואיו ע״ש. ואולי איז וועגן דעם די לשון פון ר׳ שמעון בן אלעזר בסוף קידושין פב.

רבי שמעון בן אלעזר אומר ראית מימיך חיה ועוף שיש להם אומנות והן מתפרנסין שלא בצער והלא לא נבראו אלא לשמשני ואני נבראתי לשמש את קוני אינו דין שאתפרנס שלא בצער אלא שהרעותי מעשי וקפחתי את פרנסתי

והיינו, אז ער איז דער וואס האט אפגעשוואכט זיין פרנסה ע״י מעשיו, און נישט אז ס׳איז דערפאר א ״דירעקטע״ פעולה וכו׳ פון הקב״ה.

קהל'ס נער האט געשריבן:הייסט א טאטע מעיג הרג׳נן א זוהן ווייל ער האט עים באשאפן, איז וואס איז אזוי שלעכט מיט מעביר זרעו למולך, אינז וויל מיר נאר הולך׳ן בדרכיו, מה הוא הורג את בניו אף אתה תבעיר את זרעך למולך. מען דארף בכלל נישט מיין גאנצע לומדות, וועלכע מענטש האט בכלל א הו״א אז א טאטע מעג הרג׳נן א זוהן?

די עיקר אז אינז לאך מען פון די קריסטן…

ויקח לו למך - לא היה לו לפרש כל זה אלא ללמדנו מסוף הענין שקיים הקב"ה הבטחתו שאמר שבעתים יוקם קין וכו'

שתי נשים - כך היה דרכן של דור המבול אחת לפריה ורביה ואחת לתשמיש זו שהיא לתשמיש משקה כוס של עקרין (ס"א אינו) כדי שתעקר ומקושטת ככלה ומאכילה מעדנים (ב"ר כג ג).

וכן צריך שיובן אמרו (שמות לב לב-לג) ״ואם אין מחני נא מספרך אשר כתבת״, ״אמחנו מספרי״, (תהלים סט כט) ״ימחו מספר חיים״ - כל זה על צד הדימוי, לא שיש לו 'ספר' לאלוק ית' יכתוב בו וימחה כמו שיחשבו ההמון בהיותם בלתי שוערים במקום ההשאלה הנה.

וענין צום כפור גם כן סיבתו מבוארת שהוא נותן דעת התשובה והוא היום שירד בו אדון הנביאים בלוחות שניות ובשרם בסליחת חטאם הגדול. והיה היום ההוא לנצח יום תשובה ועבודה גמורה. ולזה נאסרה בו כל הנאה גשמית וכל טורח בתועלת הגוף, רצוני לומר המלאכות, ואין עושים בו רק הוידויים, שיודה בחטאיו וישוב מהם.

כן ראש השנה יום אחד מפני שהוא יום תשובה והערת בני אדם משכחתם. ומפני זה יתקע בו בשופר, כמו שבארנו במשנה תורה (הל׳ תשובה פ״ג ה״ד), וכאילו הוא הצעה ופתיחה ליום הצום כמו שהוא מפורסם בקבלת האומה מענין עשרת ימים שמראה השנה ועד יום הכפורים.

My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of "just" and "unjust"? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has an idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe to when I called it "unjust"? If the whole show was bad and senseless from A to Z, so to speak, why did I, who was supposed to be part of the show, find myself in such violent reaction against it?

A man feels wet when he falls into water, because man is not a water animal: a fish would not feel wet. Of course I could have given up my idea of justice by saying it was nothing but a private idea of my own. But if I did that my argument against God collapsed too - for the argument depended on saying that the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to place my fancies

Thus in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist - in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless - I found that I was forced to assume one part of reality - namely the idea of Justice - was full of sense. Consequently, atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there was no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be a word without meaning

Although Deut 18:18 describes the future arrival of a “prophet like Moses,” it is actually doing everything possible to make this impossible. Considering the centrality of Moses’ role as law-giver, and the Deuteronomic warning that no expansion or contraction of the Deuteronomic Law Collection is permissible, Deuteronomy could not have really envisioned another Moses arriving on the scene. Even if it stops short of saying that no other Moses-like prophet could ever arise in Israel, this is what the legislation seems aimed at accomplishing

Deuteronomy’s strict test of prophets makes prophecy like Moses essentially impossible. Moreover, even if a prophet could somehow pass the prediction test, such a prophet would be limited to reiterating or supporting Moses’ message of loyalty to God and keeping God’s commandments as stated in Deuteronomy. Thus, while Deuteronomy ostensibly allows for future Moses-like prophets, it effectively ends this prophetic activity by making it impossible or at best limited to reiterating Moses’ message in Deuteronomy, and even this was probably only meant as a theoretical possibility

Deuteronomy’s position has the advantage of basing itself on prophetic religion, claiming that its laws were transmitted by God, but at the same time, relegating this kind of prophecy to the distant past. By making further Mosaic prophecy virtually impossible, Deuteronomy does not have to deal with the potentially chaotic effects of “actual prophets” on ongoing religious life or the possibility that some later prophet will overturn the laws and teachings it records in the name of the greatest of all prophets, Moses

