GOD'S CHARACTER

If God existed, would he necessarily be good, or could he be evil?

More than a quarter century ago I read a science fiction story that has stuck with me because it posed the question of whether a deity is necessarily benevolent.  The story was about a guy, call him Jason, who created a micro-cosmos in his basement.  If I recall, Jason got it through some sort of mail order outfit.  In any event, he was able to populate his cosmos with little intelligent beings, pixies, who came to understand that Jason was responsible for their existence as well as their continued wellbeing.  Jason loved going down to the basement to see how his pixies were doing, and from time to time he would help them solve the sorts of problems that any new society might encounter.  Whenever the pixies saw Jason they went wild with adulation.  He was their god and they worshipped him.  

But then Jason got a little bored.  So he began introducing challenges into the pixies’ little cosmos—windstorms, floods, and earthquakes that destroyed things that they had built and famines and diseases that caused pain and death.  Eventually the pixies realized that it was Jason who was creating this havoc, this suffering in their lives.  They turned on him, eventually overrunning the basement.  He no longer dared go down to see what they were doing.  The mail order company, who had warned against this, had gone out of business.  So Jason called in an professional exterminator to destroy the pixies.  The exterminator never made it back out of the basement.  And that is how I recall the story ending. 

Then there was my college friend with whom I often argued over whether there could be a god who allowed pain and suffering in the world.  My friend’s response was, “God is God.  It’s his world and he can set up the rules and call the shots however he wants.”  For him it wasn’t a question of benevolence but of power.

Consider the following possibilities:

God is benevolent, omnipotent, and omniscient.  God’s creation of the world was perfect.  But humans chose to sin, and it was this sinfulness, not God’s plan, that led to pain and suffering.  God intervenes from time to time to prevent or alleviate suffering and offers eternal salvation.  This is the version of God that most Christians were taught and believe.

God is a malevolent tyrant.  God’s goal is to command allegiance and obedience, and his intervention in the form of destruction and the infliction of pain, suffering, and death are his means to achieve human loyalty. The Old Testament tribal god of the Hebrews seems to match this description.

God is an amoral experimentalist.  God created the world as a grand experiment and is letting it proceed despite the pain and suffering experienced by humanity by reason of the laws of nature that he set up.  He may intervene from time to time to alleviate suffering or to intensify suffering as part of that experiment. The book of Job comes to mind.

God is a noninterventionist.  God created the world but doesn’t intervene in it.  The world is now essentially on autopilot.  God may no longer be interested in humanity or he may have other interests unrelated to human existence.  This is essentially the deist position. 

God does not exist.  The universe, including humankind, is simply the result of the operation of natural laws.  It is indifferent to the human condition.

How does each of these characterizations match up with the evidence?  

I will be quick to declare that I am in awe of the world and delight in the life that I have had the fortune to enjoy.  But for me, as well as for everyone else, life is not an unalloyed joy.  We all experience pain and sorrow, we all have disappointments, and ultimately we all die.  And most of us feel we are among the fortunate ones. We observe others whose lives are less fortunate—short or painful or both.  The laws of nature result in what we perceive as beauty and joy, but they also result in natural disasters, such as earthquakes, tsunamis, and hurricanes.  As I have said before, I cannot reconcile that experience with the idea of a god who is all-loving and all-powerful.  Surely such a god could have done a better job.



One of the fundamental assumptions underlying science is the idea that the world operates always and everywhere in accordance with regular, inexorable laws.  Science has never had to abandon that assumption.  There are no instances of objective events that cannot be explained by reference to natural law.  In short, miracles do not occur, despite the fact that daily there are dozens if not hundreds of opportunities for intervention by a benevolent, malevolent, or experimentalist deity.  

What’s left?  For me, either a deity that is a passive noninterventionist or that simply doesn’t exist.


© 2017 John M. Phillips