Human suffering and God

Human Suffering and God

Introduction

Theodicy, meaning 'vindication of God', is an argument that attempts to resolve the problem of evil that arises when all power and all goodness are simultaneously ascribed to God. The presence of evil challenges the belief that God is omnipotent and omnibenevolent, because such a God should be able to create a universe without pain and suffering. Central to this is the belief in God’s existence, an obvious statement but we should start with all the conditions in place.

This the topic of this essay. Is there an argument that truly explains the problem of evil and its consequences that is supported by evidence and sound logic? It is my belief that theodicy is no more than a philosophical attempt to hide the objective fact that God doesn’t exist. An attempt is made to paint a picture of a loving and caring God who cares for his creation and has a final, all-encompassing plan for bringing about his perfect kingdom, in which his true followers will dwell forever in some form of Edenic bliss, perpetually engaged in worship. This mythical God allows pain and suffering to exist, because through this, the believer is refined and learns to trust God, and the unbeliever is led to call on the name of God in repentance.

The obvious problem is that theodicy treats pain and suffering as abstractions, not as the real life, lived experiences of billions of humans who have lived and died throughout human history. As an abstraction, I can imagine how suffering might cause me to question my own beliefs and ask if there is anything beyond the material world. Of course, the answer wouldn’t necessarily be God through Jesus. Our personalities predispose us to more than one spirituality, and only the narrowest of Christians would be unable to see that, for some people, Buddhism or some other belief is a better fit. Even with the best intentions in the world, there was never going to be a world in which the Great Commission would be achieved and everyone hear the “true” gospel. Billions have lived without ever hearing the Christian gospel, so to argue that suffering leads to repentance and relationship with God, as is often preached, is absurd.

Secondly, suffering and pain are real. According to the United Nations, each day, 25,000 people, including more than 10,000 children, die from hunger and related causes. Did their suffering lead to repentance, or just a sad resignation to the fact that there was no hope in the world for them. Israel is pursuing a campaign of genocide against the Palestinians which started in 1948 and has continued to this day. Tens of thousands of Palestinians, not combatants, and children have died. Winter is coming, and 80% of housing in Gaza has been destroyed and water supplies and food cut off by Israel, for the crime of living in Palestine, a land the Jews abandoned in 70 CE. That is what suffering and pain looks like. It has real world consequences. Has the unrelenting cruelty of Israel made any Palestinians turn to God? Definitely not.

Josef Stalin once said that a single death was a tragedy, and a million deaths was a statistic. He slaughtered at least 22 million Russians because was a paranoid lunatic and didn’t trust their politics and loyalty to Bolshevism. Mao Zedong murdered at least 50 million of his own people, destroyed the educated and middle class and put uneducated peasants in charge of the country. Millions died of starvation when Mao declared that certain crops were bourgeois and they didn’t meet the standards for the new China he was building. Civil wars have broken out since the collapse of former Yugoslavia, and helpless civilians were the target of homicidal Bosnian Serbs who were paid a bounty for the number of kills of civilians they achieved. Did this lead to a Yugoslavian revival and everyone started turning to Jesus because they were in hardship, and everyone sang Kumbaya together? Again, definitely not.

In all of this, where was God? Did he intervene to save the children in any of these countries? No! Did an avenging angel stop the snipers killing men, women and children in Sarajevo? No! Is there any evidence anywhere on the Earth that God intervened to stop pain and suffering when it was never going to lead to anything positive? Humans show far more compassion than the imaginary God of the Bible. He fails every test of what we should expect from a benevolent and loving father.