אכן שתים [אמונות] הנשארות שהן כללות התורה ושכר ועונש הדבוק עמה, עם היות בלי ספק אין להם הפסק כל ימי עולם זה שהרי ניתנה לדורותינו בלי תנאי כלל וכמו שיבואו עוד בפרקים שלפנינו וכבר נתבאר שאי אפשר לשום נביא וחוזה להפסיקה, אמנם כשיחדש הקב״ה עולמו ויראה עלינו כבודו שנית כל חי וירצה לחדש גם התורה בשאר מצות אם בכולן אם במקצתן מי ימחה בידו, ואף אם נצייר שיחפוץ לבטל גם שכר ועונש מכל וכל ולא יהא שום מציאות לקיום שום תורה כלל לא היה זה הפסד באמונה, אלא שאי אפשר היותו בימי המשיא שכבר העיד הנביא והחוטא בן מאה שנה יקולל, מכלל שיש חטא ועונש לפי שאין בין עוה"ז לימות המשיא אלא שעבוד מלכיות, אבל בעולם הבא פשיטא שאין שם מקום לקיום מצות התורה שאין שם אכילה ושתיה ולא שום דבר מעניני הגוף (ביחוד לדעת הרמב"ם ז"ל הסובר שגם גוף וגויה אין בו), הלא א"כ לה יסופק שיפסק בהכרח קיום התורה בפועל וזה מושכל ראשון.

And, increasingly, historians have claimed that religiously-inspired violence, whether in the modern or pre-modern world, is the product of a complex of political, economic, social, ethnic, and nationalistic factors, rather than being solely or even mainly inspired by specifically religious factors

Religion, according to this analysis, is more likely to be a pretext than a primary motivation, sacralising essentially profane drivers such as a sense of marginalisation, alienation, and social frustration. We may grant this without in any way diminishing the role of religion in magnifying and protracting conflict through its being a marker of identity, so fostering the collectivisation and hence amplification of hatred, hostility, and aggression

When the horrors of the secular totalitarian states of the twentieth century are highlighted, secularists often argue that Communism and Fascism are disguised religions: creeds that permit no heresy; the worship of a godlike infallible leader who commands unquestioning obedience enforced by apparatchiks spying on the inner and outer lives of the flock; and the promise of earthly paradise, promulgated despite the increasingly present reality of earthly hell

it might be argued that religious evils can have spill-over effects that make a world with religion worse than one without. For even if genuinely religious beliefs do not cause any evil, it might be the case that the religious gloss on certain evils deters some people from becoming religious. And if religion is the way to salvation, then this might entail that fewer people are saved. Religious evil may have ramifications that lower the number of people who go to heaven. If this is true, then, again, worlds with religion might come out as worse than worlds without from a providential standpoint

Both of these objections can be deflected by claiming that (i) God wants to guide us out of sin primarily through morality, not through religion, and (ii) salvation depends on secular moral virtues most of all, not on one’s degree of religiosity. I’ll call the conjunction of (i) and (ii) ‘the sola virtute principle’. The gist of this principle is that salvation depends primarily on morality, not on religion; the soteriological role of religion is to foster secular morality

Maybe death as such isn’t as horrifying as we ordinarily think. [...] [W]e all die anyway, we are all under a death sentence; how bad is it to die earlier rather than later? And, on the other side: how bad is the moral and spiritual corruption, blasphemy, infant sacrifice, temple prostitution, and the like attributed to the Canaanites? Maybe it is worse, even much worse, than we think. [...] Considerations such as these are perfectly sensible, and have been what millions of Abrahamic theists have taken to be no more than the sober truth

The Bible is very easy to understand. But we [Abrahamic theists] are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand, we are obliged to act accordingly

Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever written

I claim that it is very plausible that retributive justice is essential to God and therefore couldn't be overridden but must be met. The demands of retributive justice belong to God's very essence and would need to be satisfied

As an acknowledged pantheist and in later life a materialist, Strauss proceeded, like the Rationalists before him, from the assumption that miracles are impossible in principle. According to Strauss, this is not a presupposition requiring proof; on the contrary, to affirm that miracles are possible is a presupposition which requires proof. God acts immediately on the universe only as a whole, but not on any particular part; on any particular part he acts only mediately through the causal laws of all other parts of nature. Hence, with regard to the resurrection, God's interposition in the regular course of nature is 'irreconcilable with enlightened ideas of the relation of God to the world.' Thus, any purportedly historical account of miraculous events must be dismissed out of hand; 'indeed no just notion of the true nature of history is possible without a perception of the inviolability of the chain of finite causes, and of the impossibility of miracles

Voltaire exemplified this incredulous attitude. In his Dictionary article on miracles, he asserts that a miracle is, properly speaking, something admirable; hence, 'The stupendous order of nature, the revolution of a hundred millions of worlds around millions of suns, the activity of light, the life of animals, all are grand and perpetual miracles. But according to accepted usage, 'A miracle is the violation of mathematical, divine, immutable, eternal laws; therefore, it is a contradiction in terms. But, it is said, God can suspend these laws if he wishes. But why should he wish so to disfigure this immense machine? It is said, on behalf of mankind. But is it not 'the most absurd of all extravagances to imagine that the infinite Supreme Being would on behalf of three or four hundred emmets on this little atom of mud 'derange the operation of the vast machinery that moves the universe? Voltaire's God, indeed the God of all Deists, was the cosmic architect who engineered and built the machine, but who would not be bothered to interfere in the trivial affairs of man. In this light miracles simply became unbelievable

