four of these propositions cannot simultaneously be true. At least one has to be false. Let me say again what they are. That evil exists, that God is benevolent, that God is omniscient, that God is omnipotent. Let's just see about each of them.
First of all, you might say, ''Well, evil doesn't exist in the world. We can't see the big picture, that a little pool of evil here is awash in a great sea of good that it makes possible.' Or, as medieval theologians used to say, 'God uses the Devil for his own purposes.' This is clearly the three-monkey argument about 'hear no evil…' and has been described by a leading contemporary theologian as a gratuitous insult to mankind, a symptom of in-sensitivity and indifference to human suffering. To be assured that all the miseries and agonies men and women experience are only illusory. Pretty strong.
This is clearly hoping that the disquieting facts go away if you merely call them something else. It is argued that some pain is necessary for a greater good. But why, exactly? If God is omnipotent, why can't He arrange it so there is no pain? It seems to me a very telling point.
The other alternatives are that God is not benevolent or compassionate. Epicurus held that God was okay but that humans were the least of His worries. There are a number of Eastern religions that have something like that same flavor. Or God isn't omniscient; He doesn't know everything; He has business elsewhere and so doesn't know that humans are in trouble. One way to think about it is there are several times 1011 worlds in every galaxy and several times 1011 galaxies, and God's busy.
The other possibility is that God isn't omnipotent. He can't do everything. He could maybe start the Earth off or create life, intervene occasionally in human history, but can't be bothered day in and day out to set things right here on Earth. Now, I don't claim to know which of these four possibilities is right, but it's clear that there is a fundamental contradiction at the heart of the Western theological view produced by the problem of evil. And I've read an account of a recent theological conference devoted to this problem, and it clearly was an embarrassment to the assembled theologians.
This raises an additional question-a related question-and that has to do with microintervention. Why in any case is it necessary for God to intervene in human history in human affairs, as almost every religion assumes happens? That God or the gods come down and tell humans, 'No, don't do that, do this, don't forget this, don't pray in this way, don't worship anybody else, mutilate your children as follows.' Why is there such a long list of things that God tells people to do? Why didn't God do it right in the first place? You start out the universe, you can do anything. You can see all future consequences of your present action. You want a certain desired end. Why don't you arrange it in the beginning? The intervention of God in human affairs speaks of incompetence. I don't say incompetence on a human scale. Clearly all of the views of God are much more competent than the most competent human. But it does not speak of omni-competence. It says there are limitations.
I therefore conclude that the alleged natural theological arguments for the existence of God, the sort we're talking about, simply are not very compelling. They are trotting after the emotions, hoping to keep up. But they do not provide any satisfactory argument on their own. And yet it is perfectly possible to imagine that God, not an omnipotent or an omniscient god, just a reasonably competent god, could have made absolutely clear-cut evidence of His existence. Let me give a few examples.
Imagine that there is a set of holy books in all cultures in which there are a few enigmatic phrases that God or the gods tell our ancestors are to be passed on to the future with no change. Very important to get it exactly right. Now, so far that's not very different from the actual circumstances of alleged holy books. But suppose that the phrases in question were phrases that we would recognize today that could not have been recognized then. Simple example: The Sun is a star. Now, nobody knew that, let's say, in the sixth century B.C., when the Jews were in the Babylonian exile and picked up the Babylonian cosmology from the principal astronomers of the time. Ancient Babylonian science is the cosmology that is still enshrined in the book of Genesis. Suppose instead the story was 'Don't forget, the Sun is a star.' Or 'Don't forget, Mars is a rusty place with volcanoes. Mars, you know, that red star? That's a world. It has volcanoes, it's rusty, there are clouds, there used to be rivers. There aren't anymore. You'll understand this later. Trust me. Right now, don't forget.'
Or, 'A body in motion tends to remain in motion. Don't think that bodies have to be moved to keep going. It's just the opposite, really. So later on you'll understand that if you didn't have friction, a moving object would just keep moving.' Now, we can imagine the patriarchs scratching their heads in bewilderment, but after all it's God telling them. So they would copy it down dutifully, and this would be one of the many mysteries in holy books that would then go on to the future until we could recognize the truth, realize that no one back then could possibly have figured it out, and therefore deduce the existence of God.
There are many cases that you can imagine like this. How about 'Thou shalt not travel faster than light'? Okay, you might argue that nobody was at imminent risk of breaking that commandment. It would have been a curiosity: 'We don't understand what that one's about, but all the others we abide by.' Or 'There are no privileged frames of reference.' Or how about some equations? Maxwell's laws in Egyptian hieroglyphics or ancient Chinese characters or ancient Hebrew. And all the terms are defined: 'This is the electric field, this is the magnetic field.' We don't know what those are, but we'll just copy them down, and then later, sure enough, it's Maxwell's laws or the Schrodinger equation. Anything like that would have been possible had God existed and had God wanted us to have evidence of His existence. Or in biology. How about, 'Two strands entwined is the secret of life'? You may say that the Greeks were onto that because of the caduceus. You know, in the American army all the physicians wore the caduceus on their lapels, and various medical insurance schemes also use it. And it is connected with, if not the existence of life, at least saving it. But there are very few people who use this to say that the correct religion is the religion of the ancient Greeks, because they had the one symbol that survives critical scrutiny later on.
This business of proofs of God, had God wished to give us some, need not be restricted to this somewhat questionable method of making enigmatic statements to ancient sages and hoping they would survive. God could have engraved the Ten Commandments on the Moon. Large. Ten kilometers across per commandment. And nobody could see it from the Earth but then one day large telescopes would be invented or spacecraft would approach the Moon, and there it would be, engraved on the lunar surface. People would say, 'How could that have gotten there?' And then there would be various hypotheses, most of which would be extremely interesting.
Or why not a hundred-kilometer crucifix in Earth orbit? God could certainly do that. Right? Certainly, create the universe? A simple thing like putting a crucifix in Earth orbit? Perfectly possible. Why didn't God do things of that sort? Or, put another way, why should God be so clear in the Bible and so obscure in the world?
I think this is a serious issue. If we believe, as most of the great theologians hold, that religious truth occurs only when there is a convergence between our knowledge of the natural world and revelation, why is it that this convergence is so feeble when it could easily have been so robust?
So, to conclude, I would like to quote from Protagoras in the fifth century B.C., the opening lines of his
About the gods I have no means of knowing either that they exist or that they do not exist or what they are to look at. Many things prevent my knowing. Among others, the fact that they are never seen.
Seven
Cast your mind back some hundreds of thousands of years. Those who can do that readily will have demonstrated some of the issues that I considered dubious earlier, but apart from reincarnation let's try to think about what were the circumstances of the greater part of the tenure of the human species on Earth. That surely is relevant to any attempt to understand our present circumstances.
The human family is some millions of years old, the human species perhaps one million, with some uncertainty. For the greater part of that period by far, we did not have anything like present technology, present social organization, or present religions. And yet our emotional predispositions were powerfully set in those times. Whatever our feelings and thoughts and approaches to the world were then, they must have been selectively advantageous, because we have done rather well. On this planet we are certainly the dominant organism of some fair size. An argument could be made for beetles or bacteria at smaller scales as being the dominant organism on the planet, but at least on our scale we have done quite well.
