The second big objection to God’s goodness and God’s greatness we are going to look at is atheism. This says that if we have a problem with saying that God is good or that God is great, then the better option is to deny both: to say that God is neither good nor great. In fact, such a God does not exist at all.
Note that there are two dimensions to this discussion.
- The requirement for proof of the existence of God and particularly the clash between modern theories about origins and the Bible’s creation account.
- Ethical questions about the God defined and described in the Bible and seen as representative of monotheism. The atheist argument (especially as presented by the new atheists, including Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens is that the biblical God is not good and not worthy of worship.
A normal theism/atheism debate will focus on the first question, but that’s not my primary concern here as our discussion starts from a different place. Also there’s plenty of both young earth and old earth creationists around who have been getting on with that debate.
Our focus here is more about thinking through the implications of and challenges to the little bit of doctrine we’ve been looking at. So I want to focus primarily on the challenge to God’s goodness.
However, we can’t completely ignore question 1 even in this context. So, before moving on to the specific questions about God’s goodness raised by atheists, we’ll take a brief look at questions to do with proof of his existence.[1]
If God exists why doesn’t he show up and prove it?
This is really about demanding evidence or proof for God’s existence. Classical apologetics talks about these proofs or arguments under headings such as the ontological, teleological and cosmological arguments.
So the argument goes that there must be a greater intelligence to explain the design, beauty and order in the Universe, that the Universe must have come from somewhere and so there must have been a first cause and that if we can conceive of a perfect being, then its very perfection depends upon it actually existing.
Now, there are some significant issues with starting with these arguments and I don’t think that they should be treated as proof in the sense of “here’s the killer evidence.” I say this for three reasons.
- Evidence is usually interpretable and even faced with “evidence” people may choose not to accept that it is telling them what you think it is telling them.
- Something feels wrong with this type of argument by proofs because I end up debating God as a theory/hypothesis – but that’s not what you do with people/friends. You introduce friends to other friends.
- We end up falling far short of where we want to be. The classical arguments don’t get us to the God of the Bible. We conclude with Anthony Flew that there is a higher entity, but exactly what sort of god is that? We are still a long way from the Gospels.
So someone who doesn’t believe in God or want to believe in God is unlikely to be either convinced by the “evidence” or end up in the right place. And I still think that whilst the “goodness” challenge exists then for some people, their immediate response will be “even if you could prove your God exists, I still would not want to meet him.”
However, I think they do provide two important functions. First, of all, they offer an articulation of the assurance that believers have that the God they know and worship is real. Secondly, they help to explain the picture we are building up of a credible narrative for why we are here and who we are where that narrative starts with the creator God.
You see, that’s what we are doing here. We’re attempting to tell the history of why we are here. Now, what historians do is to assemble the most credible story that best explains the data we have.
So if my story or metanarrative is that there is an eternal and personal God who created and sustains the universe, then when I talk about things like evidence of design or the need for a first cause, then those things fit with the story.
Or, take the ontological argument associated with Anselm. This would look like the weakest of the classical proofs. This is the proof that says if we can conceive of a perfect being, then an important aspect of perfection is existence. Now at face value, that just sounds like wish fulfilment. Just because I imagine or wish for a perfect being does not mean that such a perfect being exists.
However, I think that the argument, rightly understood and used does touch on something important. No, it’s not a very helpful argument to put forward in debate. No-one’s going to say “Oh yes, I can imagine something perfect but if it didn’t exist, it wouldn’t be perfect. God must be real!” However, what this proof is doing is expressing our sense of the transcendent – that there must be more than this. It’s expressing, a sense or feeling that many people readily identify with. Now of course, it remains the case that the desire for something more could still be all to do with wish fulfilment and so it still does not function as an apologetic proof in that sense. However, that sense of “something more” or transcendence fits with what we know about ourselves. What we observe about human behaviour aligns with the meta-narrative of a creator God. Furthermore, f my natural desires for food, comfort, relationships etc. arise in response to real needs that can be met by real food, comfort, relationships, then why shouldn’t my desire for the transcendent reflect a real need for something/someone more and a need that can really be fulfilled?
Now, if that’s the Christian/theistic account of why we here, Atheism presents an alternative account based on Evolution. This story tells us that we evolved without a personal God being involved. It starts with a primeval soup of gases and then, something starts to happen, causing chemical reactions and the formation of molecules. [2] Then one day:
“At some point a particularly remarkable molecule was formed by accident. We will call it the Replicator. It may not be necessarily have been the biggest or most complex molecule around, but it had the extraordinary property of being able to create copies of itself. This may seem a very unlikely sort of accident to happen. So it was. It was exceedingly improbable. In the lifetime of a man, things that are that improbable can be treated for practical purposes as impossible. That is why you will never win a big prize on the football pools. But in our human estimates of what is probable and what is not, we are used to dealing in hundreds of millions of years. If you filled in pools coupons every week for a hundred million years you would very likely win several jackpots.”[3]
But there’s still a vital ingredient missing or we’d just have lots of identical molecules around busy cloning each other.
“So we seem to arrive at a large population of identical replicas. But now we must mention an important property of any copying process: it is not perfect. Mistakes will happen.”[4]
Richard Dawkins goes on to explain:
“erratic copying in biological replicators can in a real sense give rise to improvement, and it was essential for the progressive evolution of life that some errors were made.”[5]
Variation in numbers, longevity and stability mean some replicators are better equipped to survive than others.[6] These replicators are found in us now:
“Now they swarm in huge colonies safe inside gigantic lumbering robots, sealed off from the outside world, communicating with it by tortuous, indirect routes, manipulating it by remote control. They are in you and in me; they created us, body and mind, and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence. They have come a long way those replicators. Now they go by the name of genes and we are their survival machines.”[7]
Now, that’s a fascinating story, but it has a big problem because it starts with time, but fails to give account for eternity. In other words, time and matter came from somewhere. You see, every account of the Universe has got to put that Universe into context – where and when are we in the bigger scheme of things. Every meta-narrative has to deal with what happened before the beginning of space and time. Every story needs to deal with eternity.
Atheists have two real options. The first is that there was a when, when there was nothing, in which case, they’ve still got to explain how that primordial soup turned up. Or alternatively, they’ve got to say that matter itself is eternal, that there’s been some form of energy around in what we might call the “previ-verse.”[8] Now, that sounds very close to pantheism – the idea that God and creation are one and the same. In fact, Dawkins draws a similar sort of conclusion. When dealing with reports of famous scientists supposedly believing in or referring to God, he responds by saying that first of all we want to define what we mean by God. He defines the theist’s God as
“a supernatural intelligence who, in addition to his main work of creating the universe in the first place is still around to oversee and influence the subsequent fate of his initial creation. In many theistic belief systems, the deity is intimately involved in human affairs. He answers prayers; forgives or punishes sins; intervenes in the world by performing miracles; frets about good and bad deeds, and knows when we do them (or even think of doing them).”[9]
He then distinguishes theism from deism.
“A deist too believes in a supernatural intelligence, but one whose activities were confined to setting up the laws that govern the universe in the first place. The deist God never intervenes thereafter, and certainly has no specific interest in human affairs.”[10]
Then finally he describes pantheism:
“Pantheists don’t believe in a supernatural God at all, but use the word God as a non-supernatural synonym for Nature, or the Universe, or for the lawfulness that governs its workings.”[11]
In Dawkins’ view, when people like Einstein and Stephen Hawking refer to God, they do so in the pantheist sense.
“Einstein was using ‘God’ in a purely metaphorical, poetic sense. So is Stephen Hawking and so are most of those physicists who occasionally slip into the language of religious metaphor.”[12]
He goes on to say that it is the theist God, not the pantheist God, that he has a problem with,
“My title, The God Delusion, does not refer to the God of Einstein and other enlightened scientists of the previous section. That is why I needed to get Einsteinian religion out of the way to begin with: it has a proven capacity to confuse. In the rest of the book I am talking only about supernatural gods, of which the most familiar to the majority of my readers will be Yahweh, the God of the Old Testament.”[13]
Now, note that Dawkins’ pantheism is intended to be only metaphorical. He’s not saying that the Universe is divine in the same way that a theist would use the word divine. Mind you, I’m not convinced that a purist pantheist would accept that their understanding of divinity in creation is purely metaphorical either! However, what he is doing is setting up the Universe around us, physical matter, as the ultimate foundational entity.