Spinoza attempts to establish four points: (1) nothing happens contrary to the eternal and unchangeable order of nature; (2) miracles do not suffice to prove God's existence; (3) biblical 'miracles' are natural events; and (4) the Bible often uses metaphorical language concerning natural events so that these appear miraculous. I shall leave (3) and (4) to my colleagues in biblical studies, but the first two contentions merit closer exposition here. (1) Spinoza argues that all that God wills or determines is characterized by eternal necessity and truth. Because there is no difference between God's understanding and will, it is the same to say God knows or wills a thing. Therefore the laws of Nature flow from the necessity and perfection of the divine nature. So should some event occur which is contrary to these laws, that would mean the divine understanding and will are in contradiction with the divine nature. To say God does something contrary to the laws of Nature is to say God does something contrary to his own nature, which is absurd. Therefore, everything that happens flows necessarily from the eternal truth and necessity of the divine nature. What is called a miracle is merely an event that exceeds the limits of human knowledge of natural law. (2) Spinoza maintains, in rationalist tradition, that a proof for the existence of God must be absolutely certain. But if events could occur to overthrow the laws of Nature, then nothing is certain, and we are reduced to scepticism. Miracles are thus counter-productive; the way in which we are certain of God's existence is through the unchangeable order of Nature. By admitting miracles, which break the laws of Nature, warns Spinoza, we create doubts about the existence of God and are led into the arms of atheism! And at any rate, an event contrary to the laws of Nature would not warrant the conclusion to God's existence: the existence of a lesser being with enough power to produce the effect would suffice. Finally, a miracle is simply a work of Nature beyond man's ken. Just because an event cannot be explained by us, with our limited knowledge of Nature's laws, does not mean that God is the cause in any supernatural sense

Hume supplies four reasons, which are a catalogue of typical Deist objections to miracles, why in fact the evidence for miracles is so negligible: (1) No miracle in history is attested by a sufficient number of men of good sense and education, of unimpeachable integrity so as to preclude deceit, of such standing and reputation so that they would have a good deal to lose by lying, and in sufficiently public a manner. (2) People crave the miraculous and will believe absurd stories, as the multitude of false miracles shows. (3) Miracles only occur among barbarous peoples. (4) All religions have their own miracles and therefore cancel each other out in that they support irreconcilable doctrines

Less argues: (1) Because nature is the freely willed order of God, a miracle is just as possible as any event. Therefore, it is just as believable as any event. (2) Testimony to an event cannot be refuted by experiences and observations. Otherwise we would never be justified in believing anything outside our present experience; no new discoveries would be possible. (3) There is no contradiction between experience and Christian miracles. Miracles are different events (contraria) from experience in general, but not contradictory events (contradictoria) to experience in general

It will be remembered that the world view that formed the backdrop to the Deist controversy was a model of the universe as a Newtonian world-machine that bound even the hands of God. So ironclad a view of natural law is, however, untenable. Natural law is today understood essentially as description, not prescription. This does not mean that it cannot serve as a basis for prediction, for it does; but our formulation of a natural law is never so certain as to be beyond reformulation under the force of observed facts. Thus an event cannot be ruled out simply because it does not accord with the regular pattern of events. The advance of modern physics over the Newtonian world-machine is not that natural law does not exist, but that our formulation of it is not absolutely final

Perhaps Pascal was right in maintaining that God has given evidence sufficiently clear for those with an open heart, but sufficiently vague so as not to compel those whose hearts are closed

The most glaring limitation of the irredeemable culture argument concerns the seemingly gratuitous slaughter of infants and small children. In response, Copan offers his "mercy killing" argument: "What then of the children? Death would be a mercy, as they would be ushered into the presence of God and spared the corrupting influences of a morally decadent culture." In short, Copan would have us believe that the Israelites were saving the Canaanite children from their own fate, rather like the marines in the film Aliens who mercifully kill the pitiful wretches that are incubating alien spawn. But if we have no guidelines to determine when a culture is irredeemable, then we cannot determine when a mercy killing is justified since the latter is dependent on the former. Hence, these two arguments fall together. In addition, the claim that an infant could be so formed by its culture that it would have to be killed is most doubtful

Copan seems to progress from a relatively uncontroversial claim to a very contentious one. We may grant Copan the following:
‏(a) God can rightly allow creatures to die
‏(b) God can rightly allow creatures to be killed
‏(c) God can rightly kill creatures
‏(d) God can rightly direct some creatures to kill other creatures

‏But even granting (a)-(d), it is by no means obvious that we must also accept (e):
‏(e) God can rightly direct a human being to kill a healthy baby

‏Not only is this by no means obvious; it seems to me obviously false

John Barton warns (Ethics and the Old Testament, 1998) that there can be no “simple route” to dealing with Old Testament ethics. Bruce Birch (Let Justice Roll Down, 1991) considers Old Testament ethics as something of a “patchwork quilt.” Any treatment of the Hebrew Bible with regard to ethics, especially as an ethical resource to contemporary communities, must acknowledge the impediment created by the simple fact that these texts are rooted in a cultural context utterly unlike our own, with moral presuppositions and categories that are alien and in some cases repugnant to our modern sensibilities. (See Brevard S. Childs, Biblical Theology in Crisis (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1970), 125, where he notes that there is no "clear-cut answer" on how to do biblical ethics)

While the new atheists are correct in pointing out moral flaws and horrendous actions of Old Testament characters, they often imply that "if it's in the Bible, it must be approved by the author." Yet we see that many of Israel's stories involving stubbornness, treachery, and ingratitude are vivid negative role models to be avoided. The OT's "is" does not amount to "ought." (Christopher Hitchens's remarks about "the ungrateful and mutinous children of Israel" is quite right!) OT descriptions are not necessarily normative. Moreover, the hero status given by the OT to Abraham, Moses, David is rooted not in their moral perfection but more so in their uncompromising dedication to the cause of God and their rugged trust in the promises of God rather than lapsing into the idolatry of many of their contemporaries

If there is a robust sense in which the cosmos belongs to God, then God's moral standing from the outset is radically unequal to ours. ... Arguably our rights [to, say, property or privacy or even life] are at least hedged if the ownership of God is taken seriously. Being thus beholden to God would not seem to entitle God to create beings solely to torment them, but if life is indeed a gift from God which no creature deserves . … then certain complaints about the created order may be checked

This concept of original sin was often presented to me in terms of natural law–like gravity, it’s just the way things are. But the analogy seemed inapt; gravity had nothing to do with what you deserved. And anyway, I’d protest, didn’t God make the laws? If so, why did He choose to make things so that you inherited your parents’ guilt? Why make the laws of spiritual heredity Lamarckian rather than Darwinian?