Meanwhile billionaires like Musk and Bezos spend millions of totally frivolous nonsenses, like Bezos and his flight into space on his own dedicated craft, spending $5.5 billion for the privilege. That amount could have completely fed and housed millions, but Bezos’ total disregard for anything but his own ego meant that he spent that money for a four-minute thrill. The richest country in the world with the greatest number of billionaires has one of the lowest educational standards in the world, and a health system that low-income people can’t access because of the obscene costs, driven by pharmaceutical company CEOs. Repeatedly, the right wing of politics gives tax breaks to the wealthiest in America, while the middle class pays the bulk of the tax. What is the source of suffering and pain here? Corporate greed and the apathy and lack of compassion by government and the wealthy. This is in a country that tries to convince anyone who will listen, that they are a Christian country. Where is Christianity showing the mercy and grace of God by preaching social concern and welfare, exactly the values Jesus preached. Yes, Jesus would be labelled a Socialist by the Christian Church today.

Reasons and excuses for the existence of evil

In theology, dualism is the theory that there are two supreme forces that govern the universe, good and evil, and in the New Testament this presents a challenge for the theologian. The Apostle Paul talks of powers and principalities, and personal and spiritual battles are the result, because the goal of these powers is to lead us away from God. In 2Cor. 4:4 we read:

the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them.

If these powers and principalities exist, and if God is the Creator, he is also their creator, and created the conditions for us all to be deceived by satanic forces he was unable to foresee would rebel against his rule. The question must be asked why no one pushes back against God being the creator of evil, and who is certainly not omniscient and all wise. If he created evil beings who deceive and mislead people, then we have a right to question his motives and his claims to be absolutely the pinnacle of moral perfection, whose orders and laws must be followed without fail, or the sinner would face the eternal consequences.

Paul was completely sold on the idea of principalities and powers on Earth, which would be judged when the kingdom of God came, and he expected that to happen in his lifetime. Paul was influenced by Greco-Roman and Persian ideas and was definitely not a Jerusalem rabbi. No Hebrew speaking and reading Jew would believe in this spiritual worldview, with evil spirits inhabiting God’s heavens. When the Israelites were in the Babylonian Captivity from 586 BCE to 517 BCE, they were exposed to the Persian religion of Zoroastrianism. Zoroastrianism is a dualistic religion, with Ahura Mazda as the force for good and Angra Mainu as the force opposing goodness. These ideas came back with the returning Israelites and added to the rich milieu of religious ideas that existed at the time, and were later added to by the Greek influences after 333 BCE and the conquest of Palestine by Alexander the Great.

It is significant that no being such as Satan exists in the Hebrew Bible or Hebrew traditions. Satan is an entirely Christian creation as we find him today and the myths and legends of demons and fallen angels owe more to the Book of Enoch than the Hebrew Bible.

The question must be asked why no one pushes back against God being the creator of evil, and who is certainly not omniscient and all wise. If he created evil beings who deceive and mislead people, then we have a right to question his motives and his claims to be absolutely the pinnacle of moral perfection, whose orders and laws must be followed without fail, or the sinner would face the eternal consequences. God fails spectacularly as I show when we examine some commandments God put in place for Israel.

There is no biblical evidence that points to spiritual forces causing human suffering, except for the supposed healing miracles of Jesus, and I feel we can freely disregard them. These miracles are almost certainly legends and myths that grew up around Jesus and were added into the gospels, which were written at least forty years after the crucifixion and as late as seventy years later. This only leaves human freewill, and the question of why God made us this way that we would so often choose evil over goodness and kindness.

Paul was spiritual, not practical

Paul is only concerned with the immediate spiritual warfare that would lead believers astray. Paul believed in spiritually evil beings, but never preached anything worthwhile beyond Christ and him crucified. Not once does Paul, or Jesus, ever call out the evils of slavery, call for slaves to be freed, preach equality for women and better treatment or preach for anything of any practical value that would improve the lot of people. They were obsessed with the imminent coming of the Kingdom of God, and I am sitting here 2,000 year later and nothing has changed.