But the problem hasn’t been dealt with. You see, this account does not make best sense of things like intelligence, emotions, personality, relationships etc. So we’ve either got a dilemma because the cause does not seem to fit the effect, or we have to explain away emotions and intelligence as not really existing at all, which no-one seems quite able to bring themselves round to doing.
So when I’m looking for a credible metanarrative, I don’t find that the “atheistic evolution” story hangs together. It doesn’t make sense of the things it is meant to make sense of. For example, we talk about “evolutionary progress,” but without a sense that there’s a standard to measure how we are doing against and a goal to go towards. So then the idea of progress becomes meaningless. It’s like taking a walk without either a map or an intended destination. You can’t call that “progress.” It’s just wandering around!
In fact, this is what we’ve seen in recent times. That metanarrative collapsed. If ontologically everything is random, if we are just here by chance, then epistemologically things end up the same way too. We find that we can’t actually tell a story to describe who we are, why we got here and what we are doing. The metanarrative collapses. Stories and even language itself become arbitrary. That’s why you end up with postmodernism.
You see, the story in the end is not about humanity at all, but about these things called genes that replicate and mutate and supposedly do what they need to in order to survive – but no one can actually tell me why these genes should exist or want to keep on existing. There is no meaning to existence. So I think that the other story carries more credibility; I do better to go back to revelation.
Then, supposing that the answer to the question “if God exists, why doesn’t he prove it? – why doesn’t he show up?” is “Well, he has.”
That’s the Christian view of Jesus. God shows up. God becomes man and lives among us. Jesus displays God’s wisdom with his teaching, God’s love with his compassion for us and obedience to his father; Jesus shows God’s power in his miracles. He calms the sea, heals the sick and he himself dies and rises.
If we are going to make this claim, then the focus is going to be on the question “can we be certain that Jesus really did live, die and rise again?” The resurrection becomes the crucial factor (which is what the Gospel writers understand as well).
Now, we know about Jesus and the resurrection through the Gospel accounts, so a subsidiary question will be “can we actually trust those accounts to be reliable?” Space here doesn’t permit a full discussion of the question, but it is worth noting the following.
- External evidence is helpful when seeking to date and get a feel for the reliability of the Gospels. This includes the volume of manuscripts available and their close proximity to the original events which compare favourably with other historical events. It also includes external reference to Gospel authors by other writers.[14]
- Internal evidence that helps us to identify the context in which books were writte. For example, when dating Luke and Acts, we note that Acts finishes prior to Peter and Paul’s deaths. It would be legitimate for the writer to deal with those events without compromising an early dating of them. Therefore, the most likely explanation is that those events had not yet taken place when Luke and Acts were written. Similarly, JAT Robinson has argued that the Gospel and other New Testament writers handling of Jesus’ words concerning Jerusalem and the Temple suggest that they are writing prior to the actual fall of Jerusalem in AD 70.[15]
So, we can have a high level of confidence that when we pick up the New Testament, we are dealing with credible eyewitness accounts.[16] Additionally, because of the way those accounts work, there’s strong evidence that we are dealing with genuine, independent eye witnesses with their own accounts to tell, not with a group of people that colluded to concoct a story.
This means that we find each Gospel author making use of each other’s written material.[17] At the same time, they pick up on and emphasise different aspects of the story. They do this in a way that does not contradict, but rather each piece of material supplements and adds to the other.
Now, when we come to the resurrection accounts, some alternative theories have been presented to try and account for the empty tomb. These include
Swoon – Jesus wasn’t really dead when they placed him in the tomb and so revived overnight. This seems unlikely. The Romans had a good track record for executing people and the piercing of Jesus’ side appears to have gone through to his internal organs. Additionally, someone who has been through a crucifixion and just about survived is unlikely to make a convincing resurrected Messiah.
Fraud – That the body was stolen. But by who and to what purpose? It doesn’t really suit the aims of Jesus’ rivals and his supporters stuck quite consistently to their story even under the threat of torture, exile and execution.
Superstition and hallucination – The problem with this is that the women and the disciples are not looking for a resurrected Jesus. In fact, they assume to start with that one of the other explanations is the reason for the disappeared body.
So these alternative explanations have been comprehensively answered over the years. I guess that the final explanation is “myth:” that it’s an attempt to tell a story to explain things and provide the basis for a new religion. Now such an approach assumes a couple of things. First of all, that the accounts were written long after the supposed life of Jesus (see above on this) and that they don’t stand up to the test of historical reliability. In other words, the argument is that the gospel writers did not do a good job of inventing their story; that the stories don’t really match up.
Now, eye witnesses, if they are not colluding, won’t sound exactly the same – but they shouldn’t contradict each other and whilst harmonisation of different eye witness accounts may be difficult, it should not be impossible.
Personally, I think it a strange idea that an editor would clumsily shove together contradictory accounts and in any case, I do think you can put a harmonised version of the whole story together. This would run something along the lines of the following:
Very early in the morning, some women go to the tomb. Mary Magdalene is one of them. It looks like they set off before dawn and dawn is breaking as they arrive. They arrive about the time that the stone is removed. There are angels there. The women run back and tell Peter and John that the stone has been moved and the body gone. Peter and John run to the tomb and witness this.as well. This leads John towards some form of belief, but Peter is still wondering what is going on. Mary Magdalene returns to the tomb and there the angels speak to her – she’s still weeping and in distress, but then, turning around, she meets Jesus. He sends her to speak to the others.[18]
During the day, Jesus appears to two disciples going back to Emmaus and then at some point to Peter. Then he appears to the gathered disciples – collectively referred to as the 11 but without Thomas at this point. They report to Thomas – he does not believe. Jesus appears to all the disciples with Thomas now present.
They are instructed to go to Galilee. This includes a fishing trip and a walk up a mountain where they are commissioned to go and make disciples of all nations. They then return to Jerusalem. Jesus meets them at Bethany. They go out to a hill from where he ascends to Heaven. They return into Jerusalem and worship at the Temple.
Now there are a couple of things to note here.
- That each account does not name all the people or give all the details – but there’s consistency. For example, there are multiple women with Mary Magdalene standing out as a notable representative (it’s possible even in John’s gospel that Mary’s use of “we” refers to the women together. Although John does not list all the women, that does not mean that they were absent.
- That in some places there are multiple options for the exact chronology of events. For example, it’s possible that Matthew tells us about one conversation with angels and it’s later repeated to Mary, but it’s also possible that all the women return to the tomb with Mary and that Matthew concentrates the story down so that he doesn’t over distinguish between the first visit to the tomb and the second.
- The different accounts give different amounts of space and detail so some things will get summarised up in different ways. This can be seen in an analysis of the amount of detail that each author goes into. A quick word count using the NIV version shows that each writer’s account gives the following amount of space to the Resurrection story.
- Matthew 435 words
- Mark 186 words
- Luke Acts 1326 words
- John 1,455 words
- That none of the accounts give a full description of everything that happens. For example, the appearance to Peter is alluded to, but not described and then there’s the 500 witnesses that Paul refers to in 1 Corinthians 15.
So a little bit of work and thinking may be needed from the reader in piecing together the eye witnesses, but notice that at no point does one account contradict the others. They complement each other.
So, returning to our best fit meta-narrative, we can say that there’s an eternal and personal God who made, orders and looks after this world. That this world shows all the hallmarks of design, order, beauty that you would expect if a good God had made it. That this good God shows up consistently through history and is not at a distance, but interacts with his creation – most notably in the person of Jesus who demonstrates power over creation, weather, sickness, resources and authority over life and death itself. We also see that we human beings recognise in ourselves an inner longing for something greater and beyond ourselves. We are aware of eternity. We are designed to worship.