. . .

I am no Bible scholar but note only that the story, taken at face value, renders a trope familiar from many ancient mythologies: the stealing of a divine prerogative by the presumptuous human. Always such thefts are punished: Prometheus is sentenced to eternal torment, Pandora releases pain and sadness into the world, and Adam and Eve, with all their descendants, must toil and suffer. What’s the lesson? Well, it could be that it’s prudent to do what powerful divinities tell you to do — in Adam and Eve’s case, to remain in a state of childlike ignorance, devoid of conscience or principle, dependent but safe. Or one could extract a different, more noble message: that knowledge and reason, those godlike powers, are so valuable that having them is worth enduring the wrath of the most powerful being in the universe. On this reading, Adam and Eve did not “fall from grace,” they ascended into moral responsibility. This is how I choose to read the story, and how I conceive our struggle as a species — to claim our rationality, to confront the harsh realities that constrain us, and to acknowledge our own responsibility, in spite of the cost — therein to make ourselves “as gods”

The human interest stories in my local paper (on the front page of the ‘‘Faith’’ section — there is no ‘‘Reason’’ section) regularly honor the fidelity of people suffering the most appalling depredations: debilitating accidents, ruthless illnesses, spouses and children lost to senseless wars — all consistent, in the minds of these latter-day Jobs, with the limitless goodness of God. Likely as not, there will be featured, in the same edition, people who have prevailed against astonishing odds — the woman who survived the cancer that all the medical experts said would kill her, the husband who survived the landmine that killed all his buddies — all cheerfully attributing their own good fortune to God’s great love for them. Never mind the quick paradox (He loved you enough to get you through chemotherapy, just not enough not to spare you the cancer in the first place) — what about the illogic of divine responsibility? God is to be thanked for the good things that happen but never blamed for the bad

A college friend born and raised in a reformed Jewish household, never very religious, suddenly surprised all his childhood and college friends—not to mention his Jewish wife—by converting to messianic Judaism, becoming a ‘‘Jew for Jesus.’’ One evening a few months after his conversion, my husband and I visited for dinner. My friend was recounting an incredible story from his hellion adolescence: he had failed to see a ‘‘road out’’ sign and driven his motorcycle over a fifteen-foot cliff, tumbling off the bike, and landing, ‘‘miraculously’’ unhurt, at the bottom of the ravine. At this point in the story, he suddenly stopped, looked off into the distance, and announced solemnly, ‘‘I see now that Christ was saving me for something.’’ Oh, I thought to myself, so I guess He was just all finished with my father, who died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of fifty-three, leaving behind a homemaker wife, her elderly aunt, one daughter just starting graduate school, and another (me) only eleven years old

More edifying, presumably, were the also-quoted remarks of a local rabbi, reflecting on the significance of the patterns of destruction wielded by Hurricane Fran. She saw the Hand of God in the fact that a large, expensive, and recently installed stained-glass window in the synagogue had been spared, despite a tree’s having come down right next to the building. But then in the same breath, as it were, she cautioned the faithful not to yield to the temptation to blame God for damages they had suffered. God’s plan is mysterious, she reminded everyone. (No kidding–stained glass windows are more important than people’s lives!) Apparently, in her world, God gets the credit if the outcome is good, but need take no responsibility if it’s bad. We expect our politicians to behave like that, but God?

To balance the arguments for God, we [in my class] looked at arguments against God. That was easy, too. There is so much suffering in the world that I could pick my examples. Many children have been born with horrible birth defects that caused them tremendous pain and early death. An all-good God would prevent these harms if he could. An all-powerful God could prevent them. It follows that there is no God who is both all-good and all-powerful, as traditional Judaism, Christianity, and Islam claim. The argument was so obvious that beginning students had no trouble appreciating its force

To be even-handed, I also presented various responses by theists. That was the hardest part of my lectures to prepare, because I really wanted to make some responses look plausible, but my main goal was to teach students critical thinking, and every response to the problem of evil has glaring defects. Maybe free will is more important than any amount of suffering, but what does free will have to do with natural evils, such as birth defects? Maybe God repaid the child’s suffering with a ticket to heaven, but then why didn’t God send him straight to heaven without the suffering? Maybe God was teaching a lesson to the child’s parents, but isn’t it unfair to use one person’s suffering to teach others (especially when you could use better teaching methods)? Maybe we mere mortals are too feeble and ignorant to see the justification for suffering, but then why should we believe that there is any justification? Maybe God is not subject to our lowly human moral standards, but then why should we love or worship such a God (except out of fear or confusion)? Maybe we need some suffering to make us appreciate the good things in life, but why do we need so much, and why must it be distributed so unevenly? It was hard for me to stand up in front of my students and try to make such feeble responses look good when I really wanted to teach them how to evaluate arguments critically

Moreover, if God is omnipotent, if he can do anything he wants to do (or any logically possible thing he wants to do), then nothing can happen except by his will. If I wind up going to hell, God must have willed that I go to hell. This takes it out of my hands. How can I prevent what an omnipotent being wills?

