Before we proceed, pretend you are in an audience. The speaker asks if the end can justify the terrible means, that it is moral to allow the deaths of vast numbers of children (that with little effort could have been saved) in order to forward a great cause? Would you refuse to raise your hand in support of child homicide on a titanic scale?
Hold that thought.
Folks yak a lot about whether gods exist, but that’s not even close to being the critical question. What theists actually long for is a good God worthy of their love and fealty. According to billions, god is a conscious entity of unlimited intelligence and wisdom that not only inexplicably exists, but equally inexplicably happens to be perfect, suffering not the slightest moral flaw, employs immense or absolute power, created all things living and otherwise, and gifts his human creations with his infinite love. Most of all the innocent children. Because you can’t get something for nothing, theists argue (actually you can) it’s stridently argued that only an “intelligent” designer could “fine tune” the universe for intelligent life. As John Glenn put it, no one who sees the beauty of the planet can fail to believe in his perfection.
A defect with viewing earth from orbit is not seeing the damning details.
Even theists acknowledge the key problem with the Abrahamic God is explaining how the perfect intelligence could end up creating the obtusely imperfect habitat we’re stuck with. The stock argument is that God, wanting his creations to choose whether or not to be with him, has given humanity free will, preventing the creator from interfering in earthly affairs. Ergo bad things happen.
Science shows another view of reality. Of course the universe is far from being “fine-tuned.” Assuming that a creator did invent humanity, this being then fashioned an enormously inefficient universe and plopped us on a teeny planet that, far from being a neutral stage for the morality play, is a gorgeous death trap.
Some 100 billion people have been born.In the journal Philosophy and Theology , I calculated that half the children born on earth suffered and died before reaching adulthood, infected by diseases that are part of God’s creation one way or another. The human reproductive system is so poorly designed that most pregnancies fail. The preborn and children whom this God did not care to save number perhaps a couple hundred billion.
God has not lifted a super powerful finger to save most humans from premature death; in my view this shows that there is no evidence that he loves children. Compare this inaction to the selfless effort of those truly caring humans who have labored to bring juvenile mortality down to a few percent. If God is the omnipotent creator of the universe, then this inaction is immoral. Is this not sin on the grandest scale?
Do not begin to think theologians have solved the problem. The P&T article details how all theists evade this ‘Holocaust of the Children’ because there is no answer. How can theists explain this? And even more baffling, how can so many worship this kind of God?
The Christianity-averse Mark Twain put it better than I could in his anti-God Letters From the Earth:
The human being is a machine. An automatic machine. It is composed of thousands of complex and delicate mechanisms, which perform their functions harmoniously…. For each one of these thousands of mechanisms the Creator has planned an enemy whose job it is to harass it, pester it, persecute it, damage it, afflict it with pains, and miseries, and ultimate destruction.
Not one has been overlooked…. It is the Creator’s Grand Army, and he is the Commander-in-Chief. Along its battlefront its grisly banners wave their legends in the face of the sun: Disaster, Diseases and the rest.
Gregory Paul is an independent researcher in sociology and evolution. He frequently writes on atheism and American culture. He wrote this post for washingtonpost.com/onfaith. His previous Guest Voices post was Atheism on the upswing in America.
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