The point is that this world view works. The story is consistent and coherent and the truth claims associated enable us to make sense of the big questions we ask including:
Where did this world come from?
Why am I here?
Is there more than this?
Do I have purpose/a future?
Which leads us into the second part of the discussion – is the God revealed in Scripture good or malign?
Atheism and God’s goodness
[19]“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 misogynist, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”[20]
That’s Richard Dawkins’ verdict on Yahweh. And if you think he’s just got a problem with the Old Testament then it’s worth noting that the New Atheists have just as big (if not bigger) a problem with the New Testament.[21] Now, not every atheist will have read “The God Delusion” and not everyone claims to share his approach to debating on faith. However, this statement is important because I would suggest that it is representative of a major objection to the Christian claim that God is good. So, it’s right that we engage with it.
Firstly, it’s important at this stage to note that Dawkins is making a series of moral judgements here. He is saying that if there is something called goodness, then God does not possess or show it. So, a major part of our discussion needs to focus on the following questions:
- What is morality and does morality really exist?
- Where does morality come from?
Remember that one of the key things we should be thinking about as we go along is whether our answers to these questions are consistent, fit within and support our worldview or whether we give inconsistent answers and/or undermine our worldview.
We are back to presuppositions again. Presuppositions are the foundational beliefs that we have on which our worldview sits. Generally speaking, if you challenge my individual beliefs and find evidence to prove me wrong, unless you actually demolish the foundations and show that my underpinning pre-suppositions are wrong, I’m unlikely to change my mind and more likely to simply find new explanations that fit within the overarching framework of my belief system.
Morality – is it real?
What we immediately see here is that Dawkins is making a moral assessment of the Christian God. He attributes a number of negative characteristics and actions to God. Now, I am a little curious about this. Does Dawkins mean that there really are right and wrong motives or does he simply mean that here are a set of standards that Christians would claim are moral and by their own standards, their God fails?
It is right to ask the question “is there really something that we can genuinely call morality?” What do I mean by this? Well, here are a few examples of moral qualities: love, mercy, compassion, kindness etc. Now, I can say that yes I agree, love exists, that a real action (compassion) happens because of an emotion I experience (love) and that the action results in a further sense of well-being. However, there is a big difference between seeing “love” as a moral quality and seeing it as a label to describe chemical processes. The difference here is about “is and ought.”
What do I mean by this? Well, I am constantly able to observe how people, animals and plants function. I know that in certain conditions certain creatures will normally perform in certain ways -they’ll respond to the environment around them. That’s what we mean by “is”.
However, saying that things do happen does not mean that they should happen. We can say that something “is” the case but we also want to talk about what “ought” to be the case. For example, if you are a Tottenham Hotspurs fan, then the difference between “is” and “ought” would be obvious. You might think that Spurs ought to have won the Premier League in 2016. However, the real situation is that Leicester won the title. Or to give another example, take someone who runs a business using dodgy and maybe even criminal methods. You might say that he is successful and making lots of money but he ought to be found out and locked up in prison.
It’s the same when we look at the wider world around us. We can observe how the world functions, how animals behave towards each other, how humans treat one another. You will observe that certain behaviours tend to have certain consequences. You will observe a world where some people do well and others don’t. You will observe a world where there is pain and suffering as well as joy. That’s what the world is like but ought it to be like that?
How do we tell the difference between “is” and “ought”? Well, medical treatment offers some clues. we know that some people respond physically to stimuli that should cause pleasure or a neutral reaction, but in fact they experience pain. Now on a small scale I know that the “is” here isn’t the “ought”. Medical diagnosis depends on distinguishing the two. A doctor will then compare my experience of pain to two things, first of all he will look wider and finds out what is the experience of the rest of the population. Secondly, he looks deeper and finds out what my past experience is by looking at my medical history.
So to distinguish between “is” and “ought” we need to see the bigger picture. But if we are looking at how the whole Universe behaves can we do that? Is there something bigger to look to? Where do we get our terms of reference from? How do we know that particular behaviours are right or wrong, especially if they appear to be common to much of humanity? For example, Slavery has been common and persistent throughout history in some form or other. Does that mean we should just accept it?[22]
Then what do we do if there is more than one “is”? What happens if we observe a number of different practices around the world? For example, how do I choose between capitalism, communism and feudalism? I really have three choices
- I could say that one system is right and the other two are wrong.
- I could say that all of the systems are wrong and we need to keep searching for the right one.
- Or we could say that none of the systems are necessarily right or wrong. All we can say is that each system exists.
If we take the third option, then we are saying that it is impossible to identify an “ought.” All we can do is describe what is the case. Now, this is a perfectly logical conclusion for atheists to come to. If all we have is the Universe around us, then there is nothing greater than it, nothing beyond or outside of it. We have on way of telling how things “ought” to be. All we can do is describe how things are.
This is in effect a logical conclusion of belief that the foundational absolute is matter. Words like love justice, compassion, mercy, forgiveness, retribution, restoration really are just words to describe the reality. They are just labels for observable chemical processes and interactions between organisms but we should not load them with any value.
The problem is that not many people really want to do this. Generally speaking, people want to talk about goodness and morality. Generally speaking, as well, we tend to talk about evolution in terms of progress. It’s not just that things change, mutations are meant to lead to improvements.
Where do we get our morality from?
Ethical Approaches – an important piece of the jigsaw
John Frame identifies three main approaches to ethics: existential, teleological (or situational) and deontological.
Existential Ethics tend to be subjective, “they focus on ethics as a phenomenon of the internal life”[23] meaning that “a good act comes from a good character.”[24] Modern politicians often rely on this approach: we are expected to trust their policies because they are good and honourable men and women.[25] The problem with this approach is that it is subjective. It is dependent upon individual conscience about right and wrong. How can anyone challenge what I do, especially if I believe myself to be essentially wise and good?
Frame does note though that:
“No thinker is an absolutely pure example of any of these three tendencies. The reason is that ethics by its very nature requires all three perspectives. One can try to reject a perspective, but it always shows up somewhere. So, in secular existential ethics, our inner subjectivity is made to play all three roles; motive, goal and standard.”[26]
The second ethical tradition described by Frame is Teleological Ethics.
“This term comes from the Greek word telos, which means ‘goal’ or ‘purpose.’ This tradition understands ethics as a selection of goals and of means to reach those goals. In the secular version, the goal is usually human happiness or, more narrowly, pleasure.” [27]
This leads to a lot of discussion about how we know what a good goal is. Utilitarianism will argue that we should weigh up what brings the greatest joy or happiness, but that leads to further questions. For example, what if I pursue maximum pleasure for me at the expense of pain to others? The answer to that one may sound simple, but then, what if we pursue pleasure for a majority of people, but that results in severe pain for a minority?
The third approach is called Deontological Ethics. This is about a concern for objective rules or principles. Frame says that:
“Deontologists tend to be contemptuous of people who do good in order to gain pleasure or happiness or to express their inner inclinations. In the deontological view, seeking happiness is never morally virtuous; indeed, it detracts from the moral quality of any action. So when a writer despises pleasure and exalts principle or self-sacrifice, he is probably a deontologist.” [28]
How do we determine what those rules are? Well, a theist is likely to identify those rules as being given by God. However, an atheist does not have (and may not want) that option. Also, we cannot go on subjective feelings or benefits. So as Frame explains, because
“Deontologists seek to find ethical norms that are universal, necessary and obligatory. They usually accept the argument of Hume, Moore, and others that such norms cannot be found through sense experience (as in teleological ethics) or introspection (as in existential ethics).” The problem set before the deontologist, therefore, is to find some other source of ethical knowledge.” [29]
Dawkins’ Ethics
So how does Richard Dawkins engage with ethics? It’s important that we go back to his basic starting point: the selfish gene. In Dawkins’ worldview, our essential purpose is to provide vehicles for genetic reproduction. The Gene functions selfishly in that its concern is self-preservation.
