The Golden Cord: A Short Book on the Secular and the Sacred

Chapter 5: Is God Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know?

107 c h A p t e r 5 IS GOD MAD, BAD, AND DANGEROUS TO KNOW? It is tempting to conclude that if [God] exists, it is the atheists and agnostics that he loves best, among those with any pretensions to education. For they are the ones who have taken him most seriously. —Galen Strawson During a philosophy conference at Macalester College, a young man was presenting a paper on the problem of evil. There was something detached and aloof about the way he set the problem before us: “Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that there is a triple-A God.” By this, he explained, he referred to a G od that is All- powerful, All-knowing, and All-good. In any event, he set up the pr oblem of evil as “ the problem of the poi soned water.” Imagine that a fiend has put poison in a glass of water. An innocent person comes along, drinks the glass of poisoned water , and dies. This is a clear case of the fiend doing a wrong act, and he is fully 108 T H E G O L D E N C O R D responsible for it. B ut now imagine that ther e is a b ystander who saw everything and had the power to intervene but did not. Isn’t that person also responsible for the preventable, wrong death? The bystander is like God, or so the young man argued. Is God a Bystander? As noted in chapters 3 and 4, the God of Christianity creates and sustains the cosmos; and, if Augustine, the Cambridge Platonists, and Auden are correct, then God may even be encountered experientially. The chief difficulty with setting up the problem of evil along the lines of poisoners and bystanders lies in not sufficiently appreciating that God, in Christianity, is active both as Creator and as a power within the cosmos. So, in taking on board the three As, or Os, we cannot view the question as simply as, say, analyzing a crime scene. I f one thinks that G od’s not preventing an evil event counts as a reason for thinking that there is no God, then one needs to take seriously what may be called the ethics of cr eation. What do you think are the ethical constraints (if any) that should go vern what a good God creates? The question may seem preposterous. Are our ethical judgments and rules the sort of standards that can be used to measure which galaxies would be good to create? Although the questions are wild, if one is going to think and talk about (as well as love) God as good, even supremely good, we will need to r ely on our ordinary moral judgments but try to extend them to cover a truly extraordinary, cosmic scale. In an effort to adapt such a cosmic point of vie w, I can rephrase the problem of evil along the follo wing lines: Is it compatible with G od’s goodness for God—as an all-knowing, all-good, all-powerful being—to create and sustain a cosmos that contains profound goods (stable laws of nature), plant and animal life, consciousness, moral experience, and some experiential awareness of God, and yet there is profound suffering and pain brought about by floods and droughts, murder, rape, birth defects, and crippling diseases? There is beauty too, such as in the birth of a child, art works, and romantic love, but there are also miscarriages, cruelty, and mass killing. If there is an all good- God, then all evils ar e contrary to Is God Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know? 109 God’s will and nature; each murder is a case in which something sacr ed is destroyed (the victim) and perverted (the murderer misuses his power). God has given freedom to human creatures that can be used horrifically or lovingly in valuable relations of interdependence. He acts in the world to prevent some harm thr ough answers to prayers, but not all pray ers are answered. His nature and will are revealed to many creatures, and, if Christianity is true, then God has become incarnate as J esus to redeem creation in this life as well as through an afterlife in union with God. In asking this question w e build into the inquir y a thesis that goes underappreciated in...