The History of God
The origin of God
As we discussed in the Chapter on the World Religions, the Abrahamic god was conceived around 500 BCE by the Israelites, the people of Israel, when they merged two gods of their pantheon: El Elyon (who was worshiped as the creator of the Universe) and Yahweh (who was worshiped as a son of El Elyon). The Israelites thus created a newly empowered god they called Yahweh. But they were still polytheistic, worshiping other gods in addition to Yahweh. That would change in 598 BCE, when Jerusalem, their capital, was destroyed by Babylonia and the most influential Israelites taken to the city of Babylon as captives1. In captivity, Israelite clerics concluded that the destruction of Jerusalem was a punishment from Yahweh for worshiping other gods1. Henceforth, the Israelites abandoned all other gods so that only Yahweh remained. This introduction of monotheism was the hour of the birth of Judaism. Its beliefs were codified in scripture known as the Torah.Around 30 CE, the Jewish prophet Jesus of Nazareth began preaching in what was then Roman Israel. Jesus was just one of numerous prophets trying their luck in the region2. These prophets may have spoken about the Jewish god Yahweh, but they may also have spoken about other gods (or even no god at all). However, at the time, the Jewish faith did not take talk of other gods lightly (blasphemy and apostasy were punishable by death). Hence, only those prophets who acknowledged Yahweh stood a chance of gathering adherents from among the Jewish populace. Such was the case for Jesus. He believed in Yahweh (i.e., God) but gave him a new face: God now wanted everyone to enjoy his kingdom, including the poor, the weak, and the sinners3. This new idea caught on and Jesus quickly gained adherents within the population of Israelites. Jesus was later crucified by the Romans, purportedly for blasphemy, but his followers insisted that he was resurrected thereafter. The religion of Christianity was founded on his preachings. The holy book of Christianity is the Bible, which combines the Torah (referred to as the Old Testament) with stories and letters from Jesus' time (called the New Testament). From the beginning of Christianity, Jesus was considered the son of God. Much later, in the 4th century CE, Christianity came to hold that God was, in fact, a triune godhead of God the Father, God the Son (Jesus), and an entity called the Holy Spirit.
The 7th century CE saw the birth of another religion that worships God: Near the city of Mecca on the Arabian Peninsula, the Prophet Muhammad declared that he had received revelations from God (whom he called Allah). He taught submission to Allah, daily prayer, and almsgiving. At this time, the region had no unified religion — Judaism, Christianity, and Zoroastrianism all coexisted with paganism. Furthermore, the region was a land of many different tribes and kingdoms, which all jockeyed for power4. Muhammad prevailed in this disarrayed environment by transmitting a simple main message: Submit to Allah and to Allah alone. There was no space for complexities such as a god who is one and three entities at the same time, a god who fathered a human, or a resurrection. Muhammad found many followers and started conquering the peninsula in numerous military campaigns. After his death, his revelations were collected in a book called the Quran. They are the basis of the religion of Islam.
In the 19th century, two prophets appeared in Persia: Siyyid Ali-Muhammad (who called himself “the Bab”) and Mirza Husayn Ali (who called himself “Bahaullah”). Their main message was that Yahweh was, in fact, the god of all religions and that individual religions were just different revelations from the same god. Both prophets were persecuted, but their teachings, written down in several letters and books, stuck and became the basis of the Bahai Faith.
Meanwhile, in America, also in the 19th century, several people reported that they were able to contact the spirits of the dead. The merging of these practices with the belief in the Abrahamic god became known as Spiritualism. Under the pseudonym Allan Kardec, Frenchman Hippolyte Léon Denizard Rivail codified these beliefs as Spiritism into The Spirits’ Book, written in 1857 CE5. It teaches belief in the spirits of the dead, belief in God, and a largely humanist worldview.
All of these religions trace their origin to the beliefs of the early Jews. Since Abraham was an important prophet in the Jewish faith, the god of these religions is nowadays called the Abrahamic god, and the religions are the Abrahamic religions. Although all of these religions revere the same god, the character of that god has accumulated different contradictory properties throughout history, which we detail next.
How God became loving
The Jewish God
In the Torah, God is described as a rather brutal character: He asks a father to kill his own son as an act of devotion; he asks for human sacrifices as tribute; he drowns all of humanity (except one family) in a great flood because humanity misbehaved; and he kills numerous people by his own hand in revenge or as punishment. Furthermore, both evildoers and apostates are punished either directly by God or brutally by his adherents, at his encouragement.We can hypothesize that God’s brutality reflects the time period in which the writers of the Torah (the Israelite priests) lived: Societies were largely more violent than they are now6, with retaliation, cruel punishments, and premature death more common generally. It may also reflect the fact that the Torah was consolidated while the Israelites were in captivity in Babylon: In the aftermath of the Babylonian conquest, the editors of the Torah likely had every interest in presenting Yahweh as a firm god who ruthlessly punishes those who go astray. Had they not, the Israelites might have acculturated and adopted Babylonian religion. In the same way, God’s brutality also likely ensured that Judaism survived the episodes of forced eviction, diaspora, and persecution that followed. In the spirit of English biologist Charles Darwin: Among the faiths that went through such hardships at the time, only those that worshiped a firm and vengeful god survived (i.e., Judaism).
The Christian God
When Jesus of Nazareth entered the scene as a prophet around 30 CE, he was probably just one of several prophets in Roman Israel2. Among these prophets, only those who had a particularly convincing message would have been able to gather adherents. This was manifestly the case for Jesus. His message of Yahweh as a loving god (compared to the vengeful god of Judaism) and, by extension, his call to for people to love one another, struck a chord among the populace:However, evildoers and apostates could now expect a new type of punishment after death: For those who digress, and for those who do not believe in God, Jesus introduced an eternal torture house called Hell, which was unknown to Judaism at the time.
The Muslim God
At the time of the Prophet Muhammad (around 600 years after Jesus’ death), the Arabian Peninsula was home to several rivaling tribes, each of which fought with or against the neighboring Byzantine and Sasanian Empires4. Raiding caravans (a practice called ghazu) was common way of life in times of scarcity, including for Muhammad7. The society was thus chronically violent7. In this context, Jesus’ teachings of a god who loves all humankind uniformly did not take root. By contrast, Muhammad transmitted a slightly different image of God: Allah inherited the kindheartedness of the Christian god[Quran: 85:14], but explicitly reserves that kindheartedness for those who submit to him: “Allah will generously reward those who believe and do good [but] he truly does not like the disbelievers”[Quran: 30:45, 3:32, 2:98]. The god that convinced the Arab tribes to unite and conquer the peninsula was a god who cursed the unbelievers as “the worst of all beings”, encouraged his adherents to go to war[Quran: 8:39, 61:9, 9:33, 48:28-29, 9:29, 2:244, 47:35, 66:9, 2:216, 4:76, 8:59-60, 8:65, 9:14, 9:111, 9:123, 61:4], called on adherents to punish wrongdoers and deviators, and granted adherents war booty, slaves, and enslaved concubines. The Christian notion of Hell was perfected to a horrible place of the most brutal tortures for those who did not submit to Allah.The enlightened God
History took its course, and the Age of Enlightenment brought forth modern values such as the equality of the sexes, the ostracism of brutal punishments, and the freedom of religion. Accordingly, religions formed after the 17th and 18th centuries had to accommodate these values if they were to find a followership. The Bahai Faith entered the scene in the 19th century in Persia. Building off the newest iteration of the Abrahamic god of Shia Islam, the Bahai Faith adapted the god to be even more loving than the Christian god: The Bahai god emphasizes the equal purpose of all religions — a quality unthinkable in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Talk of brutal punishment, the punishment of apostasy, and even physical torture in Hell is nowhere to be found in the Bahai teachings.Spiritualism is the youngest of the major Abrahamic religions. Since its founders lived in a predominantly Christian environment (the United States), they based their version of God on the Christian god. Much like the Bahai Faith, Spiritualism had to accommodate the values of the Enlightenment. Therefore, the faith also supports the equality of the sexes, the freedom of religion, equal respect for all religions, and the rejection of brutal physical punishment, including in Hell.