So, does this remove the possibility of altruism? Dawkins argues that no it doesn’t because it is the gene that is ‘selfish’ because that’s what it needs to preserve, but just because the lowest common denominator is defined as ‘selfish’, it does not mean that everything else is ‘selfish’ around it.
“It is necessary to put the emphasis on the right word. The selfish gene is the correct emphasis, for it makes the contrast with the selfish organism or the selfish species.”[30]
The gene itself needs to be ‘selfish’ because
“The logic of Darwinism concludes that the unit in the hierarchy of life which survives and passes through the filter of natural selection will tend to be selfish. The units that survive in the world will be the ones that succeeded in surviving at the level of their rivals at their own level in the hierarchy. That precisely, is what selfishness means in this context.” [31]
Dawkins does acknowledge that this ‘selfishness’ will extend beyond the gene. However, this is not guaranteed to be always and uniformly the case.
“The most obvious way in which genes ensure their own selfish survival relative to other genes is by programming individual organisms to be selfish. There are indeed many circumstances in which survival of the individual organism will favour the survival of the genes that ride inside it. But different circumstances favour different tactics. There are circumstances –not particularly rare – in which genes ensure their own selfish survival by influencing organisms to behave altruistically”[32]
He then goes on to discuss a number of circumstances in which organisms and communities may discover good reasons for acting altruistically in a way that supports the survival of the selfish gene. He concludes:
“We now have four good Darwinian reasons for individuals to be altruistic, generous or ‘moral’ to each other. First, there is the special case of genetic kinship. Second, there is reciprocation: the repayment of favours given, and the giving of favours in ‘anticipation’ of payback. Following on from this there is, third, the Darwinian benefit of acquiring a reputation for generosity and kindness. And fourth, If Zahavi is right; there is the particular additional benefit of conspicuous generosity as a way of buying unfakeably authentic advertising.”[33]
Essentially, Dawkins argues for a form of game theory where the game players “start out being nice, and give others the benefit of the doubt. Then repay good deeds with good but avenge bad deeds.”[34] He does, however, also acknowledge the problem that “there will always be cheats, and stable solutions to the game theoretic conundrums of reciprocal altruism always involve an element of punishment of cheats.”[35]
Now, I want to suggest that Dawkins’ ethics are essentially located within the teleological tradition. We do good for the good of something, but note that it’s specifically for the good of the gene which may not necessarily be or at least feel like the same thing as “my good/ wellbeing,” although the two things could well coalesce. In fact, because it is the gene itself which functions at the teleological level, then I am still likely to experience the other two forms of ethics.[36] For example, in order to safeguard its future, the gene may generate a number of neurological processes intended to give me a sense of honour if I carry out actions aligned with the gene’s well-being. Alternatively, individuals and communities may learn to live by certain seemingly arbitrary rules that on the one hand don’t appear to deliver happiness or pleasure to the individuals or the community, but do ensure survival at the genetic level.
Now arguably, the implication is that my action’s true end goal is to serve the needs of something other than either myself or even those others who are the immediate recipient of my altruism. In fact, this is always true when your world view is founded on anything that is not a-se. In other words, I live to serve someone or something who is dependent upon me. The observant reader will realise that this is the alternative to grace.
It’s interesting that most creation or origins myths revolve around the needs of the gods. They create either to win battles with each other, by accident in some tragic way or in order to create servants and food for themselves. This is why I suggest that the alternative to the Bible’s account of God and creation means that I am no more than an accidental by-product of the gods’ agenda. In effect, Dawkins’ origins story does the same, only it is the genes that take the place of the gods. We become the accidental by-products of gene survival.[37]
Dawkins’ creation story does the same. It’s fascinating that the Bible’s creation story subverts this. God does not create out of need – but he does create intentionally. We are not an accidental by—product.
Evaluating Dawkins
I want to suggest the following problems with Dawkins’ account
- Dawkins still hasn’t really explained why altruism should work – why would we end up with that model (especially if the foundational building blocks are selfish)?
- If altruism is right, then why do you end up with selfish people? Why would someone go rogue and if altruism is what we truly need, then shouldn’t evolution eliminate the faulty alternatives? Or, if it doesn’t, then doesn’t that suggest it is somehow very inefficient?
- In the end, even when we follow altruistic means, then it does not follow that we ever can do that for genuine altruistic reasons – we are at heart selfish because our genes are selfish. Even when I do act altruistically, I’m primarily playing a waiting game to see how things will play out and where and when I might need to play nasty. I am, at heart, a selfish being. In effect, what we have is a form of original sin, but not recognised as such and without the possibility of salvation. I am really a slave to my genes. Really all any of us are doing is biding our time in the game.
Finally, even Dawkins doesn’t really convince himself that morality has a real place in the process. It may well be
“that our Good Samaritan urges are misfirings, analogous to the misfiring of a reed warbler’s parental instincts when it works itself to the bone for a young cuckoo. An even closer analogy is the human urge to adopt a child, I must rush to add that ‘misfiring’ is intended in only a strictly Darwinian sense. It carries no suggestion of the pejorative.”[38]
In other words, Dawkins may be able to give an explanation for why we do good to those who are in a position to do good back to us. But why should we give when we don’t get anything back? Why should we serve without being noticed or rewarded? Why should we love those whom we don’t seem to have any real responsibility to?
Dawkins ends up saying that these emotions and compulsions are mistakes, errors in our genetic makeup. I still think that this is the most consistent and coherent conclusion to Dawkins’ account of origins. Mind you, I would suggest that if our primary purpose is to enable the survival of genes, then any suggestion of “misfiring” must, within a Dawkinsian worldview, be pejorative. It cannot be anything other.
So, in the end, Dawkins cannot really give a coherent account for why we should be moral. Not only that, I don’t find his account for why we are moral all that convincing either. Not only has failed to justify the ‘ought’ but he also failed to coherently explained the ‘is’.
Now, part of our discussion is quite rightly about challenging atheist positions to see if they can give a reasonable account for morality, but we still also have to deal with the question “Is the Christian account moral?”
Morality and the Christian account of God
So how does the God revealed in Scripture and worshipped by Christians do when it comes to the morality question? Once again, we are back to the question of evil and suffering and why a good God can permit these things to happen. Now, there are two charges to respond to here. The first is that if there is a sovereign God supreme over everything, then he is the cause of evil and suffering. That’s the kind of big or meta philosophical question. The second one is that when you look at the Bible and the description of what God says and does, then he doesn’t actually come out of it too well: that his actions are immoral and unloving against the very standards that the Bible sets.
I want to spend a little bit of time exploring the first question a little bit further. It is something that we will need to come back to again and again as we explore the big questions about who God is, who were are and why we are here. So, there will be other bites of the cherry if we don’t get to grips with everything here. At the same time, we won’t want to deny that this is a big and a difficult question. Theodicy is the big question that theologians and philosophers have wrestled with down through the ages. So, it would be slightly arrogant of us to think we’ll get this one done and dusted in one article here. I also think that it’s a good thing to say “I don’t know” some, if not a lot, of the time.
Attempts to explain evil and suffering
In “Evil and the Cross”, Henri Blocher identifies three categories of explanation for suffering. These are “The solution by universal order”[39], “The solution by autonomous freedom”[40] and “The solution by dialectical reasoning.” [41] Let’s take each in turn.
By “The solution by universal order”, Blocher means those theodicies[42] where evil is seen to have a place in the progress of creation and humanity.
“To the angry or anguished question, ‘Why?’ asked by human beings confronted with evil, Christian thinkers had to find an answer. The one most often put forward, at least in ancient times and in the great periods in the history of the church, is closely related to optimism. Moreover it reflects the influence of philosophies that we have classified under the heading ‘optimism’, such as Stoicism and the Neoplatonism of Plotinus. The strategy consists of erasing or blurring the most scandalous aspects of evil, and choosing a perspective which appears to diminish the anomaly. It is rather as if the existence of evil and the goodness of God are the two lips of a wound that have to be brought together, and you must find as many clips as possible – the clips being in this case the rational considerations that suggest harmony.”[43]
From this perspective, the seriousness and extent of evil is in effect played down. In fact, it is literally reduced down to nothingness or ‘non-being.’
