Goodnessofgodandproblemofevil (Pdf)
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George Smith, from ATHEISM, The Case Against God 6. - God and Goodness The final characteristic of God that we shall consider is omnibenevolence—the quality of being all good. While God is said to be the epitome of moral perfection, this attribute has been notoriously difficult for Christians to defend, and it functions as a constant thorn in the side of Christian theology. The first problem with omnibenevolence is reconciling it with the biblical portrayal of God who, in the words of Thomas Jefferson, is “a being of terrific character—cruel, vindictive, capricious and unjust.” The Old Testament in particular makes little attempt to absolve God from the responsibility for evil. “Does evil befall a city,” asks the prophet Amos, “unless the Lord has done it” (3:6)—The prophet Jeremiah agrees: “Is it not from the mouth of the Most High that good and evil come” (Lamentations 3:38)—And in the book of Isaiah, the biblical Jehovah reports, “I am the Lord, and there is no other. ... I make weal and create woe, I am the Lord, who do all these things” (45:6-7). The Old Testament God garnered an impressive list of atrocities. He demanded and sanctioned human sacrifices (Leviticus 27:28-29; Judges 11:29-40; 2 Samuel 21:1-9). He killed the first-born of every Egyptian family (Exodus 12:29). He sanctioned slavery (Exodus 21:2-6; Leviticus 25:44- 46) and the selling of one’s daughter (Exodus 21:7). He commanded the killing of witches (Exodus 22:18), death for heresy (Exodus 22:20), death for violating the Sabbath (Exodus 31:14-15), death for cursing one’s parents (Leviticus 20:9), death for adultery (Leviticus 20:10), death for blasphemy (Leviticus 24:16), and death by stoning for unchastity at the time of marriage—a penalty imposed only upon women (Deuteronomy 22:20-21). The Old Testament credits the Israelites, acting under the auspices of Jehovah, with massacring an incredible number of men, women and children through conquest. Time and again we read accounts where they “utterly destroyed all in the city, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and asses, with the edge of the sword” (Joshua 6:21). There were exceptions, however. In Chapter 31 of Numbers, we read that Moses, angry with the officers of his army because they had taken captives from a conquered people instead of killing everyone, issued the following orders: “Now therefore, kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known man by lying with him. But all the young girls who have not known man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves” (Numbers 31:17-18). Jehovah himself was fond of directly exterminating large numbers of people, usually through pestilence or famine, and often for rather unusual offenses. In one instance, he is reported to have killed 70,000 men because David took a census of Israel (2 Samuel 24). In another strange case, he sent two bears to rip apart forty-two children for mocking the prophet Elisha (2 Kings 2:23-24). Many theologians are reluctant to identify the Old Testament Jehovah with the New Testament God of Christianity. The Christian God, they assure us, is a being of mercy and love. But this assertion is difficult to defend. While the old god was cruel, he at least restricted his infliction of misery to this life. The Christian God, however, reportedly extends this misery to eternity. According to the New Testament, Jesus repeatedly threatened disbelievers with eternal torment, and we must wonder how the doctrine of hell can be reconciled with the notion of an all- merciful God. … To my knowledge, no one has ever been accused of striking God, so the explanation must be that God, using some peculiar standard of “justice,” damns men to endless agony as punishment for insulting his infinite nature. Furthermore, God has complete foreknowledge of each man’s fate, so many men are born for no purpose other than to suffer in hell. And why would God create a place of torment in the first place, unless he derived some kind of pleasure or satisfaction from witnessing pain? Whether the Christian deity of fire and brimstone projects love or neurotic sadism on a cosmic scale, will be left to the conscience of the reader to decide. … Even if we bypass the problem of reconciling omnibenevolence with the Bible, the Christian still confronts serious philosophic problems. We shall assume that by omnibenevolence, the Christian means that God never does any evil, that all of his actions are good. Remember that “goodness,” in this context, must refer to a standard other than the will of God. Something cannot be defined as good simply because God is responsible for it. If we define the good as anything that God wills, it is ridiculous to talk about the moral worth of God. Morality applies only when there is choice. To say that God has no choice but to be good completely destroys the concept of morality when it is applied to God. If God is incapable of evil, he is neither moral nor immoral; he is simply amoral. To be omnibenevolent, God must be capable of evil but always choose the good. If God deliberately chooses evil, he is immoral. The question now arises: Why is there evil in the creation of an omnibenevolent deity? Why, in a world for which God is ultimately responsible, are there natural disasters that kill millions? Why are there diseases that cause suffering and cripple innocent men, women and children? Indeed, why is there evil and suffering of any kind? Must not God bear responsibility for these things, and do they not demonstrate that God cannot be all-good? This dilemma, known as the “problem of evil,” has led some Christians to deny the unlimited power of God and to declare belief in a deity with limited capacities who was unable to create a world without pain and evil. It has led other Christians to write lengthy books on theodicy, which purport to reconcile God’s goodness with his other characteristics and the existence of evil. The problem of evil is frequently considered to be the major objection to the Christian concept of God, and there has been more discussion of omnibenevolence than any other characteristic. But the relative importance attached to this problem is exaggerated. While this is a serious difficulty and one which Christians have failed to solve, it is by no means the most important or basic objection to Christian theism. When considered within the context of other difficulties surrounding the concept of God, this one is minor by comparison. For this reason, we shall not discuss it in as much detail as is customary in a book of this kind. Briefly, the problem of evil is this: If God does not know there is evil, he is not omniscient. If God knows there is evil but cannot prevent it, he is not omnipotent. If God knows there is evil and can prevent it but desires not to, he is not omnibenevolent. If, as the Christian claims, God is allknowing and all- powerful, we must conclude that God is not all-good. The existence of evil in the universe excludes this possibility. There have been various attempts to escape from the problem of evil, and we shall briefly consider the more popular of these. But one point requires emphasis. The Christian, by proclaiming that God is good, commits himself to the position that man is capable of distinguishing good from evil—for, if he is not, how did the Christian arrive at his judgment of “good” as applied to God? Therefore, any attempt to resolve the problem of evil by arguing that man cannot correctly distinguish good from evil, destroys the original premise that it purports to defend and thus collapses from the weight of an internal inconsistency. If the human standards of good and evil are somehow invalid, the Christian’s claim that God is good is equally invalid. One general theological approach to the problem of evil consists of the claim that evil is in some way unreal or purely negative in character. This argument, however, is so implausible that few Christians care to defend it. The first problem with it, as Antony Flew notes, is: “If evil is really nothing then what is all the fuss about sin about: nothing?” In Some Dogmas of Religion, John McTaggart quickly disposes of the claim that evil is in some way unreal: “Supposing that it could be proved that all that we think evil was in reality good, the fact would still remain that we think it evil. This may be called a delusion or a mistake. But a delusion or mistake is as real as anything else. A savage’s erroneous belief that the earth is stationary is just as real a fact as an astronomer’s correct belief that it moves. The delusion that evil exists, then, is real. But then ... it seems certain that a delusion or an error which hid from us the goodness of the universe would itself be evil. And so there would be real evil after all. ... However many times we pronounce evil unreal, we always leave a reality behind, which in its turn is to be pronounced evil.” As for the argument that evil is purely negative, a privation of the good (as disease may be said to be the absence of health), Wallace Matson provides this illuminating example in The Existence of God: “It may console the paralytic to be told that paralysis is mere lack of mobility, nothing positive, and that insofar as he is, he is perfect.