Jesus and Paul were seduced by the promise of apocalyptic beliefs, like the Book of Daniel, and completely failed to see most of the world needed bread, not false promises of Messiahs and Kingdoms of God that never eventuated. To this day, many fundamentalist Christians are more convinced than ever that the Second Coming is a breath away, and worry more about that than feeding their neighbour. They too will die in time, and their children and their children’s children will come and go, and no Kingdom of God will every come. Only we can improve the world, not an imaginary God and the obsession with the predicted apocalypse is a distraction, not a motivation to work for a better and more just society.

Pain and Suffering

Pain and suffering are universal, unavoidable, and part of our lot as fragile and mortal human beings. This mortality defines us. We alone are able to consciously posit our existence and question our fate. We consciously count down the years and know that, like our fathers before us, we will finally go down to the grave, to be forgotten in time as the generations pass. And this is how it should be. We have a time in the sun, and our descendants take over and so the species continues. However, this awareness of our mortality causes several problems.

The first is that it predisposes us to looking for the meaning of life, an exercise I believe is utterly meaningless. There is no meaning to life, except that which you ascribe to it. It may be as varied as being the best artist you can be, the most compassionate doctor or nurse or volunteer or even tennis player. There is no God judging your choices, so make one. Secondly, it leads humans to invent beings of greater power than themselves to explain both their own existence and the vicissitudes of life and to make up a meaning for life that involves non-existent “gods”. This inevitably leads to trying to appease these gods when life goes to hell, as it always does.

Suffering – a Universal Experience

Everything that is alive suffers, whether animal, including human beings, or plant. On this latter, there is now firm evidence that plants like trees and fungi, set up communication networks, and they are affected by natural disasters and human activity like agriculture and logging. “The Hidden Life of Trees” by Peter Wohlleben is a great read and a revelation. It opens up a world that we have never considered. Philosophers, poets and priests have asked the question since the human race became sentient – why does life contain so much suffering and why am I suffering? As much as religions are about finding a means to touch and experience the ineffable, they are more about explaining the inconvenient truths about our existence, namely, that we are often passengers in life, not drivers. Our best efforts might gain us power, fame, empires and wealth, but there is always the voice in our heads telling us this is only for now, and we will disappear without trace one day. Remember Ozymandias, the poem by Shelley? Such knowledge should make us love more, care more and give more, but it can prompt a perverted need to retain our youth at all costs and show a selfishness that diminishes us.

I am going to break up suffering into two categories. This is an approach often used in Theology. Firstly, there is natural evil. The second is called moral evil. Natural evil is just the results of living on planet Earth, which gave us our existence, and can just as easily take it away. The Earth is an enormous ball of molten magma, liquid rock that is heated by decaying radioactive material and by pressure. Above the mantle is the crust, the that is the part we live on. Try to imagine the crust that forms on porridge that has been left on the stove too long, and a similar thing has happened with the Earth. For billions of years the earth was cooling, until it finally a crust formed, the temperature at the surface decreased and bacteria and single cessed organisms were able to exist and colonise the planet. The explanation is necessarily simplistic because I’m not a geologist, but the principle is the main idea here.

The crust floats on the magma, in islands called tectonic plates, and just like porridge, they are able to move. Unlike porridge, we are considering enormous continent-sized plates that move at centimetres or even millimetres per year but are billions of tons in weight. When they impact another plate, they either create a pressure ridge, and a mountain or mountain range might be pushed up. This is the reason The Rockies and the Himalayas exist. Other times they join up but create a fault line and these fault lines will slip against each other, like the famous San Andeas Fault in California. Still other points of contact result in one plate sliding under another plate and forming a subduction zone.

These natural processes are the cause of earthquakes, volcanic activity, tsunamis, weather patterns and are the reason we can mine the Earth for minerals. The death and destruction from earthquakes and volcanoes that sometimes results in the death of tens of thousands of people. A good example is the Toba Volcano or Krakatoa in Indonesia. Both resulted in the death of tens of thousands and Toba nearly led to the extinction of early mankind in India. It's easy to talk about the frequent deaths from earthquakes in countries like Turkey because our overseas news services keep us informed, and with higher population densities the results are far worse now. Tsunamis are particularly devastating because most people live in coastal areas. Tsunamis are incredibly destructive and the cleanup afterwards leaves agricultural land devastated as well as causing terrible loss of life.