This “explanation of the origin and the function of evil rests on an interpretation of the nature of evil that roots it in finitude. Every creature is finite, it does not possess being in all its fullness; therefore there may be detected in it a lack of being, the mark of non-being.”[44]
The point here is that God did not cause or create evil, at least not in the same way as he created the heavens and the earth and formed animals and people. Evil is the absence of goodness, the absence or limit of the things God has created. For example, “Blindness is the absence of sight, injustice is the absence of justice, lies or error are the absence of truth.”[45] One proponent of such a position, Teillard De Chardin, treats evil as “the waste product of evolution.”[46]
We have already met the idea that evil’s existence has its roots in autonomous freedom because it is the position of open theists. Indeed, this is probably the best known and widely used of all the arguments. As well as open theism, variants of this approach are found in the writings of CS Lewis, Francis Schaeffer and Rob Bell. Blocher comments that, “This explanation of the problem of evil through freedom is presented in a wide variety of forms, some highly speculative, others commonplace and popular.”[47]
In autonomous freedom based arguments,
“Evil is considered as a possibility that is inherent in freedom: it would make no sense to call a creature free if it were not a priori possible for it to do evil. Secondly, the free choice of a personal agent, human or angelic, could not (for defenders of this solution) be determined in advance by God. It goes without saying that, if my choice is free, no-one, not even God,, has made a decision about it ahead of me. Lastly, since freedom is held as an extremely high, if not the highest, value, being essential to any relationship of love, it was good for God to ‘take the risk’ of creating free agents. God had to do so, if he wished to be loved, for that is not possible except where there is freedom.”[48]
The third approach treats evil and good as somehow in tension and necessary to each other. They are in effect two sides of the same coin. There is an element of dualism in the thought process. Blocher explains that:
“The thinkers in the third category probably differ among themselves even more than the advocates of the solutions we have already discussed. Using reason in a very free and speculative manner and enjoying the delights of paradox, they have two principal affirmations in common. First, they consider that evil has been present from the very origin of the world, as a qualified power which opposes Good. This evil is often called non-being or nothingness….but it is given actual reality, either in God or with God.”[49]
We also see as we look at these different approaches that attempts to explain evil either fulfil some form of purpose in God’s overall plan[50] – such as the manufacture of souls,[51] negate or lay down its place, extent or horror, treat good and evil as equals in tension and/or in conflict (dualism) or take a fatalistic approach to evil and suffering as an unavoidable aspect of existence.[52]
Evaluation
Listening
Now, I want to suggest, carefully, that each of the main accounts of evil have something to say to us. For example, those accounts that describe evil as negation are picking up on something vital as they consider its ontological nature. As a number of people throughout history have argued – including Augustine of Hippo, Thomas Aquinas and, in modern times, CS Lewis – evil is not a substance that God made; rather, evil is the negation of the good. Evil is parasitical on goodness.[53] That is to say that we want to put it in its right context: the bigger picture is of God’s infinite glory and beauty, the goodness of creation and the future joy of eternity.
This means that Augustine makes a helpful distinction between how God is sovereign over good and evil. God is sovereign over good as its creator. However, He is sovereign over evil as ruler. He acknowledges that God uses evil for good, but not as its originator because it is not a thing to create.[54]
Secondly, there is a sense in which the evil of suffering is formative. This is Paul’s point in Romans 5, the argument even of some secular psychiatrists and psychologists and the experience of many believers through history and around the world. One of the privileges of pastoral ministry is hearing the testimony of people who have grown in godliness and closer to God through suffering. To hear someone who has suffered terribly through a long, debilitating, terminal illness say “God has been good to me” is truly humbling.
Thirdly, unless we are fatalists, then we do need to give an account for human freedom and this will have something to say about evil and its causes. A reformed understanding of God’s sovereignty and a strong denial of open theism does not exclude the place of free will. So, for example, John Calvin, along with Augustine of Hippo, is most closely associated with a theology that emphasises God’s sovereignty over and against human autonomy, but he says about Adam in his pre-fall existence:
“Therefore God has provided the soul of man with intellect, by which he might discern good from evil, just from unjust and might know what to follow or to shun, reason going before him with her lamp….to this he has joined will to which choice belongs.”[55]
The idea here is that true freedom is found in a will directed towards trust in the true and living God because Adam, before he sinned, was able to reason fully and so make wise choices. The will was “submissive to reason”.[56] Calvin allows for the real possibility that Adam and Eve could have withstood temptation, commenting that “Adam, therefore might have stood if he chose, since it was only by his free will that he fell.”[57] So when Calvin (and also Luther[58]) talk about human beings lacking free will, they are primarily talking about our state after sin and this lack of freedom is not so much about our finite state, but our fallen state. We are unable to make free choices because we are enslaved to our sinful desires so that Calvin has little time for “those who …still seek for free will in man, notwithstanding of his being lost and drowned in spiritual destruction.”[59]
Challenging
The problems we see with these attempts to explain evil is that they still fall a long way short both in giving an answer that satisfies our intellects and our emotions and in doing justice to the Biblical accounts as well.
So, whilst it is helpful to see evil as parasitic and to talk about it as negation, we cannot deny its painful reality. The cancer sufferer and the assault victim are very much aware of evil’s presence and horror. Furthermore, the Bible does not shy away from the reality and enormity of evil and suffering. As Blocher says, “Scripture never tires of denouncing the reality and the danger of evil; it is evil totally, radically and absolutely.”[60] This is seen both in God’s judgement on wickedness – “Nothing shows the evil reality of evil better than the wrath of God against it and the eternal perdition of those who choose evil and remain devoted to it”[61] – and in his solution, the Cross.
Secondly, if God truly is sovereign over the detail of everything,[62] then we cannot really get him off the hook by detaching him from the events. If God is constrained to permit by principles outside of himself, then he is subject to a higher and impersonal authority; he is weak and not truly sovereign. If God permits out of choice, then that begs the question “why” just as much as if he directly authored it.[63]
Putting a picture together
So, we have to admit that we don’t have a neat, tidy answer to the problem of evil and suffering. That, of course, is the reality of being humans. We are small, finite creatures in a massive Universe trying to understand an infinite God. This does not stop us from asking the questions or from continuing to look for answers though. Nor does the questioning and searching compete with the call to trust – and that may well be part of the point of it all, as we’ll consider very shortly. Before that, I want to make a few other suggestions for consideration.
First of all, we come back to the point that if God is sovereign, then everything which happens must in some way serve to fulfil his purpose and to glorify him. Secondly, that Scripture is clear that glory is not about “might is right”; worship is as much a response to goodness as it is to greatness and so we can expect these purposes to be for good. In fact, Scripture is clear is that God works all things together for our good, not just His. Thirdly, it is important as always to make careful distinctions. So, just as Augustine distinguishes God’s sovereignty as creator over good from his sovereignty as ruler over evil, so he and Calvin also make another vital distinction. This time, they distinguish between God’s intentions behind his decrees and human intentions in fulfilling them. Calvin, quoting Augustine, observes:
“Man sometimes with a good-will wishes something which God does not will, as when a good son wishes his father to live, while God wills him to die. Again, it may happen that man with a bad will wishes what God wills righteously as when a bad son wishes his father to die and God also wills it.”[64]
Examples of this include in the Old Testament where Joseph tells his brothers that they had intended to harm him by selling him as a slave, but this was actually fulfilling God’s plan for all their good. Then, in the New Testament (and I think Joseph’s experience is intended to point us forward to this image), we have evil men conspiring to kill Jesus. They do this to stop him, to destroy him, to further their own selfish ambitions, but God had planned the crucifixion before the start of time.
Now, this is where trust comes in. There is the sense in Scripture that present sufferings are incomparable to the joy waiting in eternity. Quite how that will come to be true, I don’t know. Christians have never expected to know all the answers here and now.[65] Nor can I pretend to fully understand the exact detailed nature of God’s overarching purpose or why this exact creation and history was the necessary way for God to do this.