Theologians sometimes try to save God from responsibility for our sins by saying that he merely permits them. But to permit something to happen when you could have prevented it, and when you knew what would happen if you didn’t act, is not to escape responsibility for it. In Lillian Hellman’s Little Foxes, Regina is having a quarrel with her husband when he suffers a heart attack. He asks her to bring him his medicine, and she refuses to do so. She has it in her power to bring him the medicine, and she knows what will happen if she does not. Her decision not to bring him the medicine makes her as much responsible for his death as if she had shot him

Some Christian philosophers will no doubt object that, although God could prevent me from committing the sins that will justly cause my damnation, he cannot do so in a way that would entitle me to moral credit for refraining. If he causes me to refrain from sin, then by a proper definition of freedom my refraining will no longer be a free act; the freedom required for moral responsibility also requires that the free act not be caused. His inability to cause me not to sin is a consequence of his inability to do what is logically impossible, an inability that does not detract from his omnipotence

Even if we accept the libertarian conception of freedom that this reply presupposes, it doesn’t seem to work. It doesn’t show that God can’t cause me not to perform the act that, if done freely, would be a sin. It just shows that he can’t do this without depriving me of the libertarian freedom necessary for my refraining to accrue moral credit. It’s the value he places on human freedom that prevents him from causing me not to sin, and that value may seem, on reflection, too high

Christian philosophers sometimes invoke, in this context, the analogy of a mother raising her child. Wanting him to learn to be a responsible adult, she refrains, after a certain age, from interfering in his decisions, believing that she needs to let him make his own mistakes. But parents who act this way rarely have certain knowledge of what their children will decide in the absence of their intervention. And presumably, a loving parent would act differently if she knew that her child were going to make a decision that would have catastrophic and irrevocable consequences, if she knew, for example, that it would lead inescapably to his death

. . .

It is common among Christians to believe that God is a personal being, who created the universe and who is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good. Indeed, it is commonly said that God must possess all perfections. Yet we observe that the world this perfect being has created includes many imperfections: there is much joy in the world, but there is also much suffering — much of it apparently undeserved; and there is sin. We call these things evil. How can they exist in a world that owes its origin to a God with the attributes Christians believe their God to possess?

The usual response now is to say that though God could have created a world without evil, it was better for him to have created the world he did, in spite of the evils it contains. The occurrence of those evils was necessary for goods that are even greater. If God had so created the world that it contained no evil at all, that world would have been less good, all things considered, than it is even with all the evil it contains. This is called the greater goods defense

The Christian may say we humans rightly do many things we expect to cause avoidable harm. We build a bridge from San Francisco to Marin County, knowing that in the construction some workmen will fall into the water and drown. We could avoid their deaths by not building the bridge. But the bridge is a great good. Given our human limitations, we cannot build it without some people dying a result. So we build it and accept their deaths as part of the cost of bridging those waters. And God’s permission of evil may also be justified by the greater goods to which it leads

An omnipotent being, of course, does not face all the hard choices we do. If he wants a bridge across those waters, he need only say ‘‘Let there be a bridge’’ and there will be a bridge. One question the greater-goods defense raises is: what kind of good could be so intimately connected with evil that even an omnipotent being would have to accept the evil as the price of realizing that good? And what good could be so great that it would justify such a being’s accepting the amount of evil there is in the world as the price of attaining that good?

The usual answer these days is freedom. There must be freedom if there is to be moral goodness. And the price of giving humans freedom is that sometimes they will misuse it. Even an omnipotent being can’t cause a person to freely do good. And freedom, with the moral goodness that sometimes results from it, is a good sufficiently great that it makes the evils that also result worth accepting. This is what is called the free will defense

There is a problem, of course, about appealing to human freedom to solve the problem of evil when you also believe in predestination and divine foreknowledge. This is a problem of long standing, with which many philosophers have wrestled. No solution has gained general acceptance. And until Christian philosophers have worked out an acceptable solution to that problem, I think non-Christian philosophers are entitled to regard the free-will defense as very problematic

But there are other problems about the appeal to freedom. There are evils whose occurrence has no discernible connection with freedom. Theologians call them natural evils, meaning such things as earthquakes, floods, tornadoes, diseases, and so on. If a deer dies in a forest fire, suffering horribly as it does so, that is an evil. It is not only human suffering we must take into account when we are weighing good against evil in this world

Now, if you accept the theory of evolution, you will believe there were other animals on this planet long before humans appeared on the scene. Humans evolved from other species through a long and gradual process during which many of their ancestor species died out. This is how new species are born, through the death of old species weeded out by natural selection, the elimination of living beings that are less well adapted to compete in the struggle for survival in their environment. When the less well-adapted species die out, many of their members die of starvation, or disease, or predation, all methods that involve considerable pain and suffering for the animals less able to compete. None of that suffering can be justified as a necessary consequence of permitting humans freedom. We weren’t around then. So none of it seems beyond the power of omnipotence to prevent without the loss of that good

Here’s another objection. The greater-goods defense can easily lead to a kind of cost-benefit analysis that is deeply repugnant to our moral sense. Consider the kind of case that troubled Ivan in Dostoevsky’s great novel, The Brothers Karamazov. A little girl is treated quite brutally by her parents, who beat her because she has done something that made them angry. Perhaps she wets the bed repeatedly, and they think she ought to be old enough to control her bladder. Or perhaps the father is an alcoholic who abuses his daughter sexually. The Brothers Karamazov is fiction, but to hear about real cases like this, you need only listen regularly to the eleven o’clock news

