Can you blame God for creating the universe?
God kills everyone. This is not an observation made in Rupert Shortt’s new study of God, evil and suffering, The Hardest Problem, but a thought that occurred to me in reading it. Barely 100 pages long, it is a thought-provoking book.
God created everything and “holds everything in being moment by moment”, Shortt recognises. But if we attribute our deaths to him, that does not make him a murderer, any more than his taking away my fortune would make him a thief.
There is at the moment a popular strain of criticism of God for his behaviour, even among those who deny his existence. The 18th-century philosopher David Hume formulated the charge against him: “Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.”
This may not really be the hardest question. (To me, the nature of matter is no easier to answer.) But it is the most neuralgic. It comes in two halves: natural evil, such as lions eating lambs (or more troublingly, children in pain) and moral evil, such as cruel human acts. The latter, if God is in charge, is harder to explain.
God certainly did not make the best of all possible worlds, as Shortt makes clear. It would be easy to think of one better in some way. Nor is God part of the world as another item in it. (A previous book by Shortt is God is No Thing.) “What is not God will by definition be subject to imperfection, decay, collision, conflict.” And if you say that the price of suffering is too high, you are, Shortt suggests, saying that it would be better to have no material world at all.
But Shortt shares the insight that voluntary evil is nor merely a lack of good, but a “defect” of goodness – what I’d call a privation or the absence of a good element where it is due. To make the problem sharper, God could have made a cosmos where creatures freely chose to do good and never evil. Would it be unfair to expect him to have done so?
I think it would. Shortt is resolved to face the charges against God in the context of a rational theistic world view, and he spends a chapter in his compressed book making an argument for that world view. But he prefers the answer of Job in the remarkable book of the Bible to that of Job’s rational “comforters”. Job is innocent, suffers but refuses to blame God, who at last speaks to him from the whirlwind.
God’s answer, Christians believe, is taken to another level by his becoming a man. This entailed acceptance of suffering which, common experience teaches, is inevitable if one loves people. Herbert Mccabe, who left some of the most cogent writing on the problem of evil, is quoted for his wry remark: “If you don’t love, you’re dead; and if you do, they’ll kill you.”
God does not allow himself an escape from suffering that he denies his creatures. At the same time, God is to be trusted because,
I’d say, he has made promises and is able to do whatever he wants. If he was unable to do so, we could not be sure that our refusing to do evil would (in the end) make things all right.
Shortt is strong on the eschatological side – the endgame – of God’s dealings with us. He is hospitable to teleology – causation with an end in view – often taken by present-day thinkers as a taboo notion.
I would go further, that God, while preserving the physical functions of the cosmos and its probabilities (being the ordainer of the lottery), can grant trivial prayers. I admit that this means changing the whole history of the universe in order to let me catch the bus, but if he can’t do that small thing, then how is he in a position to work a moral change in me and you?