The Enlightenment also impacted the older Abrahamic religions. Judaism renounced brutal punishments and Christianity, likewise, has recently begun to embrace the freedom of religion. Some denominations of Christianity have even abolished Hell as a physical place and allowed non-Christians to achieve salvation. The liberal interpretations of Islam, too, now stipulate freedom of religion and respect for adherents of other faiths. The originally vengeful god of early Judaism has thus been tamed. Successive Abrahamic religions, and successive interpretations of these religions, have rendered the god more humane and kinder. Today, God is assumed to be omniscient (all-knowing), omnipotent (all-powerful), perfect, and benevolent in all Abrahamic religions.
That said, even if the Abrahamic religions have evolved markedly towards more humanist values, they still carry the baggage of the brutal god originally described in the Torah — the god that once purposefully drowned nearly all of humanity in a great flood.
The character of Moses, as stated in the Bible, is the most horrid that can be imagined. [He once said: “Kill every male child, and kill every woman that hath known a man by lying with him; but all the virgins keep alive for yourselves.”[Bible: Numbers 31:13]] Here is an order to butcher the boys, to massacre the mothers, and debauch the daughters. Let any mother put herself in the situation of those mothers, one child murdered, another destined to violation, and herself in the hands of an executioner. Let any daughter put herself in the situation of those daughters, destined as a prey to the murderers of a mother and a brother, and what will be their feelings? In short, the matters contained in this chapter, as well as in many other parts of the Bible, are too horrid for humanity to read, or for decency to hear.
How God became universal
Yahweh was initially conceived as the god of the Jews. As such, he was interested mainly in a single people and a single land: “Out of all the peoples on the face of the Earth, the Lord has chosen you [i.e., the Israelites] to be his treasured possession.”[Bible: Deuteronomy 14:2, Exodus 19:5, Deuteronomy 7:7-8]8Jesus liberated God from his singular focus on the Jews and Israel: In Christianity, God is a universal god in which all humankind should believe. This is in line with the general pattern that gods become more omniscient and more universal as societies become more complex9.
Islam sits between the two: The Muslim god clearly takes a special interest in the Arab people. For example, the Quran was revealed to Muhammad specifically in Arabic, so that Arabs may follow it[Quran: 12:2, 44:58]. To this date, the Arabic version of the Quran is considered the most authoritative. (There is no such constraint for the Christian Bible, which was written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek and is today read mostly in translations). At the same time, Islam is clearly universalist in spirit and invites all of humanity to follow it.
The Bahai god is even more universal than the Islamic and Christian god: He is not only the god that everyone should venerate, but he is also, in fact, the god that all religions already venerate in their own way10. Spiritualism holds the same: “All religions, or rather, all peoples, worship the same God, whether by this or that name.”[Spirits’ Book: § 671] Over time, Yahweh has thus evolved from a god of a single people to the god of all people, and finally, to the god that all religions already revere anyway.
How the devil joined
When the Abrahamic god was first conceived, he did not yet have the devil as his opponent. There is no mention of the devil in the Torah. This is because the devil was simply not necessary. God himself was responsible for both the good and the bad in life and he possessed all the negative characteristics of humans to this end, most notably, anger, evilness, and hate.The devil first appeared in the centuries before the common era, at the time when Judaism was being influenced by Zoroastrianism. As a classical dualist religion, Zoroastrianism recognizes a good deity (Ahura Mazda) and an evil deity (Angra Mainyu). It is hypothesized that Judaism took up the idea of an evil deity from Zoroastrianism in the 2nd and 1st centuries BCE and incorporated it into its theology as Satan11. The Talmud explains that Satan descends to this world and misleads a person into sinning. Satan then ascends to Heaven and levels accusations against the sinner, which inflames God’s anger against the accused. Satan then receives permission to act and takes away the sinner’s soul as punishment[Talmud / Bava Batra / 16a].
However, since the Torah was already complete when the devil was added to Judaism, there are no explicit mentions of him in the text. That omission was repaired in the New Testament of the Christian Bible, which formally introduces the devil. There, his role was, indeed, direly needed: Since God had become a loving god, the evilness on Earth could no longer be explained by God’s anger. That role was now filled by the devil: He is the source of evil. Interestingly, the New Testament did not take the occasion to equate the devil with the snake that seduced the first humans, Adam and Eve, in the mythical garden of Eden. The snake was still the snake. The idea that the snake was the devil appeared only in the centuries afterwards — too late to be incorporated into the books of the Bible12.
The devil exists also in Islam. When the Prophet Muhammad attempted to convert the polytheistic city of Mecca to Islam, the people refused. Muhammad then received a revelation that accepted the worship of the goddesses of the city besides Allah13. With that, the people of Mecca accepted Islam. However, Muhammad later declared, in an incident only alluded to in the Quran, that the verses were whispered to him not by Allah but by the devil[Quran: 22:52-53]. Since then, the verses have been known as the “Satanic Verses”, and they have been erased from the Quran and from Muslim theology. However, Islam does continue to hold that the incident took place, and the devil has thus definitively earned his place in this religion.
Israeli history professor Yuval Noah Harari offers an interesting thought on the concept of the devil14: Monotheistic religions with a loving god (such as Christianity, in particular) have the disadvantage that they cannot explain why there is so much evil in this world if there is only one power and that power is good. Dualist religions (such as Zoroastrianism), in contrast, cannot explain why there is order at all in this world (such as the laws of nature, which bind both the good and the evil god). The creation of the devil struck a compromise in this respect.
When the saints start marching in
The Abrahamic religions are monotheistic, i.e., they know only a single god. However, both Christianity and Islam expanded to societies that were originally polytheistic. These polytheistic societies could appeal to different supernatural forces for different needs: a sea god, a goddess of fortune, a god of war, etc. When Christianity and Islam arrived, they could offer no such convenience nor could they, as monotheistic religions, admit more gods to cater to this need.However, both Islam and Christianity know the concept of patron saints, i.e., the supernatural spirits of heroic men and women. In Islam, the saints are known as wali. In both religions, saints are not gods. In other words, they do not have universal power. However, they are believed to be able to influence God. People pray to them so that they may influence God in an adherent’s favor. Every saint has a specific domain of expertise (e.g., Saint Brendan is the patron of sailors). In this way, the saints take the role of the gods in polytheistic religions. We can hypothesize that this made Christianity and Islam more palatable to the polytheistic societies into which they expanded, striking a delicate balance between monotheism and the existence of other supernatural beings8.
How God became abstract
Yahweh was originally designed as a hero: He interacts physically with the prophets, punishes evildoers, helps good people, and is generally responsible for the working of the Universe. The figure thereby satisfies the human desire to obtain justice, to influence fate, to justify suffering, and to see a meaning in life.By Jesus' time, physical contact with God had already become much rarer. The New Testament mentions no physical interaction between God and humans after the time of the writing of the Torah — and that was hundreds of years earlier. In fact, in the New Testament, God does not appear at all as an actor. He sends angels, speaks from Heaven, and performs miracles through Jesus, but he himself does not act at all. Even when his own son is brutally crucified, God does not lift a finger. The Christian god had thus become much more abstract than the Jewish god.
By the time of Islam, God had become even more abstract: Allah acts exclusively by sending revelations to the Prophet Muhammad. Victories and failures in war are attributed to God, but nowhere does God perform a miracle for Muhammad, as he did for Jesus. Even less does he interact physically with the Muhammad, as he had done with the Jewish prophets. The direct interaction of God with humanity had thus been reduced to sending messages to a single person. Moreover, Muhammad declared that he was the last prophet, thus sealing the door to any further messages from God.
Even if God no longer sent prophets, the Abrahamic religions still considered him the creator of the Universe, the Earth, and humans. But that role became contested when British biologist Charles Darwin proposed the theory of Evolution, which did away with the need for a supernatural creator of humans. Today, the theory of Evolution is officially recognized by the Catholic and Anglican Churches. The genesis of the Earth and the Universe, likewise, are nowadays mostly explained by science and not by scripture. God’s role in the creation of the Universe has thus been reduced to the very first moments of the Big Bang, which science cannot (yet) explain. It has also become less common (at least in Europe) to believe that God grants prayers and performs miracles in everyday life. Thus, the God character has changed from a physical hero to a completely abstract concept.