The free-will defense seems to say, in cases of this kind: well, it’s all very unfortunate, of course, but this is the price we must pay for having freedom. For the father to have the opportunity to display moral goodness, God must give him the opportunity to choose evil. You can’t have the one opportunity without the other. And the father’s having the opportunity to display moral goodness is such a great good that it outweighs the fact that he chooses evil

But who gets the good here? It’s the father. And who suffers the evil? It’s the little girl. Let us grant, for the sake of argument, the questionable assumption that the benefit outweighs the cost. Freedom, we’ll concede, is a very great good, even when it isn’t properly exercised. Still, it makes some difference who pays the cost. Freedom may be a great good, even a good so great that it would outweigh really horrendous suffering. But justice requires some attention, not only to the net amount of good, after you have subtracted the evil, but also to the way the goods and evils are distributed. Some distributions just aren’t fair

The mention of Ivan Karamazov brings me to my final point. Ivan claims that if God does not exist, everything is permissible. Dostoevsky, speaking through Ivan, may have stated the problem of evil as powerfully as any atheist; but he was himself a Christian, who believed that God must exist if we are to make sense of morality

I think the opposite is true. I think Abrahamic belief makes morality, as we normally think of it, unintelligible. Consider the story of Abraham and Isaac in Genesis 22. One day God put Abraham to the test. He said to Abraham: “Take your son, Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering.” God gives no reason for this horrifying command. And Abraham asks none. He simply sets out to obey. And he nearly does obey. He has the knife raised to kill his son, when God sends down an angel to stay his hand. God then says he is satisfied with Abraham: “Now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your favored one, from me.” In the end, God does not actually require the sacrifice. But he does require that Abraham demonstrate his willingness to carry out the sacrifice

What’s the moral of this story? I suggest it’s this: as God’s creatures, our highest loyalty must be to God, even if this requires the sacrifice of our deepest human loyalties; God is our creator, our Lord, and we owe him absolute obedience, no matter what he commands — and he might command anything. There are no constraints on his will, so we might be required to do anything. There is no predicting what he might require, and there is nothing to say that his commands will not change from one moment to the next. At the beginning of the story, God commands Abraham to kill Isaac; in the middle he commands Abraham not to kill Isaac

If there is a God who is liable to command anything, and if our highest loyalty must be to this God, there is no act — save disobedience to God — that we can safely say is out of bounds, no act of a kind that simply must not be done, not even genocide, to use a crime I think most of us would shrink from committing, even if we believed God had commanded it. If this God exists and we must obey him unconditionally, then anything whatever might turn out to be permissible. This view is destructive of morality

From this line of thought there seem to be only two possible escapes. One is to say, as Robert Adams does, that the God he believes in is a loving God, who simply would not issue a command as brutal as one which required the killing of an innocent child, or of entire people — men, women and children. Anyone who claims that he has issued such a command must be rejected as speaking falsehoods about God. This line leads, I think, to a deep skepticism about the validity of scripture as a record of God’s revelation to his human creatures, since scriptural passages that report that God did in fact issue such commands are not hard to find; for example to exterminate all the inhabitants of Canaan

If the scriptures are at all accurate in their portrayal of God, then he has frequently acted in a way that did not display love toward all his creatures. We can avoid this conclusion only by being deeply skeptical about the accuracy of the scriptural portrayal of God

The alternative, I think, is to say yes, the scriptures are generally accurate in their portrayal of God. He does frequently command things apt to
seem
to us abominable. But if he has commanded them, they must be right, however they seem to us. This alternative leads to a deep skepticism about our ability to make moral judgments. If the mass slaughter of the innocent is not wrong, then we don’t know how to tell the difference between right and wrong, even in what would appear to be the clearest cases. We must either give up belief or give up morality. I choose heresy

The core evidence for theism, then, is Scripture. What if we accept Scripture as offering evidence of a God who has a moral character and plans for human beings, who intervenes in history and tells us how to live? What conclusions should we draw from Scripture about God’s moral character and about how we ought to behave? Let us begin with the position of the fundamentalist, of one who takes Scripture with utmost seriousness, as the inerrant source of knowledge about God and morality. If we accept biblical inerrancy, I’ll argue, we must conclude that much of what we take to be morally evil is in fact morally permissible and even required

Consider first God’s moral character, as revealed in the Bible. He routinely punishes people for the sins of others. He punishes all mothers by condemning them to painful childbirth, for Eve’s sin. He punishes all human beings by condemning them to labor, for Adam’s sin (Gen. 3:16–18). He regrets His creation, and in a fit of pique, commits genocide and ecocide by flooding the earth (Gen. 6:7). He hardens Pharaoh’s heart against freeing the Israelites (Ex. 7:3), so as to provide the occasion for visiting plagues upon the Egyptians, who, as helpless subjects of a tyrant, had no part in Pharaoh’s decision. (So much for respecting free will, the standard justification for the existence of evil in the world.) He kills all the firstborn sons, even of slave girls who had no part in oppressing the Israelites (Ex. 11:5). He punishes the children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and great great-grandchildren of those who worship any other god (Ex. 20:3–5). He sets a plague upon the Israelites, killing twenty-four thousand, because some of them had sex with the Baal-worshiping Midianites (Num. 25:1–9). He lays a three-year famine on David’s people for Saul’s slaughter of the Gibeonites (2 Sam. 21:1). He orders David to take a census of his men, and then sends a plague on Israel, killing seventy thousand, for David’s sin in taking the census (2 Sam. 24:1, 10, 15). He sends two bears out of the woods to tear forty-two children to pieces, because they called the prophet Elisha a bald head (2 Kings 2:23–24). He condemns the Samarians, telling them that their children will be “dashed to the ground, their pregnant women ripped open” (Hosea 13:16). This is but a sample of the evils celebrated in the Bible