I can come back to one or two suggestions or clues to what He might have in mind. First of all, some theologians suggest that the emphasis is on God’s purpose to call to himself a people who are chosen by grace and learnt to love and enjoy grace. In that sense, it’s not so much the Open Theism argument that we must be free so that we can freely choose to love God as that the story is set up so that he freely chooses to love us. You see, unconditional love means giving even when we don’t deserve. I like this approach with its emphasis on grace.[66]
I also want to come back to the question of freedom at this point. I do think that even the Open Theists are onto something when they suggest that freedom is important as we learn to love. The problem with Open Theism is that it makes God the one who needs us to love him freely back. He becomes dependent on us, wanting our love. If God is love and God is Trinity, then he isn’t dependent on us loving Him. His love for us is given freely; it is an act of grace. However, by giving me the experience of freedom, God gives me the opportunity to make choices so that I can genuinely experience what it means to love.
Finally, I think that The Doctrine of the Trinity gives us an important clue as to God’s purposes. The Father eternally loves the Son and so wants to glorify him. It is through the history of Creation, Fall, Redemption and New Creation that the Son is glorified. Similarly, it is through this that the Son is able to love, obey and honour His father.
But I’m still living with incomplete answers. There are still questions. So, in the meantime, we keep asking, thinking, learning and trusting. How do I trust when the answer is incomplete? Well, to do that, I look back and see what God has done so far. Has God proved trustworthy? That’s why we need to come back to the other part of our discussion. Does the God revealed in the Bible prove himself to be trustworthy, faithful, loving and good?
God, The Bible and Morality
Does the God we find in the Bible prove himself to be trustworthy, faithful, good and loving? What about those parts of the Bible that actually appear to contradict morality? Isn’t the Bible full of examples of genocide, sexual brutality, jealousy and vindictiveness? This is, after all, one of the arguments Richard Dawkins makes in The God Delusion.[67]
Dawkins offers a number of examples of dubious morality in the Bible, stating
“In Genesis with the well-loved story of Noah, derived from the Babylonian myth of Uta-Napisthim and known from the older mythologies of several cultures. The legend of the animals going into the ark two by two is charming, but the moral of the story of Noah is appalling. God took a dim view of humans, so he (with the exception of one family) drowned the lot of them including children and also, for good measure, the rest of the (presumably blameless animals too).[68]
Then he is particularly taken with the events when the angels visit Sodom and Gomorrah to warn Lot and his family to flee and the interesting parallel with the Levite and his prostitute at the end of Judges. He also draws a comparison between Lot and his family being saved from the destruction of Sodom and Noah’s salvation from the flood. He observes that:
“In the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the Noah equivalent, chosen to be spared with his family because he was uniquely righteous, was Abraham’s nephew Lot. Two male angels were sent to Sodom to warn Lot to leave the city before the brimstone arrived. Lot hospitably welcomed the angels into his house, whereupon all the men of Sodom gathered around and demanded that Lot should hand the angels over so that they could (what else?) Sodomize them”[69]
In the Genesis account, Lot tries to reason with the men of the City and protect the angels:
“Lot’s gallantry in refusing the demand suggests that God might have been onto something when he singled him out as the only good man in Sodom. But Lot’s halo is tarnished by the terms of his refusal.” [70]
You see, Lot’s offer is for the men to have his daughters instead. He puts his own family at risk of gang rape. Dawkins notes though that:
“As it happened, Lot’s bargaining away of his daughters’ virginity proved unnecessary, for the angels succeeded in repelling the marauders striking them blind.”[71] If Lot gives us a problem, then what about his uncle, the even more central Old Testament character, Abraham? Of him, Dawkins says,
“Lot’s uncle Abraham was the founding father of all three ‘great’ monotheistic religions. His patriarchal status renders him only somewhat less likely than God to be taken as a role model. But what modern moralist would wish to follow him?”[72] A notable example of this is Abraham’s attempt to pass his wife, Sarah, off as his sister to the Pharaoh in Egypt. He does this to protect his own life but he puts Sarah’s life and honour at risk and brings judgement down on Egypt. If that’s not bad enough, he later repeats the same mistake with Abimelech, the Philistine ruler.
Then there’s the events surrounding the Exodus and the Law giving at Sinai. Whilst Moses is receiving the Law, the people of Israel get Aaron to provide them with golden images of calves to worship. They break the first two commandments. Dawkins describes the judgement that follows as
“God’s monumental rage whenever his chosen people flirted with a rival god resembles nothing so much as sexual jealousy of the worst kind, and again it should strike a modern moralist as far from good role model material.”[73]
Dawkins concludes that:
“To be fair much of the bible is not systematically evil but just plain weird, as you would expect of a chaotically cobbled together anthology of disjointed documents, composed, revised translated, distorted and improved by hundreds of anonymous authors, editors, copyists, unknown to us and most unknown to each other, spanning nine centuries.”[74]
So therefore, we cannot and should not use Scripture as the basis for our morality. In fact, Dawkins argues that even most believers don’t really use the Bible as the means by which they decide what is good and what is bad. So commenting on the incident where God tests Abraham by telling him to sacrifice Isaac, Dawkins says
“But what kind of morals could one derive from this appalling story? Remember, all I’m trying to establish for the moment is that we do not, as a matter of fact, derive our morals from scripture. Or if we do, we pick and choose among the scriptures for the nice bits and reject the nasty.” [75]He sees evidence of Christians approaching the Bible in a pick and choose way when it comes to which parts of the Bible they choose to accept as literal. Going back to Noah’s flood, he observes:
“Of course, irritated theologians will protest that we don’t take the book of Genesis literally any more. But this is my whole point! We pick and choose which bits of scripture to believe, which bits to write off as symbols or allegories. Such picking and choosing is a matter of personal decision, just as much, or as little, as the atheist’s decision to follow this moral precept or that was a personal decision, without an absolute foundation. If one of these is ‘morality flying by the seat of its pants’, so is the other.”[76] So how do we respond to this? I want to suggest three responses
- We need to distinguish between types of Biblical Genre
Do some people pick and choose which parts of the Bible to accept as fact and which parts to obey? Yes, they do. Some Biblical scholars argue that much of the Bible Is intended to be read as myth and story rather than as fact. This includes people who claim to be Christians as well as atheists. We particularly associate this approach with liberal theology. There are a number of reasons why they do this.
Sometimes, people pick and choose because they don’t like what the Bible seems to say. They find the idea morally repugnant or too close to the bone and too hard to obey in their own lives. There’s nothing new in this. One of Jesus’ criticisms of the Pharisees was
“Blind guides! You strain your water so you won’t accidentally swallow a gnat, but you swallow a camel!”[77]
Paul has a similar criticism of those who pick and choose when and what to obey in Romans 2 and this criticism reflects something of the complaint raised by the prophets against Israel.
Sometimes, such an approach comes from the assumption that stories about miracles are too incredible to be true. In other words, they start with the presupposition that God does not intervene supernaturally.
Sometimes, the discussion about whether or not to treat a Bible event as fact or fiction arises from disagreement over the evidence. Is the claim supported by the current scientific consensus? Are we happy that the archaeological evidence presented supports the claim? The challenge here is not the absence of evidence, but, as we have discussed before, when evidence is presented, there is usually some debate and discussion about its validity and meaning. Now, we have a problem here because we like instant answers. We want the evidence to serve our apologetic purposes. Historians and scientists tend to appreciate that it takes time to analyse and evaluate. They also know that competing explanations can take it in turns over time to hold the upper hand.
For example, take the Exodus from Egypt and invasion of the Promised Land described in Joshua and Judges. Is there evidence for an invasion of Israel and the destruction of cities like Jericho? The simple answer is that yes, there is substantial evidence of those great cities being destroyed that fits with the descriptions in the Bible. The challenge is that, over the years, different archaeologists have visited the sites, carried out their own excavations and done experiments such as carbon dating to try and date the events. Guess what? Some of the results have suggested dates that fit with the consensus for when the Exodus would have taken place; others have dated the destruction of Jericho and other sites to a couple of centuries earlier.[78] So what do you do when that happens? Well, I would counsel patience. See how the argument develops over time. You also look for the most natural and reasonable explanation for the data. So, for example, if the archaeological evidence matches what happened in the Bible better than any other historical explanation, then either we’ve estimated the date of the Exodus wrong or our carbon dating results are inaccurate.