Is there any theodicy or defence that can be offered for the loss of life and suffering caused by natural evil? The Apostle Paul in Romans 8:20 tries to address this, prescribing the suffering of the Universe to the will of God, as follows:

For the creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God.

Paul makes God the author of natural evil and links it to his expectations of the imminent coming of the Kingdom of God. If we accept the premise of Genesis Chapter 1 & 2, then the universe and especially the Earth was created by an act of divine fiat, perfect in every way. Genesis declares in Chapter 1:10, 12, 21, and 25 that as he looked at what he had created, he saw it was good. Obviously, it’s not possible to understand the two creation accounts as literal events, but, in contrast to Platonism, the material world in Jewish religion isn’t considered inferior to the spiritual. However, on practical matters, the Hebrew Bible is woefully inadequate. Earthquakes in many religions are understood as indicating the god or gods’ anger, not natural processes. We know they are no more than natural processes, but given creation was declared as good, surely an omnipotent and omniscient God would know at least as much as a modern geologist. Earthquakes are the inevitable consequence of natural geological processes, and God, by creating the Earth, set those process in motions. Tsunamis and volcanoes are all linked to the same processes, so the Creator is responsible for untold human suffering and loss of life and for the death and suffering of millions of animals and sea creatures, if we accept that God created the heavens and the earth.

Theodicy applied to natural evil

Renowned apologist, for Christians only, William Lane Craig answered a question from a person who wrote asking why God isn’t responsible for suffering from natural evil. The essence of the questions was:

… natural events are outside of our control and completely in God's. You often use the example of plate tectonics as an example of perceived natural evil which has many good consequences. But wasn't it God who set up the laws by which the plates act? Isn't there a possible functioning world where natural evils are avoided and only moral evils are permitted? God may have a purpose in allowing natural evils, but how can He ordain them?

Craig then replies, moving the goal posts and never addressing the question. He moves from natural evil to Providence, which is an invalid response. He is refusing to answer the question but chooses to reframe it as follows:

… one level your question is not really so much about the problem of evil as about the doctrine of divine providence. You’re concerned that God does not merely permit but is the cause of the natural evils in the world. (Craig)

Further:

At most He can be said to be the remote cause of these events in the sense that He established the natural laws that govern the universe and the initial boundary conditions on which those laws operate. (Craig)

This answer is at best dishonest, but deliberately disingenuous in all probability. Craig moves the question into the distant past, all the way to the Big Bang in order to muddy the discussion. He seems to think that his argument is effective. However, to use his own argument, if God set up the initial boundary conditions, then as an omnipotent and omniscient being, he must have understood the implications of his actions. This directly, not indirectly, results in human suffering because he was an incompetent creator. By civil law, a manufacturer who releases a product into the marketplace that they know to be defective, and will probably result in harm or death to the user, will be liable to prosecution, huge fines and even jail time. I only need to remind the reader of the Ford Pinto scandal and the vulnerable fuel tanks that sometimes exploded in rear end accidents. The company was fined millions of dollars, an amount that exceeded Ford’s profit for 1971.

Now, let’s imagine that the manufacturer is in the business of creating whole planets and settling them with his offspring. This creative process needs to come with a warning label, warning that the new species know that sometimes the ground will start shaking so bad the landscape sometimes collapses and whole village are buried. Or that enormous tsunamis could result and sweep them and all their family and livestock. Or, finally, that a volcano called Krakatoa they see smoking could one day erupt in a cataclysm beyond human imagining, with a force of 13,000 Hiroshima nuclear bombs and 25 cubic kilometres of the island would be blasted into the atmosphere. Over 36,000 people were killed by the volcano and subsequent tsunami. The obvious response to this crazy scenario is to say that we need to believe in “real” omniscient gods, not an amateur incompetent god who is incapable to providing a truly safe planet for the people he claims to love.