God over time
We have seen that the image of God has changed over time: First, God did not exist at all. There was no god in the early Israelite pantheon that had the properties of the Abrahamic god. The Israelites then created God literally out of thin air around 500 BCE, by merging the god El Elyon with his son Yahweh. Even then, he was first accompanied by other gods. Only when these other gods were abandoned did Yahweh become the sole deity worshiped by the Abrahamic religions today.God’s character changed as well over time: He was first described as a brutal god. Only later did he become loving. He was at first local and is now universal; he was at first unopposed and is now in opposition to a devil; he was at first the only god but people can now also pray to saints; he used to be a physical hero but is now an abstract concept in many mainstream denominations; and he was once a single entity but is now a godhead in most denominations of Christianity. And yet, this god is considered the same god, both across the millennia and across the different Abrahamic religions: Each Abrahamic religion holds that its god is identical to the god of the religions preceding it.
While this may be surprising, it is very understandable from an atheist point of view: God is but a fictional character, and anything can be said about an object of fiction. A narrator, prophet, or author can design God in any way that suits him. He just has to strike a careful balance between continuity (to legitimize his ideas on the basis of previous beliefs) and novelty (to add new ideas that suit his goals). In this sense, the scriptures of the Abrahamic religions (the Torah, the New Testament, the Quran, the books of the Bahai Faith, and Allan Kardec’s works) can be seen as a series of novels. The novels were written in different epochs, by different people, and with different audiences in mind, and yet, for practical reasons, the main hero of the novels is always the same (God). Naturally, the hero of these stories has accumulated contradictory properties over the past three millennia.
This sort of development of a fictional character has an insightful modern-day analogy: Tintin is a hero in a series of Belgian comic books first written in the early 20th century. As such, the books mirror the society of that time: They contain occasional racist prejudices, animal cruelty, and an apologist attitude towards colonialism — all of which are nowadays considered outrageous. Therefore, the offending pages of the books were redrawn in the late 20th century15. The novels about God suffer from similar problems, even more so since the moral standards they espouse do not deviate by a mere 100 years but by three millennia. However, as the stories about God are considered eternal, they cannot be rewritten. Therefore, the adherents of the Abrahamic religions are stuck with them.
We will now look into some of the vestiges of the brutal god of the Torah that the Abrahamic religions of today still carry with them.
The Brutality of God
Mock execution
in Tel Aviv, Israel
From a Humanist point of view, this popular story of a father asked to slay his own son is, in reality, a disgusting cruelty. Nobody in his right mind would call the originator of such an instruction benevolent and loving. Assume that you saw someone who was about to slay another person on an altar. Would you not immediately rush to help? Would the excuse “I am doing it because God instructs me so” make the act any more pardonable? Certainly not. Today, we would declare such a person insane. Indeed, this has happened: In 2004, a Texan mother killed two of her children, claiming that God told her to do so. She was declared insane by the court and committed to a psychiatric hospital16. And yet, in the Bible, such a person is not considered insane. On the contrary, he is hailed as a hero for following God’s instruction, even though it meant sacrificing his own son. Abraham is so much of a hero that he became the eponym of the entire group of Abrahamic religions and God, who gives the instruction, is revered as the loving lord of humanity. That is an absurdity in Humanist eyes.
It is also an absurdity in Christian eyes. To see that, consider the story of Wilhelm Tell, the national hero of Switzerland. He, too, was de facto instructed to kill his own son by a local lord. However, the lord was not thereafter praised as the wisest and most loving. On the contrary, people rightly concluded that he was insane. The story sparked a rebellion, and this rebellion led to the creation of Switzerland as an independent country.
We may argue that God prevented the slaying of Isaac at the last minute. This, however, does not make things much better. How are a father and a son ever to trust each other again? Pretending to kill someone is called a mock execution. It is a horrific experience used as a device of psychological torture, entailing severe trauma, anxiety, and depression17. When the CIA used such techniques on prisoners in the early 2000s, the organization was not met with adoration18. Nobody praised the organization for only pretending to kill prisoners rather than killing them outright. On the contrary, the practice was condemned all over the world. This is because the threat of death itself is a crime. Thus, in Humanist eyes, praising God for the story of Isaac is a glorification of violence.
Some people argue that God just wanted to make a point — to prove, through Isaac, that he no longer desires human sacrifices. If that was true, few people seemed to have got the message. Even God himself seems to have forgotten: Just a few centuries later, he gratefully accepts the sacrifice of 32 prisoners by his own prophet Moses as “tribute unto the Lord”[Bible: Numbers 31:25-40].
This makes an atheist interpretation of the story of Isaac much more likely: It is entirely made up. It was written (or consolidated) when the Israelites were in captivity in Babylon. A faith that was to survive under these circumstances needed absolute obedience from its adherents, lest the adherents abandon the faith in despair. The story of Isaac was written to hammer this point: Obey your god even if he commands you to kill your own son. This strategy worked well, and the Jewish faith survived not just Babylonian captivity, but also diaspora, persecution, and the Holocaust. The clerics at the time could not know that their story would cause headaches with the image of the loving god that Christianity foisted on the Jewish god a few centuries later.
Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon, than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness, that has served to corrupt and brutalize humankind; and, for my own part, I sincerely detest it, as I detest everything that is cruel.
Human sacrifices
The Torah tells us that God enjoys human sacrifices: Even after the story of Isaac, Moses sacrifices 32 prisoners as “tribute unto the lord”[Bible: Numbers 31:25-40]; Jephthah sacrifices his daughter[Bible: Judges 11:29-40]; and human sacrifices are used to end a famine[Bible: 2 Samuel 21]. Even priests are sacrificed[Bible: 2 Chronicles 34:1-5]. These sacrifices are made to appease God, to obtain favor, or to pay tribute. In all of these instances, God is either apathetic or pleased with the sacrifices. In the 2nd Book of Samuel, God actually ends the famine in response to the sacrifices. Even in the New Testament, God receives a sacrifice: that of his own son[Bible: Hebrews 10:10, 1 Corinthians 5:7].From a Humanist perspective, human sacrifices are a deeply abominable act. Any being that desires such sacrifices deserves our utmost disgust. It is unfortunate, then, that today’s Abrahamic religions have inherited this despicable being from the Torah. They are thus obliged to vindicate its acts in the past and to revere this god as the most lovable being that can exist. For a Humanist, this is an detestable stance. One should never revere a god who once desired human sacrifices, even if he is a mere fiction.
The only excuse for God is that he doesn’t exist.
Mass murder
The Torah tells a story about a great flood — an event in which God had so much rain pour down upon the Earth that the entire world was flooded[Bible: Genesis 6-9]. Only one family survived, because God instructed them to build an ark. Thus, the story tells us that God deliberately drowned all humanity along with all animals (except those who were on the ark). With that, God makes German dictator Adolf Hitler look like an amateur19.We may say that God drowned humanity because humans were very sinful. Yet, that is no excuse from a Humanist point of view. First, the death penalty is a highly disputed instrument of punishment, and today, most countries have banned its practice. Second, the flood drowned babies along with all the others. Babies are innocent beings. Killing babies is a crime called infanticide, and it is widely shunned today. Third, drowning is a particularly agonizing form of death: The victim struggles against being submerged in water, screams for help, swallows water, goes in and out of consciousness, cannot breathe, breathes in water, and finally dies. Hence, death by drowning is outlawed even in those countries that permit the death penalty. Thus, whatever sins people may have committed before the flood, there is, from a Humanist point of view, no excuse for God’s actions.
According to the Torah, after the massacre, God shows humanity a rainbow and vows to never destroy them again. This has been interpreted as a sort of apology (even though God does not actually say that he is sorry). He is then presented as a loving god in the New Testament and his violent past forgiven. However, the destruction of humanity is not something that can be swept under the rug. God’s change of mind does not make him perfect, loving, or benevolent in any way. If Hitler said he was sorry, would we revere him as a wise and just ruler? Certainly not. But to this date, Christians, Muslims, Jews, and Bahais alike still worship a baby-killer as the most just ruler.
From an atheist perspective, of course, the story of the Great Flood is made up. Floods are a recurrent theme in ancient myths. They appear in Australian, Indian, European, and many other mythologies20. It may be that some people found seashells or fish fossils in inland areas and concluded that the Earth was once covered with water. Others may have experienced a flood in their living history and tried to explain and justify the calamity with reference to their respective gods. Whatever the case, what is certain is that there is no scientific evidence for a “Great Flood” that erased all of humankind. Most likely, the story was invented by the Israelite priests to scare people into obedience. Atheists would say much the same for the Abrahamic god himself.
Why does this same God tell me how to raise my children when he had to drown his?