I would like to suggest three responses to these reasons for picking and choosing.
First of all, I happen to agree to some extent with Dawkins. Saying that something is just an allegorical myth does not really help if the allegory appears to support an unethical way of behaving or thinking. For example, it doesn’t matter if the Flood didn’t really happen if the story told presents a picture of a God who is vindictive and destructive because first of all, we will learn to fear Him rather than to love him and secondly, we will learn to behave like him. We will justify our own vindictive and destructive behaviour.
Secondly, just because something is incredible or hard to believe, it does not mean that it doesn’t happen. Sometimes a team like Leicester City wins the Premier League, humbling Manchester City and Chelsea in the process. Sometimes the “joke candidate” becomes a party leader or a presidential candidate.
Thirdly, just because some people make those arbitrary and subjective choices, it does not negate the point that there is a right distinction to make between the different Biblical genres. The Bible is intentionally a mixture of different genres including historical narratives, poetry, wise sayings, apocalyptic literature and some stories that are meant to be read as fiction. This also means that within the different types of literature, we’ll see rhetorical devices used; we’ll see irony, satire and hyperbole at work. We’ll realise that a story can be told in a number of different ways depending upon the author’s intention. A Bible passage may be intended to argue a case, give supporting evidence, encourage, act as a cautionary tale and even to mock or lampoon.
A genuine and sensitive engagement with the genre and style of writing will help us to understand the message the author is communicating. You see, the author may not always be intending us to treat the characters involved and the events that happen as examples to follow.
- It’s important to identify the author’s intended application
At this stage, we need to deal with a rather mischievous red herring that Richard Dawkins has thrown into the pot. You see, by mixing in those stories that he finds unpleasant and weird, Dawkins blurs the distinction between prescriptive and descriptive literature.
In other words, just because we read that Abraham, Lot, Moses or David did something, it doesn’t mean that the Bible endorses their actions. This seems reasonably obvious, but the purpose of retelling a story may be to caution against those behaviours or to give an insight into the human character. Now, if some of those stories are hideously awful and involve deceit, torture, rape, murder and genocide, then they accurately reflect the world we see around us. In our own lifetimes, we have seen such things repeated in Bosnia, Rwanda and Syria. The Bible does not shrink back from describing the full horror of evil.
The Biblical account shows that even those who are marked out as righteous fail and fall. Noah is exposed and shamed in his drunkenness. Abraham lies and puts his wife at risk; this is also a failure of faith because he tries to solve things himself rather than trusting the God who made promises to him.
So we learn two lessons from the lives of Noah, Abraham and Lot. First of all, existential ethics don’t work. I cannot assume that what I subjectively identify as good, even if I am widely considered to be a good person, will be good.
Secondly, Paul tells us that Abraham is counted righteous through faith not by works. It’s not about him being the perfect example and getting everything right. God chooses Abraham and loves him in exactly the same way he chooses and loves you and me: by grace.
Furthermore, by highlighting the full horror and extent of evil, the Bible points to why there is judgement. We’ve been talking about God being in the dock and that suggests that we’ll be looking for him to provide evidence of his goodness when he speaks but the Bible shows that there is another case being heard. It’s not just God who is put in the dock. We seek to put God on trial but the Bible Says that it is you and me in the dock. We are the ones who have rebelled against God. We are the ones who have exploited creation through greed. We are the ones who have been cruel and destructive towards others. The Bible’s account of human history puts a mirror up to us so that we can see what we are really like.
So, sometimes the author intends to give us a command to obey, or a promise to trust, but not always. Sometimes, the author intends to give us an insight into the depth and depravity of the human condition.
Sometimes, we look at the event and see something so wonderful and amazing that we are not meant to try and imitate it. We are meant to realise that we cannot do these things ourselves. Take, for example, David killing Goliath. We are not meant to take this primarily as an example of how we should face our own giants. We are not meant to place ourselves in David’s shoes. Instead, we are meant to find ourselves looking on with the Israelite army in wide eyed wonder as God sends His chosen deliverer.
Sometimes, we are meant to find wise principles and general truths to wrestle with as we seek to apply them to our own situations. That’s how the Proverbs work. They are not predictions or promises. They are general truths that apply differently to each context.
- We need to read Scripture in the context of God’s overarching Salvation narrative
This is particularly important when we get to those Bible passages where we find God acting in ways that we find difficult to stomach, such as sending a flood to cover the earth, punishing idolatry with death or ordering the destruction of the Canaanites.
So, we come back to the overarching Bible narrative which we can sum up as follows.
God is eternal. He is love, just, sovereign, wise. He is the Triune God who is self-existent. God is not dependent upon anything outside of Himself.
God freely chose to create this World because He is good; His creation was good, beautiful and ordered. Because He is love, He made us to have a relationship with Him and each other. God put boundaries in place to teach us to love, trust and depend on Him. God said that the penalty and consequence of breaking those boundaries would be death.
The first humans chose to rebel against God because they wanted to be equal to Him. They did not trust Him. They believed a lie about Him. So death entered the World.
God has acted to save a people for Himself. Where we deserve the penalty of death, the Son has died in our place, defeating death.
One day, the Son will return as Judge, raising those He died and rose for to eternal life. However, judgement means that there will be a consequence for those who did not put their trust in the Son, who rejected Him and continued in rebellion against God. The death penalty will still stand. This means eternal separation from God’s loving presence. The Bible calls this hell.[79]
So when we come to events like the Flood or the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, what do we see? I want to suggest that we see in miniature little examples of the big picture. Sin brings death, destruction and sadness. Judgement is coming. However, the God who by nature is love is the God who delights to rescue. God is Saviour. God saves Noah from the Flood and Lot from Sodom. God provides a substitute in place of Isaac.
Conclusion
The problem of evil does not allow for easy answers. Nor does the Bible ever offer us the simple answer “this is where evil came from.” However, what the Bible does is three vital things.
First of all, it refuses to accept and live with evil. There’s no place for appeasement and accommodation between light and darkness. The fact that God is sovereign and uses evil circumstances for our good and His glory is never used to justify, excuse or minimise the horror of those events and actions. Creation was designed as a place where evil and sin were absent. New Creation is pictured as a place where evil and suffering are banished from forever.
Secondly, it tells us that God has done something about evil. God identifies as the one who delivers and protects His people. God is the one who, in Jesus, steps into history and suffers the consequence and penalty of sin in our place.
Thirdly, the Bible offers us hope. It tells us to look forward to that day when suffering and sorrow will cease. We can face present suffering because that day is coming.
This brings us back to the original question. You may recall that we started out by stating that the God revealed in Scripture is a good and great God. By goodness, we mean his love, wisdom and holiness; by greatness, we mean his sovereignty over time and space (He is eternal and infinite) and over all of his creation.
We said that atheism is a challenge to God’s greatness and goodness. It rejects God’s greatness by insisting that there is no evidence for God’s existence. It rejects God’s goodness by claiming that the God revealed in Scripture is not morally good. In other words, atheism says that God does not exist and, if He did exist, then if he were anything like the God of the Bible, He would not be worthy of our praise and affection.
The Bible’s argument is that God has shown His existence, His infinite glory, beauty and majesty in Creation and in His acts through history. The Bible tells us that God’s goodness is seen in the Gospel in Jesus taking our place and dying on the Cross for our sin. God’s goodness and greatness are seen together in the resurrection of Jesus and one day will be seen most fully when He comes to reign.
[1] NB We will also come back to it later on when we look at the question of creation.
[2] Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 14.
[3] Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 15.
[4] Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 16.
[5] Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 16.
[6] Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 17.
[7] Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 20.