Craig goes on to make the argument that the non-theist can’t point out that the loss of human life and suffering from natural evil is bad. Craig believes this on the false belief that only if God exists can there be moral values against which actions and values can be judged. If you encounter paedophilia, Craig is arguing that you can only call that evil because of God’s absolute moral values. In other words, nothing you say matters, because Craig claims the high ground. Only he has the moral values to judge what is good and bad, which precludes the opinion of six billion humans who aren’t in Craig’s own flock. It’s an unconvincing and insulting argument that treats the individual as having no personal values and beliefs. This is a bit like the C.S. Lewis argument that declaring something unfair implies that fairness is an actual value, which in some way points towards a supreme being. He makes this argument in Mere Christianity.

In summing up Craig makes the following statement:

… the theist will argue, as you note, that God has morally sufficient reasons for permitting the natural evils that occur, so that He cannot be held to have acted wrongly in permitting such disasters to happen. The non-theist errs in thinking that “what ought not to be” ought not to be permitted. But God can be justified in permitting bad states of affairs. For example, I think it is very plausible that only in a world which is suffused with natural evil would great numbers of people freely come to know God and find eternal life. In a world utterly devoid of natural evil we should likely be spoiled and pampered children, oblivious to God, not mature moral agents--an emphasis that meshes nicely with your own soul-making theodicy. Therefore, it is not wrong of God to permit natural disasters, any more than it is wrong of me to allow my child to go to the dentist.

Appalling loss of life of unbelievers and believes alike is some part of the divine plan, and this justifies pain, suffering and death, including of those who have yet to hear the gospel and be “saved”. I think the argument is self-defeating and fatuous and the reader can see that.

Psalm 24 declares that God was responsible for creating the planet:

The earth is the Lord's, and the fulness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein. For he hath founded it upon the seas, and established it upon the floods,

The believer has the right to expect an omniscient being to do a better job.

There is no theodicy that accounts for natural evil. Our planet nurtures us with water, food and the means to provide shelter, but it can equally expunge us implacably. The Earth is simply a massive geological creation that has evolved over billions of years, morphing from one supercontinent to another. There is no supreme being overseeing it and nodding off at the wheel while we see another tragedy unfold. There is no God, so no one to blame for natural processes. We humans are no more than recent arrivals. In billions of years, there might be another supercontinent, and another after that. The God of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Bible gets an F- at best for his efforts in providing us with a safe home for its recent inhabitants he claims to love. It’s a kindness to ourselves to admit that God doesn’t exist.

Moral Evil and its implications for God

I believe this is the more important of the two forms of evil to explore. It has provided paid work for preachers, priests, imams and mullahs, seminary teachers, theologians, ethicists, and popes for centuries. The problem of evil has spawned a million PhD’s on why it exists, given the conflicting claims that God (or Allah) is both omnipotent and omnibenevolent.

The definition of moral evil is any morally negative event caused by the intentional action or inaction of an agent, such as a person. An example of a moral evil might be murder, war or any other evil event for which someone can be held responsible or culpable. This concept can be contrasted with natural evil, in which a bad event occurs naturally, without the intervention of an agent.

Christian theology teaches that moral evil is caused by humans misusing their free will for evil and not for good. This equally applies to all of humanity, regardless of what brand of religion they follow or none. Mankind is to blame for all moral evil, which conveniently bypasses the fact that God supposedly created mankind, who uses its freewill, sometimes for evil purposes. As creator, he takes no responsibility for the moral choices his created beings make. God could have predisposed humanity to choose good over evil, but the bias of mankind is evil according to Paul. In Romans 7 Paul laments his natural predisposition towards sin:

For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it. So I find this law at work: Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me. What a wretched man I am!