Other killings
The Torah tells us that Moses received the Ten Commandments from God[Bible: Exodus 32]. One of these commandments is, famously: “Thou shall not kill.” And yet, right after receiving this rule, Moses does exactly the opposite, upon God’s instruction. When Moses discovers that the Israelites have been worshiping a golden calf, he orders them to kill each other, saying: “This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: Go back and forth through the camp from one end to the other, each killing his brother and friend and neighbor.” The Levites did as Moses commanded, and that day about three thousand people died[Bible: Exodus 32:27-28]. This killing is in blunt contradiction to the commandment God had just given to Moses. And yet, when Moses has a conversation with God in the aftermath of the massacre, the mass murder is not even mentioned. God’s only concern is the worship of the false idol.
In total, the Bible details 158 events in which God kills someone or helps someone to do it21. And God is actually proud of his murderous actions, stating: “I kill ... I wound ... I will make mine arrows drunk with blood and my sword shall devour flesh.”[Bible: Deuteronomy 32:39-42]
In each case, God appears vengeful, brutal, and heartless. As British biologist (and militant atheist) Richard Dawkins opines22: “The god of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.” And yet, this god is revered as the most loving being by more than half of the world’s population.
Some may say that these stories did not really happen, that they are merely metaphors. Even then, the metaphor of a god who kills people by the thousands, massacres children, and drowns his own creation cannot symbolize something good or benevolent. So, no matter whether we see the stories as symbolic or not, God is still presented as a vengeful and violent creature. And even if he does not exist at all (which is what atheists hold), glorifying such a murderous being is still despicable from a Humanist point of view.
The brutality of the Abrahamic god is, from the atheist perspective, a vestige of the times in which he was invented, thousands of years ago. As we have argued, societies were more brutal then6, and so people imagined their god to be more brutal, too. Since then, the world has changed. Most societies today no longer consider revenge killing, brutality, and infanticide acceptable behaviors23. But today’s Abrahamic religions have inherited a brutal being that was invented 3,000 years ago and are thus stuck with revering it as the most loving and benevolent entity that can be imagined — an unjustifiable contradiction in Humanist eyes.
I don’t know whether God exists, but it would be better for his reputation if he didn’t.
Hell
While the idea of torturing wrongdoers may seem just and plausible at first, it is much less so if we think it through. Imagine if we tortured our criminals in the same ways in which sinners were tortured in Hell. For example, we could grill them on fire until they faint from the pain (as was indeed done in some prisons in Yemen24), let them recover, and then repeat the procedure. While this type of punishment may lead to an initial feeling of satisfaction that the sinner has received their just suffering, this feeling quickly turns into horror. The cries of pain, the sight of a bound human subjected to cruelty, and the smell of burnt flesh would urge any but the most emotionally crippled to rush to help. Indeed, torture is today widely outlawed and shunned. According to international law23, even the most notorious criminals may not be subjected to torture, even in countries that allow the death penalty.
God, however, is not bound by international law and may continue to torture his enemies. And we cannot even say that he is obliged to: God created Hell in the first place. He created Hell as a place to torture humans and he alone determines the amount of time one will spend there. It would be easy for God to stop this folly with his omnipotence — but he doesn’t. Thus, he remains as cruel as the cruelest of us. Moreover, his omnipotence and perfection allow him to torture his victims much more systematically than we humans ever could, and his immortality allows him to do so much longer than we could ever persist. This stands in gross contradiction to the claim that God is benevolent, loving, and moral.
Some may argue that the sinner in Hell acted out of his free will: that he deliberately sinned, knowing full well what he would face. Yet, even if the sinner acted deliberately, eternal suffering is a punishment that is out of proportion. Even the sinner is human, and no matter what he did during his, say, 80 years of earthly life, it is not just to subject him to billions of years of suffering. In fact, most criminals are released before their sentences are over. With this, humans are more merciful than God.
Some may also argue that this description of Hell is just symbolic. Most notably, some Christian denominations have recently abolished the physical fires of Hell, as have the Bahai Faith and Spiritualism. However, Hell is unequivocally assumed to stand for something that is at least as bad as what the words of the Bible tell us. The suffering may not be physical, but it is still suffering. Thus, this interpretation does not solve the contradiction of Hell and God’s benevolence. We may also think of Hell itself as just a myth that God threatens us with so that we behave. This, of course, begs the question of what else in these religions is but an empty threat. Finally, as we have argued previously, just the threat of torture alone is a crime by today’s modern legislation. There is thus no way in which Hell can be squared with the loving god.
Some may argue that God ultimately pardons the sinner. Yet even that is not a given. Jesus makes it very clear that sinners “will go away to eternal punishment”[Bible: Matthew 25:46, Matthew 25:41, Matthew 18:8]. Blasphemy, in particular, is a sin that cannot be forgiven[Bible: Marc 3:29, Matthew 12:31]. This is echoed in other places of the New Testament[Bible: Revelation 14:11, 2 Thessalonians 1:9]. For Islam, too, the Quran makes it very clear that unbelievers cannot ever find mercy: “Repentance is not accepted from those who knowingly persist in sin until they start dying [...] nor those who die as disbelievers”[Quran: 4:18, 4:48, 4:116-117, 4:137, 5:72].
This leaves us with the problem of Hell as a substantial contradiction to God’s benevolence, mercy, justness, and love.
To atheists, of course, Hell is entirely imaginary. It was invented to scare people into conformance and to make the religion more attractive by satisfying people’s longing for some heavenly justice. That heavenly justice was first imagined as very brutal — in the same way that earthly justice used to be very brutal. When the values of the Enlightenment condemned brutal punishments, earthly justice was updated. Heavenly justice was not. Therefore, believers of today’s Abrahamic religions find themselves obliged to justify as benevolent what cannot be justified at all — an eternal torture house.
How is the Christian Hell in any way different from a concentration camp for dissenters?
The Attributes of God
Revelation
According to the latest scientific findings, modern humans have existed for about 300,000 years. It is therefore surprising for atheists that God waited for around 290,000 years before sending the prophets. Why would God deprive some people of his divine message just because they lived too early? Furthermore, it seems strange to atheists that God would reveal himself through prophets in the first place. A prophet is arguably one of the most inefficient ways to send humankind a message. Even under the best of circumstances, a religion with a prophet will take centuries to expand from its place of origin to other societies, countries, and continents. This is, indeed, what we see: There are hundreds of religions on Earth, and none of them has reached all of humanity. Why would God deprive people in some places of the world of his divine message?
Furthermore, none of the prophets was in a natural position to spread God’s message to a large number of people. First, none of them was a king, emperor, or influential philosopher. On the contrary: One belonged to a group of enslaved desert people (Moses), another lived in occupied land at the periphery of an empire (Jesus), the next was illiterate (Muhammad), and the others lived in a country that persecuted their followers (the Bab and Bahaullah). Second, none of the prophets traveled the world to spread the word; they all remained in the Middle East. And third, only the Bahai prophets actually wrote their own message down in a book right from the start. All the other prophets had their messages written down after their deaths. In such settings, it is obvious that there is a risk for the messages becoming distorted or misinterpreted. Indeed, most religions have formed several denominations, spin-offs, and sects, each with a different interpretation of the prophets’ messages. Moreover, sending successive prophets is bound to lead to confusion and conflict. If all prophets did indeed come from the same god, then each prophet should have announced, identified, and authorized their successor. In contrast, each prophet usually claims that he is the last, and that the other prophets are false prophets or that their messages are obsolete or distorted. As a consequence, several religions have sprung up, one around each new prophet. This certainly cannot be what the sender of the prophets intended.
If you are omnipotent and omniscient, then the easiest and safest way to send humankind a message would be to implant it in their minds right from the start. Alternatively, you could print copies of your holy book and deliver it for free to every household. If that is not an option, you could send several prophets who all say the same thing to different places at the same time. God does none of this. He expects us to wait for, identify, and interpret messages he sends to various individuals. This is highly implausible in atheist eyes. And even when that message finally reaches us, it does not immediately convince us in great numbers, eradicating all other (non-divine) messages by its simple superiority. No, people generally prefer to stick to their own religion. If a divine message fails to convince its divinely created recipients, then it cannot be divine.