Can all this cruelty and injustice be excused on the ground that God may do what humans may not? Look, then, at what God commands humans to do. He commands us to put to death adulterers (Lev. 20:10), homosexuals (Lev. 20:13), and people who work on the Sabbath (Ex. 35:2). He commands us to cast into exile people who eat blood (Lev. 7:27), who have skin diseases (Lev. 13:46), and who have sex with their wives while they are menstruating (Lev. 20:18). Blasphemers must be stoned (Lev. 24:16), and prostitutes whose fathers are priests must be burned to death (Lev. 21:9). That’s just the tip of the iceberg. God repeatedly directs the Israelites to commit ethnic cleansing (Ex. 34:11–14, Lev. 26:7-9) and genocide against numerous cities and tribes: the city of Hormah (Num. 21:2–3), the land of Bashan (Num. 21:33–35), the land of Heshbon (Deut. 2:26–35), the Canaanites, Hittites, Hivites, Perizzites, Girgashites, Amorites, and Jebusites ( Josh. 1–12). He commands them to show their victims “no mercy” (Deut. 7:2), to “not leave alive anything that breathes” (Deut. 20:16). In order to ensure their complete extermination, he thwarts the free will of the victims by hardening their hearts (Deut. 2:30, Josh. 11:20) so that they do not sue for peace. These genocides are, of course, instrumental to the wholesale theft of their land ( Josh. 1:1–6) and the rest of their property (Deut. 20:14, Josh. 11:14). He tells eleven tribes of Israel to nearly exterminate the twelfth tribe, the Benjamites, because a few of them raped and killed a Levite’s concubine. The resulting bloodbath takes the lives of 40,000 Israelites and 25,100 Benjamites (Judg. 20:21, 25, 35). He helps Abijiah kill half a million Israelites (2 Chron. 13:15–20) and helps Asa kill a million Cushites, so his men can plunder all their property (2 Chron. 14:8–13)

Consider also what the Bible permits. Slavery is allowed (Lev. 25:44– 46, Eph. 6:5, Col. 3:22). Fathers may sell their daughters into slavery (Ex. 21:7). Slaves may be beaten, as long as they survive for two days after (Ex. 21:20–21, Luke 12:45–48). Female captives from a foreign war may be raped or seized as wives (Deut. 21:10–14). Disobedient children should be beaten with rods (Prov. 13:24, 23:13). In the Old Testament, men may take as many wives and concubines as they like because adultery for men consists only in having sex with a woman who is married (Lev. 18:20) or engaged to someone else (Deut. 22:23). Prisoners of war may be tossed off a cliff (2 Chron. 24:12). Children may be sacrificed to God in return for His aid in battle (2 Kings 3:26–27, Judg. 11), or to persuade Him to end a famine (2 Sam. 21)

So, why were the ancient biblical peoples as ready to ascribe evil as good deeds to God? Why did they think God was so angry that He chronically unleashed tides of brutal destruction on humanity? The answer is that they took it for granted that all events bearing on human well-being are willed by some agent for the purpose of affecting humans for good or ill. If no human was observed to have caused the event, or if the event was of a kind (e.g., a plague, drought, or good weather) that no human would have the power to cause, then they assumed that some unseen, more-powerful agent had to have willed it, precisely for its good or bad effects on humans. So, if the event was good for people, they assumed that God willed it out of love for them; if it was bad, they assumed that God willed it out of anger at them. This mode of explanation is universally observed among people who lack scientific understanding of natural events. It appears to be a deeply rooted cognitive bias of humans to reject the thought of meaningless suffering. If we are suffering, someone must be responsible for it!

Why did these representations of God as cruel and unjust not make God repugnant to the authors of Scripture and their followers? They were too busy trembling in their sandals to question what they took to be God’s will. The seventeenth-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes already observed that people honor raw power irrespective of its moral justification

The well-known “problem of evil” in the case of God is just a special case of this strategy: one would reasonably expect an omni-being to have created a moral world; the patent lack of such a world (in the plethora of cases that have nothing to do with “free will”) provides reason to doubt there’s any such being, as does the overall poor record of answered prayers (where one remembers to count not only positive anecdotes, but all of the failures people tend not to remember). And note that this argument doesn’t justify mere agnosticism: people are presumably not agnostic about bogeymen; rather, it justifies full disbelief. What’s bad enough for bogeymen is bad enough for God

. . .