Whether you ascribe this to “original sin”, a false doctrine, or a flawed creation, the fact remains that mankind according to Paul is fatally flawed.

Sin only comes with civilisation

It is only when humans begin civilisations that rules and regulations about what might or might not offend their god, were written that we get the concept of sin. Hunter/gatherer societies have rules of behaviour to keep the tribe together, but this idea of needing 613 commandments that are in the Jewish religion would be unnecessary, even beyond the issue of having written scriptures. Those societies functioned very successfully for millennia without drones like priests using a civilisation’s wealth for support and pretending to know the future and rule the people. Failure to protect the tribe, take part in hunting and share the bounty of the hunt and be a functioning part of the tribe was all that was required of them. Civilisation made slaves of mankind, and demands like following the exact letter of the law leads to an unhealthy perfectionism that is personally and socially damaging.

This brings us to the myth of Adam and Eve and the concept of “sin”. Preachers and posers who know less than they think use the idea that it’s an archery term and means missing the mark. It’s nothing of the kind. “Sin” is far more likely to be drawn from Old German and is part of the verb “to be”. It’s a silly argument because the word “sin” isn’t even in the Bible as such because it is written in Hebrew and Greek and “sin” is found in an English translation, and English contains numerous Germanic loan words.

The origins of Adam and Eve

Genesis and the myth of the sin of Adam and Eve was written approximately 500 BCE or later, but definitely in the post-exilic period after the Babylonian Captivity. As an explanation for human behaviour, it fails and is very shallow. This Jewish myth is misogynistic and sets up Eve, mother of all humans, as the fall guy. Because she was deceived, she led Adam astray and sin and death entered the world. Remember this is an aetiological myth intended to explain the problems that beset the lives of early humans, like crop failure, floods, failure of the rains to come on time, why the women in the village sometimes dies in childbirth and tells them that it’s all the fault of a bad human decision made by our ancient ancestor, and for which Gods sometimes punishes us for our sins.

As I have written elsewhere, the Hebrew Bible was written for one small population of Canaanites who lived in Palestine, and it is the product of centuries of additions and editing as different cultural and religious influences affected the Israelites. I live in a society that owes many of its beliefs and mores to Judaeo-Christian influences, and so the idea of sin is so ingrained that it’s impossible to ignore. Does being aware of sin and sinfulness make for a better world? In a word, no.

Does moral evil exist because God failed in Genesis?

Apologists and theologians talk about the impossibility of there being absolute moral values without there being an absolute supreme being. If we accept this premise, that there is an absolutely perfect, omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent being, then it is reasonable to expect this God to give his people, and by extension, all people, the most perfect laws, fair and compassionate and that genuinely hold up a mirror to the immorality of the world. Immorality isn’t sexual misdeeds. It actually has nothing to do with sex. The word is made up of two parts – a prefix (im), which is a negative, and the adjective, moral, which comes for the Latin “moralites”, meaning human nature. In other words, immorality is anything that is “negative” human nature. Suddenly, a whole world of possibilities becomes available.

Immorality would logically include all actions that are not against human nature, such as violence, murder, cruelty, child abuse, sexual slavery, human trafficking, abuse of women in marriages and domestic violence, owning and buying slaves, murdering prisoners after a battle, taking more than your due and exploiting people for greed and power. We should expect God’s perfect Word to teach us how to live, to act as if absolute moral values exist and his word will teach us how to live, and stop immoral actions against his creation. Is that what we find?

Permission to keep slaves

Deuteronomy Chapter 20 gives the Israelites a blueprint for taking the Promised Land. This includes offering the inhabitants peaceful surrender to prevent unnecessary deaths.

