Dear William,
God, some people think is an odd sort of person, and this is true as far as it goes, if by odd one means unusual. He is not a god, since a god would merely be a superhuman but the Ground of Being. He is.
Who is He? He is best known by His attributes. These single Him out from any other possible beings: all powerful, all knowing, all good. He is revealed to us in the pages of Sacred Scriptures, human history, our own experience, and reason. Of course, not all of these ways to God carry equal weight but that they all exist is what we would expect if He exists!
Early in the Twentieth century it was popular in philosophic circles to claim traditional attributes of God were incoherent. By the end of the twentieth century philosophers (both theist and non-theist) had mostly given up this line of attack as the attributes of God received philosophical clarification and definition that showed they could be asserted rationally.
Lately the idea that the Christian or Jewish God is good has come under attack (again) though generally not from professional philosophers. This is not new and in fact is a variation of an old heresy that de-emphasized the Jewish roots of Christianity. In extreme forms, the god of the Old Testament was not the God of the New Testament.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth century bigotry against Jewish people amongst European gentile elites and a rising tide of anti-intellectualism led to an attack on the portrayal of the God of the Old Testament. Old books can be hard to read and as a collection of books containing many different genre of literature the Old Testament (as Christians call it) can be particularly tricky to read for the layperson. The combination of antisemitism and village atheism produced the “God was evil in the Old Testament” myth that is still repeated today by a few atheists (though generally the popular and not the scholarly representatives of this small movement).
Generally the village atheist will assert that a good God would not kill the whole world in a global Flood, order the sacrifice of Isaac, would not order the annihilation of the Canaanites, send bears to kill teens mocking a prophet, and would not send people to Hell for eternity. The last idea is mostly from the New Testament but almost all the other examples every used are drawn from the Old.
First, we have to recognize that the village atheist insists on treating the text in the most “literal” manner possible . . .sometimes to the point of losing the literary value of the text. If the “global flood” is a metaphor of justice and did not literally happen (as some scholars argue the genre suggests), then the atheist is guilty of misreading the purpose of the text. He is attributing to God actual acts that are metaphorical or hyperbole on the part of the writer to make a point.
In other words, to emphasize the holiness of God the writer of Genesis may show that few and those only by God’s grace are righteous. The entire world deserves destruction and God in His holiness could command it. Perfectly traditional Christians (such as C.S. Lewis) read the texts in question in this manner. The village atheist often pretends that this viable intellectual tradition does not exist.
I do believe the texts suggest historical events (though not modern “histories” obviously). There was a Noah and a global flood, for example. However, it is important to note that I could be wrong not (mainly) because of some atheist attacks but because perfectly sane Christians think I am misreading the texts. I have a fall-back position!
Let us assume (as I do) that all the events cited by the village atheist are historical events. God actually did or commanded the things described in the stories the village atheist references. Does this mean God must be wicked?
It does not and the reason is fairly obvious. If God exists, then He has the attributes that God has. God does things that we can describe but in the context of all His attributes. Since the “goodness” of God is the attribute under dispute, I am not arguing that if God does it, then it must be good. I am suggesting that the village atheist has failed to account for divine power and knowledge.
You can only know God’s commands were wicked if you can know there could be no moral basis for the commands and this the atheist cannot know.
If God existed, then He could have a moral basis for destroying much of humankind in a global flood. If He could, then simply looking at the story and saying: “Given this story, we know God is a moral monster” is hasty and uncharitable. The most interesting part about God’s actions (if God exists) is that we can know there might be a good reason for His actions but it might also be impossible for that full reason to be described given the limits of ancient Hebrew. God had to speak the language people spoke . . . not a language using ideas and terms incomprehensible to most humans who would ever read the text.
If God exists, the God knows everything and sustains everything. He is also all powerful. We know that the entire cosmos is connected. To be morally good, God must account for the moral value of all of creation: animals, angels, planets, starts, and humankind to name just a few.
Imagine the moral complexity of even a fairly simply human action. My writing this piece has ramifications in the physical and metaphysical world that are immense even granted the few people who will read it! I am changing the physical universe as I press keys and make pixels go “on/off.” I am changing parts of the “mental” space of the universe by asserting ideas (good or bad!).
The reason I take some care in what I write is that I do not want to be accountable for the bad that can come from what I do. My guess is that if I saw all the implications of the typographical error in the second paragraph, I would never write again.
God sees all this interconnected universe. He cares for His creation (we are told!) including the smallest bird. He looked at the stars and the vast cosmos before humankind was created and said it was good. Given the interconnectivity of all of creation and His relative love for all of creation, I can easily imagine a case where the best thing that could be done would be not so great for most of humankind.
This is particularly true if (as traditional religion asserts) the human soul is immortal. God is dealing with creatures in humans where God has all of eternity to make things turn out with justice, beauty, and goodness. He does not just have this life. God can therefore do things that no human being or government could do because we can only act in a limited space of time and He can act in the light of eternity.
Again, the atheist plainly does not accept these assumptions but cannot look at a Biblical story and assert that God is obviously immoral without taking all the assumptions of the story into account. God is not obviously immoral to kill anyone. We are all going to die. We are all going to face God. From the eternal perspective is it so hard to imagine that it might be better for me to die sooner rather than later?
Of course no human has this knowledge so no human can decide to hasten my trip to eternity. The implications (on eternity) of taking a human life are huge. We lack (by definition) the knowledge that God (if He exists) has. This not merely asserting the desired conclusion but suggesting the atheist has had a failure of imagination. He asserts that he knows God could have no good reason to wipe out humankind in a global flood. I assert that given the interconnectivity of life it is easy to imagine many circumstances where God could wipe out humankind especially give eternity.
Let me cite but one hypothetical: Imagine that general human wickedness threatened (by some means) to destroy all life on the planet. To save all life on the planet (most of which does not have eternity) from the abuse of human free will God hastens the death (coming in any case) of much of humankind. He deals with those humans justly in eternity.
God does the “best” He can given the entire set of constraints in the cosmos.
Why doesn’t God just tell us “why” He does things? He answers this plainly in the Book of Job. Ancient peoples (at the very least) lack the conceptual framework and scientific knowledge to know that the cosmos is as it is. The number of variables from any given action is immense and God must choose which will be actualized within the cosmos He created. We know that God’s actions (as described in books such as Job) could be reasonable so easy skepticism is defeated. The full explanation would not be endless but very, very long.
At that point the religious person is free to point out that his or her personal experience of God suggests that God is not a moral monster.
Actually William there is a good rule here for when we deal with other religions: We cannot criticize another religion without taking all their interlocking assumptions into account.
(An example would be lame anti-Mormon apologetics that ask why Joseph Smith translated the Book of Mormon into faux King James English. The obvious answer, if I were a Mormon, would be that Smith was using the religious vocabulary he had learned. God was working with what Smith had. I am not a Mormon but if I were one that old anti-Mormon attack would just frustrate me with irrationality of the critic.)
More later!
Under the Mercy,
John Mark N. Reynolds
The previous letters to William (a fine correspondent who was interested in my views on theism) are here and here.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In