Where Does God Get Off Being Such a Jerk?

Back in 1997, a gentleman whom I'll just call Robert (he has requested that I not use his full name in this age of personal google searches) posted on alt.christnet a post rejecting Christianity in part because of the existence of evil and suffering. This is the second in a series of posts that constitute my response to some of his objections. You can use this table-of-contents post to read Robert’s original post and then each of my response posts, in the appropriate order.

Robert,

C. S. Lewis once wrote,

"The ancient man approached God (or even the gods) as the accused person approaches his judge. For the modern man the roles are reversed. He is the judge: God is in the dock. He is quite a kindly judge: if God should have a reasonable defence for being the god who permits war, poverty and disease, he is ready to listen to it. The trial may even end in God's acquittal. But the important thing is that Man is on the Bench and God in the Dock." (God in the Dock, p. 244).

There was at least one ancient man, however, who tried to put God in the dock. That man was Job. ...continue reading...He demanded that God come to trial and justify His action in allowing Job to suffer. In the end God showed up, but not to answer Job's charge. Instead, He challenged Job's competency and authority as a judge. In the face of this challenge, Job admitted that he had been a presumptuous jackass, and he dropped his suit.

Now if we read Job and conclude that God dodged the issue, then we do not understand what the issue really is. Had Job gone to God humbly, he might have gotten an entirely different answer — for he would have been asking a different question. Instead he demanded an explanation; he acted as though God were obligated to answer to him. God is not so obligated, and He chose not to encourage Job's self-importance.

Do you see what I'm getting at? "God, I'm really confused; if You wouldn't mind explaining, it would make me feel a lot better to know what's going on," is a legitimate request. "God, get Your butt over here and explain Yourself," is not. Only a fool talks to God like that. (Though I have to admit I've done it myself embarrassingly often.)

Only a fool — not because God is bigger than me and might beat me up; not because God is some irresistible cosmic bully. Someone who puffs out his chest and calls God on the carpet is a fool simply because he is hopelessly, laughably, monumentally unqualified for the job he is taking upon himself. We'll expand on this theme in a little bit. For right now, we'll just note that Job didn't get scared and say, "Whoa, I'd better back off before I get hurt." Instead he realized, "Good Lord, I've been a total idiot. Whatever made me think I was qualified to tell God what He was doing wrong?" And if we think a little bit, we'll see that Job was quite right.

If you are like me, however, you feel like God ought to have been able to handle it. So what if Job was a little too big for his britches? Shouldn't God be secure enough to deal with it? I mean, here's this guy who, let's face it, has gone through an awful lot and doesn't seem to deserve any of it. So he gets a little hot under the collar. So what? Why couldn't God just let it slide, give him the explanation, and go from there? That's what I find myself saying, at least.

In other words, I finish Job, lean back in my chair, and say, "Boy, it sure looks to me like God was a jerk to refuse to give Job a straight answer." The lesson sank in on Job; apparently it has yet to sink in on me.

Now with a little philosophical reflection, and with some hints from Christian teachings about God, we can make some educated guesses about what God might have been doing, even though Job itself doesn't explain that explicitly. But first we must cure ourselves of the disease diagnosed in Job, an intellectual malady I call "Cosmic Know-It-All Syndrome" (CKIAS for short).

In order to pass a comprehensive judgment on anybody's choice, we have to know (a) what all the options were, (b) what every consequence of each option would have been, and (c) how the transcendent moral law applies to the choices. In claiming that God should have made the world differently, Mr. Crappy World claims to know how God could have done it differently and what the cosmic consequences would have been had God done so. In fact Mr. Crappy World claims to know what all the cosmic consequences of free will eventually will be — not just the ones we see now, but all of them extending to eternity, and that not just for the universe in which we live, but for all possible universes. And he claims to have such an encyclopedic knowledge of the ins and outs of moral law that he can know how that law applies to God's choices in universal creation. In short, the only person who can reasonably use Crappy World to pass judgment on God is somebody omniscient.

My point is not that Mr. Crappy World is setting himself up as the ultimate holier-than-thou person, looking at God and saying, "God, if you exist, I'm more moral than you are." True, he is setting himself up as God's boss, and we could legitimately complain about rebellion. But there's no need. Why bother to prove Mr. Crappy World rebellious when he is manifestly silly? Most of God's arguments against Job don't even try to prove that Job is an evil rebel. They prove that Job is a jackass. Here is a human being who has lived for less than a hundred years in a corner of an unimaginably large, billion-year-old universe that is on the Biblical view a temporary — indeed a short-term (!) — arrangement, and he thinks that if the universe doesn't appear to be made to his personal specifications, God has plainly screwed up. (I am reminded of G. K. Chesterton's observation that "while [skeptical philosophers] were pessimists about everything else they were optimists about their own opinions: they might be living in the worst of all possible worlds, but they were the best of all possible judges of it.") In comparison to Job and other Crappy World-ers, a four-year-old who takes it upon himself to criticize Roe v. Wade is a calm and humble reasoner to whom we should pay close and reverent attention.

Each of us, then, faces a choice. If we insist on our right to be angry with God, there is no point in going further. For if we can't face up to the patent absurdity involved in declaring ourselves Arbiter of Justice for All Possible Reality, Temporal and Eternal, we certainly never will face honestly the more intellectually demanding arguments detailing the specific fallacies in Crappy World. If there is no eternal moral law, then we have no grounds for condemning God's behavior. If there is, then the only person capable of passing judgment on super-cosmic decisions is somebody who himself is built on the super-cosmic scale, and whoever that may be, it certainly isn't us. If a person can't see that, there's really nothing we can do for him except go home, come back tomorrow, and hope that he has acquired an open mind overnight.

Having said which, let me make sure I am not misunderstood. It is reasonable to have doubts about whether the Christian God can exist. If Christian doctrine can be shown to be genuinely self-contradictory (which is not the same thing as paradoxical), then it can't be true. What is not reasonable is to stomp around and be angry at the Christian God — if He doesn't exist, at Whom are we angry? If He does, then (anger being ex hypothesi a symptom of CKIAS), what reason have we to be angry, other than the childish whine that He didn't do it our way? Nor am I saying that it is morally wrong to feel angry with God. On the contrary, it's perfectly natural; happens to all of us from time to time. But if we are angry with God, reason demands that we recognize that our anger is inane, whether God exists (because we aren't competent to judge whether He deserves our anger) or doesn't (because there's no God to be mad at).

Most importantly, we must recognize that our anger will tend to make us not want honestly to face any arguments that might justify God's behavior. For when we are angry, we don't want to have to admit that the person we're angry at hasn't really done anything wrong.

You come, then, to a fork in the road. Are you mad at God? — or, let's say, if you thought God existed, would you be mad at Him? If not, then we can go on to look at the logic (or lack thereof) of Crappy World. But if you are mad, then until you set aside your anger there's no point in dealing with mere logic, since you're in no state to face up to it honestly. That is the lesson of Job.