When you march up to attack a city, make its people an offer of peace. If they accept and open their gates, all the people in it shall be subject to forced labor and shall work for you. If they refuse to make peace and they engage you in battle, lay siege to that city. When the Lord your God delivers it into your hand, put to the sword all the men in it. As for the women, the children, the livestock and everything else in the city, you may take these as plunder for yourselves. And you may use the plunder the Lord your God gives you from your enemies. This is how you are to treat all the cities that are at a distance from you and do not belong to the nations nearby.

When we read this closely, we have apparent mercy, in offering terms of surrender, but under the condition that the inhabitants of the city accept perpetual slavery. In Josua they are called hewers of wood and carriers of water. Enforced enslavement is not mercy as anyone today would recognise mercy.

God approves and even commands slavery of other nations.

Secondly, if the city resists being destroyed by the Israelites, which seems perfectly reasonable on their part, God approves the slaughter of every man, and taking the women and children as legitimate plunder. They are free to use the plunder in any way they see fit, which would include sexual slavery, selling the women into slavery and using the women and children as forced labour, or just killing them. God approves the treatment of women as chattels, whose only value lies in their sexual availability and fertility and their capacity for work, or value in the slave market.

Further, taking the women and children and killing all the men is a well-used strategy for committing genocide. With the men gone and the women either married to or being used by, the Israelite men, and the children made into slaves, the blood lines of tribes are lost. A person’s lineage is traced through the male line, not the female. With the men killed, the family line ceases and the people become assimilated into Israel in time or into other tribes. Therefore, God approves of genocide and gave Israel the method of effecting it.

All the actions the Israelites are commanded to perform are the very antithesis of the morality I would expect from an omnibenevolent God. God has one priority, which is the creation and establishment of Israel. That should make it obvious to any discerning reader that this is nothing more than propaganda, meant to show that Israel destroying opposition has the divine imprimatur of Almighty God on it. This was written by priests or prophets as a justification for territorial expansion. If God inspired these commandments, he is a monster and the argument for absolute moral values coming from God fails utterly. If he didn’t write it, then what is divinely inspired and how can we tell?

Moral values applied to women

Deuteronomy 22 teaches:

If a man happens to meet a virgin who is not pledged to be married and rapes her and they are discovered, he shall pay her father fifty shekels of silver. He must marry the young woman, for he has violated her. He can never divorce her as long as he lives.

In other words, the man receives no punishment whatsoever. He is forced to marry the woman, but that is the extent of his liability. The virgin who is now despoiled has lose her sexual value and the father has lost on his investment. She is spoiled goods. Her punishment is to marry her rapist, and spend the rest of her life being raped over and over by the man who stole her virginity. There is no doubt the whole village would know and she might be shunned.

Deuteronomy Chapter 22 contains even more awful treatment for women who can be slandered by their husbands on their wedding night, and die as a consequence at the hands of the villagers by stoning. It is clear the God hates women and his law is only to benefit men. These laws do not reflect any type of moral value. They are unfair, biased and cruel. We should reflect on the fate of women, because they are the victims of the absolute immorality of men and of God’s laws. Where does morality arise? In the hearts of men, who wrote the words of God, and whose writings are so transparent we can see there is no God behind them, just common human self-interest. If God caused these words to be written, he is unworthy of worship.

Moral Evil – the failure of God in planning

God claims to be the Creator, who created a perfect being who failed and moral evil entered the world. This idea is so flimsy, it’s less substantial than a tissue. Firstly, we have to accept that God is the Creator. This same God then gave Israel, an insignificant nation, permission to act in such a way that makes concepts of morality completely irrelevant. The brutalisation of soldiers tasked with killing women and children, who almost certainly raped the women first, would lead to men unable to exercise any moral judgement. We all carry some canon within ourselves that intrinsically knows that some actions are just not acceptable. Whether you call this your conscience, or whatever you call it, it seems God doesn’t have one and he was happy for Israelite soldiers to lose theirs. The same pattern continues today in Gaza and Lebanon. Israeli soldiers are following a pattern set down millennia ago, and Netanyahu even invoked the destruction in his speech, making the genocide in Gaza a jihad of the Jews against the Palestinians. If you doubt this, copy this link and paste it into Google.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/11/benjamin-netanyahu-amalek-israel-palestine-gaza-saul-samuel-old-testament/