Atheists consider it more plausible that the prophets just made up the stories of divine revelation — maybe because they had experiences that they considered supernatural, but maybe also because they strived for power and authority. Since the prophets grew up in an Abrahamic environment, they all ascribed their revelations to the Abrahamic god (and not, say, to the Aztec god of war, Huitzilopochtli), and they tried to legitimize their revelations by claiming continuity from the previous prophets. The stories of these prophets were then picked up, mystified, enhanced, and written down by their followers. There were probably hundreds of prophets (and there still are), but only the most plausible, imaginative, or belligerent stories found enough followers to produce a religion. The founding of religions is thus, from an atheist point of view, merely a Darwinian struggle of ideas in search of adherents.
Muhammad! Jesus! Hear thou me
The truth nor here nor there can be;
How should our God who made the Sun
Give all his light to only one?
The Abrahamic revelations
We have argued that revelations are a very inefficient means to spread a message. And indeed, none of the Abrahamic religions recognizes the prophets of the religions that follow it. For the Jews, the Torah foretells the arrival of the Messiah[Bible: Deuteronomy 18:15], and Christians believe that this messiah is Jesus. However, the Torah also says that the Messiah will bring peace on Earth[Bible: Isaiah 2:4], that he will stem from King David[Bible: Jeremiah 23:5–6] (which Jesus does not, because he stems from God), and that he will unite the people of Israel[Bible: Isaiah 11] — all of which have not happened. Furthermore, the Torah states that God is unitary[Bible: Deuteronomy 6:4], that no one shall contradict or amend God’s law[Bible: Deuteronomy 12:32], and that we should be weary of false prophets who do miracles[Bible: Deuteronomy 18:18-22]. This is why God’s own “chosen people”, the Jews, believe that Jesus is a false prophet[Bible: John 7:42-43].For Christians, Jesus is the Messiah. At no point in time does Jesus talk about another God-sent messenger. On the contrary, he urges Christians not to take miracles by non-Christian prophets as proof of existence for other gods[Bible: Revelation 19:20, Matthew 24]. He also says that he himself will return, as son of God, on the clouds of Heaven[Bible: Matthew 24:27-31]. This is why Christians do not see why God would send another messenger, the Prophet Muhammad, out of the blue. Reasoning that perhaps God did not know at the time that a new prophet would be necessary is not an excuse, because God is omniscient. Muslims say that the verses of the Bible were corrupted[Quran: 22:52-53] and that Muhammad has come to correct the word of God. Christians, however, do not see why God would wait 600 years to correct the message. Therefore, Christians accuse Muslims of following a false prophet.
For Muslims, Muhammad is the last prophet. Hence, they do not believe that the Bab and Bahaullah (the prophets of the Bahai Faith) are real prophets. The Bab and Bahaullah say that the teachings of the previous prophets were valid for their respective times only, and that they are the new prophets. Yet, Muhammad was very clear that his message was for eternity. Hence, Muslims in some countries persecute the Bahais as heretics.
To atheists, all of this does not look like the work of an omniscient god. Rather, it looks like individual people deciding that they want to be prophets and trying to legitimize themselves by claiming connection to the preceding prophets.
Omniscience
The Abrahamic god is omniscient, i.e., he knows everything. This notion entails the Problem of Free Will: If God knows everything, he also knows what we humans will do. This means that our lives are predetermined, and we have no way to do something that God does not already know we will do, i.e., we do not have free will. Now, if we do not have free will, then the entire moral system collapses. It would mean that a murderer is not free to choose to abstain from the deed, because he must do what God knew he would do. If he is unable to abstain from the deed, then how can we punish him? Furthermore, most Abrahamic religions require free will in order for an adherent to voluntarily adhere to the faith. If a person cannot decide out of free will to adhere to the religion, then how can God punish those who abandon it? After all, they did not have a choice.This is why omniscience looks implausible to many atheists. However, from the perspective of this book, this type of omniscience can indeed be imagined without destroying the foundation of our moral systems. We have already argued that, in the naturalistic worldview that this book proposes, human decisions are determined by the chemical processes in our brain. If God knows the state of our brain, he could indeed predict what choices we will make. We have also argued that such determinism does not undermine our moral frameworks. Humans are sensitive to rewards and punishments. If we punish a murderer, then he is much less likely to reoffend than if we did not punish him. This holds true no matter how the decisions are implemented in his brain. Hence, it makes sense to punish the murderer. The omniscience of God is not an impediment.
More sophisticated is the following objection to God’s omniscience: If God is omniscient, then he knows what he will do. Thus, his own actions are predetermined as well, and he cannot have free will either.
A more straightforward argument against the omniscience of God comes from the Bible itself. The Torah tells us that when God saw the evil man had done on Earth, he deeply regretted having created mankind — thus proving that he is not omniscient:
The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great on Earth, and that every imagination of the thought of his heart was only evil continually. And the Lord was sorry that he had made man on Earth, and it grieved him to his heart.
Omnipotence
The Abrahamic god is omnipotent, i.e., he can do everything. This results, however, in the Paradox of Omnipotence: If God is all powerful, then can he create a task that he cannot solve? For example, can he create a stone that is so heavy that he cannot lift it? Or can he create a being that is more powerful than himself? If he can create such a thing, then he is not omnipotent. If he cannot, then he is still not omnipotent.A common response to this conundrum is that God cannot create something that contradicts logic. For example, as Anglican lay theologian Clive Staples Lewis has argued, God cannot draw a square circle25. This lifts logic and reasoning to an important level of power. If logic binds even God, then we should study logic rather than God. This is, coincidentally, a central tenet of Humanism.
In the beginning God created the Heavens and the Earth...
Then he said: “Let there be light!”
Which means he made the entire Universe in the dark!
How fucking good is that? He’s brilliant!
Perfection
in Madeira, Portugal
We may argue that some of these phenomena may just appear imperfect but are part of an unknown and perfect grander plan. However, if something is perfect, then it requires (by definition) no further acts to perfect it. Then, why do we perform caesarian sections, pull out wisdom teeth, wear glasses, and fight obesity? Let us not wear glasses, let us have mothers die in childbirth, let us not extract wisdom teeth! Obviously, this proposal is nonsensical. Even believers wear glasses — in essence, perfecting God’s creation. Thus, even they admit that God’s creation is not perfect.
From an atheist perspective, the desire to ascribe perfection to God and to his creation is a type of wishful thinking: We would love this world to be perfect, and we would love to have a perfect father-being who is there for us. Yet, that does not make the world perfect (or that father-being exist, for that matter).
If this is the best of all possible worlds, what then are the others?
Interaction with God
Thanking God
In the Abrahamic worldview, people should thank God for the good things in their lives. Accordingly, prayers regularly involve thanking God for life, health, friendship, and/or happy events.Yet, we can thank God for something only if he made that something come about. It would not make sense, for example, to thank the president for the day’s sunshine, as the president has no impact whatsoever on the weather. In other words, thanking God implies accepting that God is responsible for the good things in life. Now, if God takes responsibility for the good things in life, then he also has to take responsibility for the bad things in life, such as natural disasters, genetic diseases, and the misconceptions of nature. And this, he indeed does: “I form the light and create darkness, I bring prosperity and create disaster; I, the Lord, do all these things.”[Bible: Isaiah 45:7] Thus, God takes responsibility explicitly also for the calamities in life. Therefore, when we thank God for the good things in life, we should also blame him for the bad things. However, Abrahamic believers never blame God for these sufferings. On the contrary, God is exclusively praised as the benevolent being who brings all goodness to life. That does not make sense to the atheist. For the atheist, the story of God is thus not only fictional, but also inconsistent.
Dude. Why is it that your god gets the credit whenever something good happens, but when a roof collapses and kills a bunch of kids, it doesn’t get the blame? That makes no sense. I mean I don’t believe it, but I might respect your stance if it were consistent.
Praising God
In the Abrahamic worldview, God explicitly asks us to praise him for his grandness. This is perhaps most obvious in the Lord’s Prayer, which God himself prescribes for Christians[Bible: Matthew 6:9-13, Luke 11:2-4]: “Our Father who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name.” However, the commandment to praise God appears also in the Quran (“I did not create jinn and humans except to worship me.”)[Quran: 51:56] and the Torah (“Praise the Lord!”)[Bible: Psalm 150].We first observe that there are quite a number of evil things in life for which God does not deserve praise at all. But leaving these things apart, it is still bizarre for an atheist that people are required to praise God. If God is almighty, wise, and magnanimous, then why does he need the devotion of us humans? As an example, take a king who grants you a job for life. Naturally, you are very happy. Now also assume that the king comes to your house every day and asks you to worship him, praise him, and thank him for his great idea of giving you a job. Would we consider this person wise and magnanimous? Certainly not! That person is insecure and self-obsessed. Therefore, we should not praise such a person. And it is the same with God. As Scottish philosopher David Hume argued: “It is an absurdity to believe that the deity has human passions, and one of the lowest of human passions, a restless appetite for applause.”26
Believers can argue that the praise for God just serves our own well-being: By praising God, we are taught to be humble, and this is for our own good. Yet, this is a modern idea. The holy scripture is quite clear that the praising happens for God, not for the adherent. The Quran, for one, explicitly states that humans were created to praise God, and thus it is God who needs the prayer, not humans. Besides, it is hard to discern the presumed positive effects of praising God: By and large, the most religious countries27 are also the countries with the lowest reported rates of happiness28, and the highest rates of crime, corruption, and social unrest. Thus, all the praising does not seem to work. On the contrary, the places where people praise God most are actually the places where there is least to praise.