I don’t think you need to be an atheist to have the reaction I’ve mentioned to the content of religious claims. Were the claims about a supernatural entity who loves, commands, scolds, forgives, and so on, to be encountered in a fashion removed from the rich, “respectable” aesthetic and cultural traditions in which they are standardly presented, they would be widely regarded as delusional, if not psychotic. Think of how most normal, even religious people react to people who murder their children because ‘‘God told them to’’ ( just as He told Abraham!); or to the claims of the Koresh cult in Texas, or those claims about the Hale-Bopp comet made by the recent Heaven’s Gate cult — and then remember that many religions were themselves once just such ‘‘cults’’ (see in this regard the work of the noted biblical scholar, Elaine Pagels 1979)

In a similar vein, even the noted theistic philosopher Robert Adams (1999) writes: “What would you think if you asked your neighbor why he was building a large stone table in his backyard, and he said, ‘I’m building an altar, because God has commanded me to sacrifice my son as a whole burnt offering. Won’t you come to the ceremony tomorrow morning?’ All agree that the neighbor should be committed to a mental hospital” (p. 284)

. . .

they know that a biological war of all against all likely leaves most animals starving, diseased, and scared; and that most of human life ends in humiliating misery, perfectly nice people wasting away from awful diseases and mental deteriorations, often unable to recognize family and friends, much less retain any wisdom they may have earlier acquired (Can anyone seriously think that Alzheimer’s helps in the building of a better immortal soul?). Of course, it’s perfectly fine to be selective about what one focuses upon and enjoys; it’s self-deception only if it leads one to avow hypotheses that one knows to be belied by the majority of the evidence

. . .

ignorance (read: mystery) is standardly a reason to not believe something. Imagine the police arresting you merely because it’s a ‘‘mystery’’ how you could have murdered Smith! Just so: if it’s really a complete mystery how God designed or created the world and permits so much pointless suffering, then obviously that’s a reason to suspect it’s simply not true that He did — and my point is that this is sufficiently obvious that everyone knows it and people simply pretend that religion affords some very odd exception

. . .

Philosophers have, I think, rightly pointed out that death may not be as bad as people suppose, but it’s hard to think of any story — least of all the glory of God! — that would justify the sufferings of, for example, children slowly dying from a plague, cancer, or aids, or people wasting away with Alzheimer’s or completely debilitating strokes

[left]I have already said I think that most people who are suffering are not really experiencing an intellectual problem but rather an emotional problem. Now you might think to yourself at this point, well then why go through all of this intellectual material if it’s really not the problem. Well, two reasons, I think. First of all people think that their problem is intellectual, so by working through the responses to the logical and evidential problems of evil we can help them to see what the real problem is and treat their opinion with respect. But secondly I think that what I’ve shared with you this afternoon can be of tremendous help and encouragement when you yourself are called upon to endure terrible suffering[/left]

[left]Paradoxically then, even though the problem of suffering is the greatest objection to the existence of God, at the end of the day, God is the only solution to the problem of suffering. If God does not exist then we are locked in a world filled with gratuitous and unredeemed suffering. God is the final answer to the problem of suffering[/left]

[left]The problem is that whereas the fool rightly was willing to grant that it is possible that the concept of a maximally excellent being be instantiated, he would have to be not just a fool but a complete schmuck to grant that it is possible that the concept of an unsurpassably great being [with additional necessary existence] be instantiated. For in granting that it is possible that there is an unsurpassably great being, he is granting that it is possible that it is necessary that there is a maximally excellent being. But if his consent to the latter is to be an informed one, he must know that the nested modal operator, “It is possibly that it is necessary,” is to be subject to the axiom of the S5 system of modal logic, according to which whatever is possibly necessary is necessary. This has the consequence that a proposition’s modal status is world-invariant. Since it is possible that the proposition that it is necessary that there is a maximally excellent being is true, this proposition is true in some possible world. But given that a necessary proposition is true in every possible world, it follow that it is true in the actual world that there is a maximally excellent being. The fool is well within his rights to charge the S5-based ontological argument with begging the question in its possibility premise.

The intelligent S5 arguer, such as Plantinga, would grant that the argument does not succeed as a piece of natural theology, but then would point out that it nevertheless serves the purpose of showing that it is not irrational or epistemically impermissible to believe that God exists; for the argument is valid and has premises, including the possibility one, that are just as likely to be true as not.

If a stalemate of intuitions is to be overcome, the opponent of the argument must give some good argument for why its possibility premise is false. This could be done by finding some concept that intuitively seems to have more likelihood of being instantiatable than does the concept of being unsurpassably great and that is strongly incompatible with it in that if either concept is instantiated in any possible world, the other instantiated in none. The concept could be that of being an unjustified evil, meaning an evil that God does not have a morally exonerating excuse for permitting, that is, an evil that could not coexist with God. But since an unsurpassably great being, if it possibly exists, exists in every possible world, in no possible world is there an unjustified evil. But it certainly seems more likely that it is possible that there be an unjustified evil than that there be an unsurpassably great being. Even some theists seem to grant the possibility of an unjustified evil when they exercise themselves in constructing theodicies that attempt to show that the apparently unjustified evils of the world really have a justification. Thus, by souping up the concept of God in the way the S5 ontological arguer does, the foundation is laid for an ontological disproof of God, conceived of as an unsurpassably great being.[/left]

[left]It is the final proof of God’s omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us.[/left]

[left]The existence of evil is the [emphasis in original] most fundamental threat to the traditional Western concept of an all-good, all-powerful God[/left]

[left]Morally speaking, how the concept of inscrutable evil comforts those suffering monumental loss is an added mystery.[/left]

[left]To argue that all sufferers were given their just deserts is as absurd as supposing that the millions Hitler annihilated, the millions who died as a result of Stalin’s purges, or the millions who were slaughtered by the Khmer Rouge were punished by God because of some sin they committed.

...

Another claim involved here is that the great power of God, evidenced by natural catastrophes, shocks those who are on the road to error into behaving appropriately. Yet sufferers are more prone to ask, “why me?” or to question the existence of an all-good, all-powerful God than they are to revere such a destructive power. A mass miracle now and then such as ending the slaughter in the Sudan, or turning the land mines of Cambodia into flowers, would better inspire awe and reverence than the devastation wreaked by earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, volcanic eruptions, and pandemics.[/left]