If God made us, he made us with the absolute certain knowledge of how it would play out. God knew we would go to war, commit murder, exploit each other and commit acts so horrendous and call them “God’s will” because they have some holy book they claim God gave them. If that God exists, he is unworthy of worship. These laws violate every standard of human decency, and the created being is shown to be more moral than the Creator. Moral evil does not stem from some mythical Garden of Eden and a bad choice of what food to eat. It is a choice that some people make, to choose immorality over morality. Human suffering is an existential reality, separate from any divine beings and wholly our responsibility as humans trying to build a better world.

Dr Kipp Davis, in a video on apocalyptic literature, described apocalypticism as theodicy on steroids. Apocalyptic literature tells us that God knows all about the forces of good and evil, but he isn’t blindsided by it. He has had a plan from the very beginning to bring history to an end at the time of his choosing, when he would establish a new and righteous Kingdom of God, and the forces of good and evil would be destroyed forever. God is not unaware of our suffering, but his timing isn’t our timing and we need to trust him. This has its own problems, with the Second Coming as the ultimate breaking into history with power seemingly delayed for two millennia. Paul and Jesus told his followers they wouldn’t die before the Kingdom of God came with power. Clearly, it is only by the most assiduous denial of actual reality that anyone can say that the Kingdom of God has come.

Conclusion

We do not need a God to judge us for moral evil because he made us knowing the consequences, and so he is either incompetent or malevolent. The most likely answer is neither, but that he doesn’t exist and there are no divinely given absolute moral values. We create and apply in our lives the moral values and these are subjective moral values because every society influences the nature of moral values. Pain and suffering caused by the environment, with earthquakes, tsunamis and even lethal bacteria and viruses which can wipe out significant numbers, is just evidence of how our planet evolved. From the formation of our sun from the remnants of a supernova, and the gas and dust coalescing into rocky planets and gas planets, our planet has evolved. Viruses like the Spanish Flu, which killed 100 million people, more than died in the entire First World War, also evolved. They weren’t created by a supernatural god.

There is no divine explanation for the natural processes that lead to death and destruction, because the scriptures haven’t got the language to explain anything in scientific terms. In the gospels, demons trouble people’s health, and Jesus casts them out, the wild man at Gerasene was possessed, except he wasn’t, and thousands of pigs were condemned to demon possession. Demons don’t even come into Jewish religion until the 1st Century, when Jesus came preaching. We evolved in a planet that both nurtures us and which also routinely performs geologic and weather events that threaten our very existence. We know that demons don’t cause illness, that the Earth isn’t flat and that we are an ancient evolved species of hominin, the last species of hominin as far as we know, and we are in charge of our own behaviour.

The problem of suffering and reconciling this with the omnibenevolence and omniscience of God is a pointless exercise. The God of the Hebrew Bible demands our unflinching obedience, and also calls for appallingly immoral actions to be carried out against non-Israelites. That includes everyone reading this, unless you are Jewish. This parochialism should alert us that the Pentateuch and the Book of Joshua are man-made books, written to reflect their tribal desire for domination of ancient Canaan, now Palestine, and access to the best grazing and farming land. At the very least, God should be making Israel, his nation of promise through Abraham, the blessing to the nations he promises in Genesis Chapter 12. Instead, his scriptures foster cruelty, slavery, and hatred of and violence towards women who have no value beyond

reproduction. There is no divine component to pain and suffering. These have social reasons, political reasons and cultural underpinnings that mean they will continue as long as humans are upon the Earth. We are alone on this planet, and we do not need an invisible God, who remains eternally hidden behind his words and whose demands are relayed through priests and prophets. God does not exist.