Honest grandness needs no praise.
La vraie grandeur méprise la gloire.
Wahre Größe scheut den Ruhm.
Proclaiming God’s attributes
In the Abrahamic religions, it is common to ascribe positive attributes to God: God is loving, just, wise, and merciful. These ascriptions are celebrated and repeated in songs, prayers, and sermons.Atheists wonder why people do this. If it is so obvious that God is loving, just, wise, and merciful (as the religions tell us), then why is it necessary to continuously proclaim it?
Compare this to scientists. Scientists do not gather every Thursday evening in the laboratory, join hands, and sing: “Yes, gravity pulls us down to Earth! Yes, her force is greater than ours!” This is because it is obviously true that gravity pulls us down to Earth, and it is thus not necessary to proclaim it. Thus, if believers continuously proclaim the attributes of God, this can mean only that they are not so obviously true actually.
American anthropologist John Tooby has argued that the proclamation of God’s attributes serves primarily a social purpose: Believers praise God mainly to show their adherence to the faith and to the group. The more absurd such a claim is, the stronger the display of commitment to said group. Thus, the mercifulness and love of God are proclaimed precisely because they are so implausible in the face of reality. Humanists, of course, prefer to proclaim what is true about objects of reality rather than what is implausible about objects of fiction.
Some people say homosexuality is a sin. It’s not. God is perfectly cool with it. God feels the exact same way about homosexuality that God feels about heterosexuality. Now you might say, “Whoa, slow down. You move too fast. How could you have the audacity, the temerity, to speak on behalf of God?” Exactly, that’s an excellent point and I pray that you remember it.
Praying to God
In the Abrahamic religions, people pray to God. People may ask him to heal an illness, to protect them from misfortune, or to grant wishes.Atheists wonder why people pray. First, if God is omniscient, then he knows their wishes anyway. So, what is the purpose of asking him? Second, God has a certain plan for each of us. By praying for something, we are asking God to deviate from that plan. This means that we do not trust God with his plan. As American philosopher Thomas Paine wrote: “For what is the amount of all prayers but an attempt to make the Almighty change his mind, and act otherwise than he does? It is as if [man] were to say: Thou knowest not so well as I.”29 Third, by praying, we assume that God has an influence on Earth. This also makes him immediately liable for most of the evil that happens on Earth. God himself is therefore responsible for much of the evil that we pray to be saved from. In the cases of diseases or natural disasters, such as earthquakes, tsunamis, or volcano eruptions, God has caused the evil in the first place. Is it, then, reasonable to expect that he would protect us from the consequences?
Even for mishaps that cannot be attributed directly to God, it is strange that humans are expected to pray to God for help. If you were to see a man hit in a car accident, you would rush to help. Everything else would be unethical, and probably illegal. Now assume that you rush to the site of the accident and then first expect the victim to pray to you. That would be sadistic. And yet, this is the role that God takes in the Abrahamic religions. He is almighty, omnipresent, and omniscient, and yet the Abrahamic religions suggest praying to him to earn his mercy. Now, back to the car accident. Suppose the victim does pray to you. If you still refuse to help, you would be acting outrageously arrogantly and irresponsibly. And yet, this is what God does. He does not help, even if asked to. Despite billions of prayers, there is no evidence that they change anything in this world. This makes the Abrahamic god an arrogant and pitiless creature in atheist eyes — a fictional creature to be sure, but a pitiless one at that.
For every player who credits God for the win,
a player from the opposing team can logically blame God for the loss.
The loving God
God is said to love us. Yet, in reality, there is little sign of divine love. Many people in this world suffer for reasons ranging from illness, violence, and hunger to sadness and loneliness. In most societies, religious people have no better life than atheist people. Adherents of the Abrahamic religions have come up with lots of explanations for this contradiction, ranging from God’s desire to grant us free will to the idea of upholding higher principles. We will discuss these explanations later.For now, we just note that if you love someone, you will behave very differently from God. If, for example, you see someone attacking your child, you will do your utmost to help her. No talk of granting free will to the attacker, of love for the attacker, or of higher principles holding you back. This is the basis of love: the unbridled desire to help the beloved. Yet, God shows no such behavior. In fact, God shows complete indifference. Independently of prayers, religiosity, or ethical behavior, some people do well in life, others do badly. Some are hit by acts of God, others are not.
Therefore, the phrase “God’s love” is an empty phrase. It means nothing to say “God loves you”. No real-world consequences follow from it. It would look just the same if God did not care about you.
If I could stop a person from raping a child, I would.
That’s the difference between me and your god.
The Problem of Evil
Benevolence and the food chain
By nature, many species can live only if they kill other animals. This entails that the life of any carnivore is reliant upon the chasing, tearing apart, and guzzling of prey. Every chased animal suffers the fear of death, the pain of being killed, and a life destroyed. As American orator Robert G. Ingersoll opined: “Would an infinitely wise, good and powerful God ... so [make] the world that all animals devour animals; so that every mouth is a slaughterhouse, and every stomach a tomb?”30
But the food chain is not the only source of cruelty: Some species of spider eat not just their prey but also their mates. When lions take over a harem, they secure the dominance of their own genes by slaughtering the entire population of baby lions in the group. And some species of wasp lay their eggs in a live host so that their larvae have a continual food source, eating the host alive.
If God designed nature, then he designed it to be inherently brutal. If creation is as he wishes, then he cannot be benevolent.
Whatever in nature produced the antelope, produces the tiger;
whatever produced the woman produced the [...] cancer;
whatever gave the child its beauty created the germ of diphtheria.
Most of us prefer not to ascribe intelligence to that creative power.
Benevolence and natural disasters
If God is benevolent, then he surely wishes to prevent such suffering. If he is omnipotent, then he is able to prevent the suffering. He does not. Hence, he cannot be both benevolent and omnipotent.
What does it mean to “trust in God”
if I have to lock my car either way?
Benevolence and humans
The Abrahamic god is considered benevolent. Humans, in contrast, are rarely benevolent. Humans commit murder, they rape and steal, they slander and lie. And so, we ask, where does this evil stem from?In the Abrahamic worldview, there are several possible answers to this question:
- Humans have a natural predisposition for evil and not enough force to control themselves
- However, it is God who endowed humankind with this predisposition. In Christianity, this is mirrored in the Lord’s Prayer, which reads: “lead us not into temptation”[Bible: Matthew 6:13]. Here, it is clear that God is the agent who leads people into temptation. He is the one who makes us do evil things.
- Humans are good but are seduced to do evil by the devil
- However, God created the devil (or he created the devil as an angel and allowed him to go astray). Thus, God himself created the source of human evilness.
- Humans are good but became evil when Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden
- However, God, in his omniscience, knew that Adam and Eve would eat the forbidden fruit. Yet, he did nothing to prevent it. Furthermore, it was God himself who created the forbidden fruit as the source of all evil. He could have simply abstained from this idea. Thus, even in this reasoning, God himself co-caused human wickedness.
God says do what you wish, but if you make the wrong choice, you will be tortured for eternity in Hell. That’s not free will. It’s like a man telling his girlfriend: “Do what you wish, but if you choose to leave me, I will track you down and blow your brains out!” When a man says this, we call him a psychopath. When God says the same, we call him loving and build churches in his honor.
The Problem of Evil
God is considered benevolent and omnipotent, but, at the same time, he lets people and animals suffer. This contradiction is known as the Problem of Evil or the Theodicy Problem, and it has long bothered theologians. Numerous attempts have been made to reconcile God’s benevolence with the evil of nature, and we shall now look into these arguments from a Humanist perspective.Epicurus’s old questions are still unanswered: Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence evil?