[8] This leads into a more detailed discussion around The Big Bang and when, how, if the Universe had a start point. So for example, Stephen Hawking tends to talk about the Universe as finite but without a boundary -similar to how we think about the earth in terms of space. His explanations are a little difficult to pin down -maybe because he is still working through a thought process and maybe because that thought process is of one very clever quantum physicist! So there seems to be a tension within his own thinking with the start of time in some sense at the big time and the Universe in some sense being self- existence. We of course have the challenge of the world renowned physicist accommodating their language to communicate with the likes of me. So for example, when Hawking talks about time being finite but unbounded like the Earth, then I think “quite. Of course you can walk around the world without falling off of it. However that doesn’t mean there isn’t something beyond it. The earth being finite sits in a context and there is something beyond.” This is probably something for greater discussion when we move to the Creation theme in due course. (c.f. http://www.hawking.org.uk/the-origin-of-the-universe.html and http://www.hawking.org.uk/the-beginning-of-time.html both cited 16-04-2016).
[9] Dawkins, The God Delusion, 39.
[10] Dawkins, The God Delusion, 39.
[11] Dawkins, The God Delusion, 39.
[12] Dawkins, The God Delusion, 40.
[13] Dawkins, The God Delusion, 41.
[14] NB For interest, see the very interesting discussion on Carston Peter Theide 7 Matthew D’Ancona, The Jesus Papyrus (1994) and Carston Peter Thiede, The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Jewish origins of Christianity (2003). The debate and discussion that followed these publications demonstrates the challenge of evaluating and interpreting evidence including archaeological data.
[15] See for example, JAT Robinson, Redating The New Testament (London. SCM, 1976).
[16] For a fuller discussion of this question check out FF Bruce, The New Testament Documents are they Reliable (1943) and Craig Blomberg, The Historical Reliability of the Gospels (1987).
[17] There appear to be a couple of common sources underpinning the text of what we call the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark & Luke). Some scholars refer to a hypothetical source called Q though whether or not this was a specific collection of writings or simply reflects that either Matthew or Luke had access to the other’s account is debatable. Additionally, both Matthew and Luke appear to make use Mark’s material though it is not simply a case of copying across.
[18] She is possibly accompanied by the other women – see later comments and notes.
[19] NB. I’m choosing Richard Dawkins as a conversation partner because he is an example of an atheist thinker and writer who is reasonably well known and widely read. I understand that not every atheist will have read Dawkins, come to their conclusions because of him or even agree with every aspect of his reasoning and approach. However, it’s good to start somewhere. Dawkins himself takes time to explain when and why he disagrees with others who would be broadly in the atheist evolution camp.
[20] Dawkins, The God Delusion, 50.
[21] See for example Christopher Hitchens, God is not Great, 109-122.
[22] Note, to save heated debate, my own answer to that is “no.” If you are interested in the history of the abolitionist movement in Britain, you may find my little booklet “John Wesley and the Abolition of the slave trade (Unpublished, 2008) of interest.
[23] John Frame, The Doctrine of the Christian Life, 74.
[24] John Frame, The Doctrine of the Christian Life, 74.
[25] Ironically at a point in history when we are less and less inclined to believe that they are that!
[26] John Frame, The Doctrine of the Christian Life, 75.
[27] John Frame, The Doctrine of the Christian Life, 91.
[28] John Frame, The Doctrine of the Christian Life, 101.
[29] John Frame, The Doctrine of the Christian Life, 101.
[30] Dawkins, The God Delusion, 246
[31] Dawkins, The God Delusion, 246
[32] Dawkins, The God Delusion, 247.
[33] Dawkins, The God Delusion, 251.
[34] Dawkins, The God Delusion, 249.
[35] Dawkins, The God Delusion, 249.
[36] Noting Frame’s comment above that all three are always present in some form.
[37] NB when referring to accidents here, I am not referring to whether or not evolution is about chance, but rather that human life, including our ability to think and feel, is a side product of the primary process, not the main intention.
[38] Dawkins, The God Delusion, 232.
[39] Blocher, Evil and the Cross, 19.
[40] Blocher, Evil and the Cross, 36.
[41] Blocher, Evil and the Cross, 65.
[42] A theodicy is a theory or explanation for suffering and evil.
[43] Blocher, Evil and the Cross, 19.
[44] Blocher, Evil and the Cross, 19.
[45] Blocher, Evil and the Cross, 20.
[46] Blocher, Evil and the Cross, 22.
[47] Blocher, Evil and the Cross, 37.
[48] Blocher, Evil and the Cross, 37. I wonder if there is a little truth in this. Not God’s need for love but giving us the experience of freedom enables us to love others freely. I need to experience the choice to experience love. It’s not, though, that God needs my reciprocating love and so in a sense he can still predestine from the eternal angle. I also learn to trust.
[49] Blocher, Evil and the Cross, 65.
[50] See Keller, Walking with God through pain and suffering, 18 & 89-90.
[51] Keller, Walking with God through pain and suffering, 89.
[52] Keller, Walking with God through pain and suffering, 18.
[53] Augustine, Answer to an enemy of the Law and the Prophets, 1.5.7. Cited in Shapers of Christian Orthodoxoy, 246-7.
[54] Augustine, City of God, 361.
[55] John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, I.xv.8. (Beveridge, 1:169).
[56] John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, I.xv.8. (Beveridge, 1:169).
[57] John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, I.xv.8. (Beveridge, 1:169).
[58] C.f. Martin Luther, Bondage of the Will.
[59] John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, I.xv.8. (Beveridge, 1:169).
[60] Blocher, Evil and the Cross,85.
[61] Blocher, Evil and the Cross, 86.
[62] Blocher, Evil and the Cross, 90-91.
[63] See John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, I.xviii.1. (Beveridge, 1:198-199).
[64] Augustine, cited in John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, I.xviii (Beveridge, 1:203).
[65] The old hymn “I Cannot Tell” is a good example of this. The hymn states a number of propositions which the author is unable to fully comprehend or explain including why Jesus came and how he will put everything to right. However, running through it is the refrain “but this I know” where the author falls back on the clear revelation of Scripture and the experience of his testimony that God acts in loiving kindness to heal and forgive.
[66] Though noting caution here. There’s an ongoing if slightly obscure debate within reformed theology between Supralapsarianism and Infralapsarianism. The debate/discussion is about the logical order of things. Specifically, was it that God’s first decree is to choose a people by grace and then the Fall followed logically from that or does the decree to choose /create a people by grace follow logically as a consequence of the Fall? Supralapsarians are those who want to emphasise God’s plan to choose a people by grace. Infralapsarians recognise a healthy caution in trying to go back beyond the fall in our discussion of evil given that Scripture’s focus on evil sticks to revealing how it came into the world and how God has responded since. See the discussion in John Frame, Doctrine of God, 336-339.
[67]He is not alone in this. Similar points are made by Christopher Hitchens, God is not Great, Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason and George Bernard Shaw, Why I am not a Christian.
[68] Dawkins, The God Delusion, 269.
[69] Dawkins, The God Delusion, 271
[70] Dawkins, The God Delusion, 272.
[71] Dawkins, The God Delusion, 272.
[72] Dawkins, The God Delusion, 274.
[73] Dawkins, The God Delusion, 276.
[74] Dawkins, The God Delusion,268
[75] Dawkins, The God Delusion, 275
[76] Dawkins, The God Delusion, 269.
[77] Matthew 23:24. New Living Translation.
[78] See for example Bryant Wood, Dating Jericho’s Destruction (http://www.biblearchaeology.org/post/2012/03/28/Dating-Jerichos-Destruction-Bienkowski-is-Wrong-on-All-C, accessed 11/05/2016) and also, Bryant Wood, Carbon 14 Dating at Jericho (http://www.biblearchaeology.org/post/2008/08/Carbon-14-Dating-at-Jericho.aspx , accessed 11/05/2016).
[79] This means that a full engagement with the problem of evil and the question of God’s goodness does require us to think through what we believe about judgement and Hell. We will cover this when we look at New Creation.
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