“Tell me about your God of love,” an
atheist wrote to me, “for all that I see is 1 Samuel 15:3, 2 Samuel 24:15, 2 Samuel 6:6, and 1 Chronicles 21:14.” Never let it be said that atheists haven’t
read the scriptures. Sometimes they have
read it only too well. And I must admit
that I too I have trouble squaring God’s command to “slay both
man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass” with
the One who said “Permit little children, and forbid them not, for of such is
the kingdom of heaven.” That God would
inflict pain or even allow pain has challenged man since the days of Job.
Grandma June provided one answer to
Natalie Angier. “When I was eight years
old, my family was in a terrible car accident, and my older brother almost
died,” she writes. “The next night, as I
lay scared and sleepless on my paternal grandmother’s living-room couch, she
softly explained to me who was to blame.
Not my father’s Aunt Estelle, a dour, aging wild woman and devout
Baptist, who, as usual, was driving recklessly fast. No, the reason Estelle’s station wagon
flipped over and Joe was thrown out the back window was this: my father had
stopped going to church the previous year, and God was very, very angry.”
A 16 year old has more questions for an
advice columnists: “When I was a little
girl it was not so bad because I got used to the kids of the block making fun
of me, but now I would like to have boy friends like the other girls and go out
on Saturday nights, but no boy will take me because I was born without a
nose—although I’m a good dancer and have a nice shape and my father buys me
pretty clothes. I sit and look at myself
all day and cry. I have a big hole in
the middle of my face that scares people—even myself—so I can’t blame the boys
for not wanting to take me out. My
mother loves me, but she cries terribly when she looks at me. What did I do to deserve such a terribly bad
fate? Even if I did some bad things, I
didn’t do any before I was a year old and I was born that way. I asked papa and he says he doesn’t know, but
that maybe I did something in the other world before I was born, or that maybe
I was being punished for his sins. I
don’t believe that because he is a very nice man. Ought I commit
suicide?”
The basic formulation for the problem is
as follows: If God is good, He is not
God. If God is God, He is not good. If God is good, He would wish to make his
creatures happy. If God was
all-powerful, He would be able to do what He wished. But His creatures are suffering. Thus, God lacks power or goodness or
both. Either God doesn’t exist or He is
impotent or He is evil.
In The Brothers Karamazov, the greatest novel of the 19th
century, Fyodor Dostoevsky puts into the mouth of the atheist Ivan the one
irrefutable objection to a personal God, that the only possible religious
answer is that human suffering will be justified by the divine harmony and the
end of history. It’s a hollow argument
made by some theologians to explain the holocaust—that Hitler was God’s
punishment of European Jews for their secularization and Biblical prophecy was
fulfilled when the state of
“Listen! If all must suffer to pay
for the eternal harmony, what have children to do with it, tell me, please?
It's beyond all comprehension why they should suffer, and why they should pay
for the harmony. Why should they, too, furnish material to enrich the soil for
the harmony of the future? I understand solidarity in sin among men. I
understand solidarity in retribution, too; but there can be no such solidarity
with children. And if it is really true that they must share responsibility for
all their fathers' crimes, such a truth is not of this world and is beyond my
comprehension. Some jester will say, perhaps, that the child would have grown
up and have sinned, but you see he didn't grow up, he
was torn to pieces by the dogs, at eight years old. Oh, Alyosha,
I am not blaspheming! I understand, of course, what an upheaval of the universe
it will be when everything in heaven and earth blends in one hymn of praise and
everything that lives and has lived cries aloud: 'Thou art just, O Lord, for
Thy ways are revealed.' When the mother embraces the fiend who threw her child
to the dogs, and all three cry aloud with tears, 'Thou art just, O Lord!' then,
of course, the crown of knowledge will be reached and all will be made clear.
But what pulls me up here is that I can't accept that harmony. And while I am
on earth, I make haste to take my own measures. You see, Alyosha,
perhaps it really may happen that if I live to that moment, or rise again to
see it, I, too, perhaps, may cry aloud with the rest, looking at the mother
embracing the child's torturer, 'Thou art just, O Lord!' but I don't want to
cry aloud then. While there is still time, I hasten to protect myself, and so I
renounce the higher harmony altogether. It's not worth the tears of that one
tortured child who beat itself on the breast with its little fist and prayed in
its stinking outhouse, with its unexpected tears to 'dear, kind God'! “
The classic counter is that God made man
not as robots but with free moral agency.
God freely limited his own freedom and put no limit on ours. God thusly could not have created a moral
universe without at the same time freeing man’s spirit. If God had programmed all humans to be good,
there would be no evil but there would be no virtue as well. Evil exists because free will exists. Blind
force, instinct, or the orchestrations of God do not compel us. The classic Christian reply to suffering
makes sense only if we assume that God is
not in control of all that happens.
If God controls plane crashes, terminal cancers, and atom bombs, then
God must be responsible. If those
actions are bad, then God must be evil and the author of evil. I cannot believe that. Rather, I believe that God created a
contingent universe and delegated to humanity the freedom to work through the
vicissitudes of life—dealing with war, disease, and poverty. By doing so, humanity develops morally,
intellectually, and technologically. So
this is another reason why I believe God’s self-limiting sovereignty and that we determine our own destiny in the face of life,
death, and God.
This accords with the view of Harold
Kushner, whose young son had progeria, the “rapid
aging disease. By the time his son had
died at 14, the boy looked like an old man.
“An aching sense of unfairness” led Kushner to write the best-selling
book When Bad Things Happen to Good
People. Kushner argues that bad
things didn’t happen because God wants to punish us for our sins, test our
strength, or teach us lessons. Instead,
Kushner sees randomness to the universe.
Lottery winners are merely lucky—not blessed. And when bad things happen, we shouldn’t question
ourselves or God and be angry because the world is imperfect and unfair. Insurance companies call earthquakes and
hurricanes that kills hundred of people “acts of God”, but they use God’s name
in vain. These are acts of nature, not
acts of God. Nature is morally
blind. The act of God is the courage of
us to continue in the face of disaster.
But I think this is a sterile argument
that doesn’t address the core issue of the suffering of the innocent. I think for example of the two million Jewish
babies and children that were swallowed by the maw of the Nazi death camps,
including kids of relatives of my wife.
It makes me think that if there is a God, it’s a God who is blind. That children must die so that we will be
good strikes me as incomprehensible.
Following the death of his young boy, Huxley replied to a letter from
the Reverend Charles Kingley: “As I stood behind the coffin of my little
son the other day, with my mind bent on anything but disputation, the
officiating minister read as part of his duty, the words “If the dead rise not,
let us eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die.” I cannot tell you how inexpressibly they
shocked me. Paul had neither wife nor
child, or he must have known that his alternative involved a blasphemy against
all the best and noblest in human nature.
I could have laughed with scorn.
What! Because I am face to face
with irreparable loss, because I have given back to source from whence it came,
the cause of great happiness, still retaining through all my life the blessings
which have sprung and will spring from that cause, am I to renounce my manhood,
and, howling, grovel in bestiality? Why
the very apes know better, and if you shoot their young, the poor brutes grieve
their grief out and do not immediately seek distraction in the forge.”
I have great sympathy for this reaction,
and should I lose my wife or child, my grief would be as great, but I could not
be persuaded that their lives had been at no purpose. I think of the