Answers to the Problem of Evil
The evil as punishment
The problem with this argument is that nature hits everybody, regardless of their behavior:
- Innocent people: Natural disasters and diseases do not differentiate between those who do good and those who do evil. A tsunami may wipe out a city and kill a rapist just as well as a priest. For example, an everyday man named Roy Sullivan, of no criminal conviction, was struck by lightning seven times throughout his life33. By contrast, dictators such as Hitler, Mao, or Stalin were never struck by lightning. Suffering and innocence are unrelated.
- Children: Natural disasters and diseases also affect children. Children are almost always innocent — babies definitively so. And yet, every year, about 1 million newborns die within their first 24 hours of life due to neonatal infections, congenital anomalies, and complications arising from premature birth34.
- Animals: Animals are hit by natural disasters, too, even though they do not possess the concepts of good and evil.
To test how plausible the idea of punishment is, let us do a thought experiment. Assume that you met a child whose parents had just drowned in a tsunami. Would you be able to tell the orphan that the tsunami was a punishment from God? Would you be able to tell the child that his parents deserved to die, for a reason that you do not know? Such an argument would be considered heartless if not outright absurd. And indeed, it is, from a Humanist perspective.
Moreover, if the evils in this world were really a punishment, then we would be acting against God’s will if we tried to counter it. It would be disobedient to give food to people who are hungry, to cure a person who is ill, or to help someone in danger. We should rather let people suffer or die, knowing that God wants to punish them. Absurd as this may seem, this was, indeed, the position of some Christian clergymen. When vaccination was introduced in Europe in the 18th century in the fight against smallpox, Reverend Edmund Massey in England condemned the dangerous and sinful practice of inoculation as an attempt to oppose God’s punishments upon man for his sins35. In a similar vein, some clerics saw the use of anesthetics during childbirth, invented in the 19th century, as an attempt to thwart God’s punishment of women after Eve’s fall[Bible: Genesis 3:16]36. It took the Catholic Church 100 years to approve the procedure, finally deciding that although God inflicted the punishment of unmedicated childbirth on hundreds of prior generations, he is OK with it being suspended now37.
Humanists take an entirely different perspective, of course. They believe that we should counter evil wherever we find it, and that any way of justifying the evil in this world (be it by God’s will or otherwise) is evil in itself.
If you believe that God is specifically reaching down from Heaven to answer your trivial prayer to remove a zit or to help you find your lost keys, while at the same time God is allowing 27,000 children to die of starvation each day by specifically ignoring their prayers, then your God is insane.
The evil for balance
Some believers hold that natural evil exists to maintain a balance in the Universe. That without evil, the argument runs, the Universe could not exist.By this reasoning, would we thus contemplate a map of malnourishment in this world and approvingly note that malnourishment in the developing world must exist so that the good fortune in the developed world can exist? Would we welcome the suffering of some to allow for the thriving of others? To Humanists, that appears an absurd thought.
And, indeed, if God is almighty, then nothing is impossible. A world without natural disasters can very well exist. A world without AIDS existed for millions of years. There is no reason why God should feel obliged to introduce this illness now. In Humanist eyes, the argument of balance is just an attempt to justify what cannot be justified.
I don’t think we get cancer to learn life lessons. And I don’t believe that people die young because God needs another angel. I think it’s just bullshit. And on some level, I think we all know that. I mean, don’t you?
The evil for a greater good
in Pompeii, Italy
As an example, consider a doctor who amputates a patient’s leg (an evil) to prevent gangrene from spreading throughout the patient’s body (the ultimate good end). Yet, this example is justified only on the basis that the doctor has limited powers. With the limitations of medical technology at her disposal, she, of course, chose the lesser evil, since there was no way of saving both the patient’s leg and his life. However, this analogy cannot be applied to God and the problem of evil: God, unlike the doctor, has unlimited powers. In fact, a more accurate analogy is of a doctor who first actively infects the leg of her patient (God is the cause of all things) and then decides to amputate the leg when antibiotics would have been sufficient (God is all powerful). We would call such a doctor wicked and mad. So, then, why do we call God good?38
In other words: God himself designed the Universe and the rules that govern it. Therefore, he cannot escape the responsibility for what happens within it.
Humanity has forgotten that it invented God,
and now it has to put up with quite a number of inconveniences in his name.
We don’t know the big picture
A variant of the previous argument holds that the world is a highly complex system in which one evil may prevent a greater evil in such a way that we as humans cannot understand it. In other words, the argument goes that we do not know the “full picture”. As an example, consider the following story: A wise man is on a journey with his companion when, suddenly, he reaches out with his knife and kills a bystander. Then, he runs away. The companion follows but does not dare to ask for the wise man’s reasoning. Years later, the companion brings the incident up and the wise man says: “Son, this man had an evil heart. He was to become a murderer. By killing him, I have saved the life of dozens.” Analogously, we can argue that what seems bad to us is, in reality, a small, necessary evil that prevents a much greater one. God optimizes for millions of things at the same time, and what seems implausible to us may be very plausible if we only knew the whole picture.Compare this to our education as children. When we are children, we often suffer because our parents do not allow us something that we want. Only later do we see the big picture and agree that their actions were necessary. It could be similar with the world: If we only knew what the big picture was, we would agree that the suffering is necessary.
It is, of course, always possible to claim that there is some bigger plan that cannot be known — simply because any such claim is unfalsifiable. However, if we cannot know what that plan says, then there is no reason to believe there is one in the first place. On the contrary, there are reasons to believe that there is no overarching benevolent plan: Humans suffer in the worst imaginable forms. Every year, millions of people die of hunger, diseases, and catastrophes. Malaria alone traps hundreds of thousands of people per year in agonizing deaths. Only a minority of the world’s population is living in wealth, health, and happiness. We cannot claim that a world in which millions of people suffer is a global optimization.
To see this, let us do a thought experiment: Let’s go to a country that suffers from drought and talk to a woman with eight children, six of whom are undernourished. We’ll tell her: “Yes, your children are suffering, but this is all part of a bigger plan in which the global sum is positive.” Will that comfort the woman? Most likely not. On the contrary, the thought is absurd and heartless. By saying that there is a bigger plan and that we just do not know it, we are effectively saying only one thing: That we do not know the reason for the suffering in this world. For a Humanist, the argument of the big picture is just wishful thinking. It is an attempt to justify what cannot be justified.
If Hitler said he worked in mysterious ways and had a big, secret plan,
would that be all the justification you’d need?
A perfect world is impossible
One possible answer to the Problem of Evil is that a perfect world without evil is just not possible. Hence, we may not expect one.To atheists, that is a curious idea. For centuries, humanity suffered from smallpox. Finally, science produced a vaccine against the disease. Today, the disease no longer exists. So then, we can ask, if a world without smallpox is possible, why did God not give it to us directly?
Furthermore, there is a world in the Abrahamic view that is perfect: Heaven. In Heaven, there is no suffering and no evil. This defies the hypothesis that a perfect world would not be possible.
In ancient times, the best minds were busy giving a meaning to our death. Today, the best minds are busy prolonging our life. They do so by investigating the physiological, hormonal, and genetic systems responsible for disease, and developing new medicines against them.
A perfect world is boring
Another possible view on the Problem of Evil is that a perfect world without evil may be possible but would be utterly boring. If there were no evil in this world, then there would be no challenges.We first observe that this theory does not justify, in any way, the suffering in this world. If you meet a person who suffers from leprosy, would you tell her that it’s good that she suffers because otherwise this world would be boring? Probably not. This shows that the idea of suffering for entertainment is not sustainable. On the contrary, it is demeaning to those who suffer.
Furthermore, there is a place in the Abrahamic worldview where there is no suffering: Heaven. Heaven is usually not described as boring by believers. Then, why would a pain-free world be?
If you contract cancer this afternoon and die three months later, that is God’s plan for you. Praying to cure the cancer is just a waste of time.
God can’t do everything
The 2003 American fantasy comedy film Bruce Almighty tells the story of Bruce, a man who is unhappy in his life and blames God for it. In a miraculous encounter, God gives him divine powers so that Bruce can see whether he can do better than God. The only conditions are that Bruce cannot reveal his divinity and he must respect free will. Bruce fails miserably. He is overwhelmed by the task, and in the end, the world is not even slightly better. This seems to suggest that the task of keeping everyone on Earth happy is close to impossible. This could explain why God, even if benevolent, cannot prevent every case of misery in this world.It is certainly impossible to take care of every human on Earth. However, that is not an excuse for someone who created the system in the first place. God knew how difficult the task would be, and still, he allows the world to become ever more complex. If he does not know how to handle it, he should not have created it in the first place.
Still, there are a few very simple things that Bruce (and God) could do:
- create some assistants (e.g., angels) to help him with the task;
- stop developing diseases that make humans suffer or die;
- stop causing tsunamis, earthquakes, and epidemics;
- give humans a stronger feeling of responsibility, for themselves and for others;
- punish those who wreak havoc immediately, as by a law of nature;
- reveal himself every year in a scientifically verifiable form so as to stop the conflicts between the religions. Admittedly, this goes against the rule not to reveal his divinity — but who made that rule anyway? God, right?
He delivered Daniel from the lion’s den,
Jonah from the belly of the whale,
and the Hebrew children from the fiery furnace,
then why not every man?
Evil as a consequence of free will
Yet, that explanation is not satisfactory. In Islam, God guides some people on a path to good, but deliberately refuses to do so for others: “It is Allah who guides whoever he wills, and he knows best who are fit to be guided.”[Quran: 28:56, 24:46] In other words: Allah guides only those who are on the right path anyway, and refuses to help those who would need this guidance most39. Declaring someone “unfit” for guidance is a rather lame excuse: Surely, Allah would not create people who are unfit for his guidance, and surely, anybody would follow Allah’s guidance if he just showed up in person.
In the Jewish and Christian worldviews, God made people sinful by nature: “The intention of man’s heart is evil from his youth.”[Bible: Genesis 8:20] For Christianity, this is reflected in the concept of original sin, of which we are all guilty. Thus, God gave people both free will and a predisposition for doing evil. This is a recipe for calamity. In fact, it is comparable to a cockfight: In a cockfight, the roosters are first put together tightly in a cage to make them aggressive. Then, they are equipped with spurs to make the fight more violent, and then left to fight each other until one of them dies. Spectators bet on the winner. In the Jewish and Christian worldviews, God is the spectator: He puts humans together on Earth, predisposes us towards doing evil, and watches us fight. To excuse the resulting brutality, he says that he gave us free will. Cockfights are widely considered cruel today — and so would be this view of a god.
Now, let’s take a non-Biblical view of God, in which he did not give humans such a sinful nature. Can we still justify the evil in this world as a consequence of free will? It turns out that we cannot: If God is really almighty, he could make moral actions especially pleasurable. He could also punish immoral actions immediately, making it obvious that moral rectitude is in our self-interest. Or he could allow bad moral decisions to be made but intervene to prevent the harmful consequences from actually happening. Yet, he doesn’t.
In general, it is not clear whether the explanation of free will accounts for the degree of evil seen in this world. While the value of free will may be thought sufficient to counterbalance minor evils, it is less obvious that it outweighs evils such as rape and murder. Both cause innocent suffering from somebody else’s free will — hardly something that we would call just.
Finally, most of the suffering in this world is not caused by people, but rather by illnesses, natural disasters, and aging. The argument of free will thus fails to justify the vast portion of the evil in this world40.
We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful God, who creates faulty humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes.
The evil for spiritual growth
Botanical Garden of Brussels, Belgium
If that argument is true, then let us aid human spiritual growth even further. Let us kill some people and torture others. Surely this will generate even more empathy and virtues for those who remain? It turns out that this argument is absurd: No suffering can be justified by supposed spiritual growth. From a Humanist perspective, we would prefer a world in which no evil exists and thus no empathy is necessary in the first place. The hope that the evil in this world would, in any way, lead to spiritual growth is just an attempt to justify what cannot be justified.
Listen! If all must suffer to pay for 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. [I say:] Too high a price is asked for harmony[.] I most respectfully return the ticket.
Suffering is subjective
One possible explanation for the evil in this world runs that suffering is subjective: What may seem like suffering to one person is actually not for another.However, no matter how we turn this idea, undergoing a painful disease for years and then dying from it is suffering in all reasonable definitions of the word. Calling it anything else is just manipulating words. Imagine that you meet a person who has just learned they have cancer and will die in the next weeks, leaving behind two children who will become orphans. You tell him: Don’t worry, your suffering is just subjective! It’s happening only in your mind! Would that help the person? Probably not. Or, more to the point, perhaps you could prove the subjectiveness of suffering by jumping from the balcony. Surely the injury you endure would cause pain only in your mind — or would it?
There exists undeniable suffering in this world and calling it subjective does not solve that problem. On the contrary, it is demeaning to the victims. It belittles their suffering, which is, in Humanist eyes, evil itself.
Health, safety, literacy, and sustenance are the prerequisites. If you are reading this, you are not dead, starving, destitute, moribund, terrified, enslaved, or illiterate, which means that you are in no position to turn your nose up on these values — or to deny that other people should share your good fortune.
Heaven outweighs the evil
Another explanation for the evil in this world is that the evil is nothing in comparison to the harmony and joys of the afterlife. The evil is just negligible.However, no appeal to an afterlife can eradicate the Problem of Evil. An injustice remains an injustice regardless of what happens afterwards. Assume that a man rapes a woman. Since the man happens to be a billionaire, he offers a few million dollars to the victim in compensation. Yet, the man does not see his actions as wrong and continues to rape other women. We quickly see that no amount of compensation eradicates the evil of the original act. Nobody would praise the billionaire as just and loving. Yet, this is what the Abrahamic religions expect us to do.
Furthermore, by pointing to Heaven, we are actually downplaying the evil in this world. We say that the evil is not important by comparison, thereby doing injustice to those who suffer. Worse, if we downplay the evil in this world, we can justify our own injustice and inertia. If it is negligible that thousands of people die in a famine, then it is also negligible that a man beats his wife, that a baby dies of malnourishment, and that a murderer kills a victim. All of these acts fade in comparison to the joys of the afterlife. If God does not care about millions dying, then why should we care about a man beating his wife? And yet, such thinking is despicable in Humanist eyes. No reference to Heaven can justify the evil in this world.
How long, Lord, must I call for help, but you do not listen?
Or cry out to you, “Violence!” but you do not save?
The evil as a test
We may say that the evil in this world exists just to test us. If God finds that we can withstand the evil, then we deserve to go to Heaven after our death.Yet, God is omniscient. He knows who will withstand the evil well. There is no need to have innocent people suffer just for the benefit of those who will go to Heaven.
Going further, we may ask why God created those people who do not deserve Heaven in the first place. Would a world without these people not be much better? It could literally be Heaven on Earth.
If an almighty god wanted you to be in some perfect world, you would already be there.
There is no need for him to test something of which he already knows the outcome.
A Humanist perspective
From a Humanist perspective, none of these justifications holds water. If God really is omnipotent and benevolent, he should have designed the world without evil. If he did not know how to do this, he should just send everyone to Heaven straight away. The Abrahamic religions agree that Heaven is the place of unlimited happiness and good — so why not send everyone there right from the start? People who do not deserve Heaven should simply not exist in the first place. Why does God not simply do this?
The solution to this conundrum is, of course, to recognize that the Abrahamic god is nothing more than a fictional character. He was developed to appeal to the masses, and as such, he had to be benevolent and omnipotent. The justification of evil also helps people come to terms with the weltschmerz that they feel when they see the suffering on Earth: When they believe that suffering can somehow be justified, they can bear it more easily. That makes the religion attractive. The problem is that, in accumulating so many attractive properties, the religion has grown out of touch with reality. Hence, theologians need to devote a lot of effort to squaring away the suffering in this world with the supposed benevolence of their god. With this effort, they are more concerned about the contradictions in their faith than about the evil itself41. That is, in Humanist eyes, a folly.
According to Humanists, any attempt to reinterpret the evil in this world as something good belittles the misery that affects so many of us, and is demeaning to those who suffer. Worse, it can be used to justify our own inaction in the face of evil. Hence, for Humanists, justifying evil is evil by itself. Instead, Humanists strive to reduce the suffering in this world. They hold that the right tools in this endeavor are the rule of law to punish evildoers, democracy to establish good governance, environmental protectionism to guard against the effects of global warming, and science to find cures for illnesses — laborious measures, to be sure, but measures that provably reduce the suffering on Earth.
If God created man in his image, I have no interest in meeting him.
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