The Problem

So after writing my last post here dealing with the problem of evil and God, and writing They shall be burnt with fire on my other blog, I had an extensive email exchange with Steve Wells about how God seems to him to be quite evil as portrayed in the Bible, and yet predictably I, as a Christian, manage to see God differently. Then this morning, something was said that hit me profoundly. In the midst of a rather large email, I said to Wells,

I respect your opinion on the Bible; it's not unreasonable. I respect the views of Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, etc. Is it really so impossible in your mind that there exist rational and moral people who believe in these holy scriptures? People manage to see things differently from each other, and that's okay.

I pressed him for an answer to this question, and this morning he came back with the following email I quote in its entirety:

I'm not sure there's much more to say, Brucker.

Donald Trump could shoot someone in the middle of 5th Avenue, and his followers would still believe in him.

The Bible could say that you should stone to death your entire family if they believe differently than you, and you would still believe in it. (Which, of course, it does in Dt 13:6-10, and you do.)

As for your last comments and questions, no I don't believe that "Hebrew slavery was intended to be a system of helping out the poor." Or that Moses wrote Deuteronomy forty years after writing Exodus. (There's no evidence that Moses ever existed, but if he did, he didn't write either book. They were written by different authors at different times and the text was changed and edited over several centuries.)

You ask if I think it's possible for rational and moral people to believe in the Bible. My answer to that is a qualified yes. Many people who are rational and moral in their daily lives and beliefs believe in the Bible. But their reason and morals are suspended when they look at the Bible. Since they believe the Bible is both true and good, they can't question its truth or morals - because they believe the Bible is both true and good.

They are like people who believe in Trump. They've already decided that he is good and truthful. They can be good and rational about everything else, except for when it comes to him. It is the same for Bible believers.

The tl;dr version of this email is, "Belief in God is like belief in Trump; they're both horrible, but if you've already decided they're great, maybe nothing will convince you otherwise."

This shook me. I have a hard time understanding why there are so many Christians who continue to support President Trump when he's obviously (to nearly everyone who isn't a Trump supporter) a horrible person.* However, what if many atheists feel the same exact way about people who love the God of the Bible, and what if they're right?

There's actually some real soundness to this argument. The God of the Bible never denounces slavery. The God of the Bible demands capital punishment for the victims of rape. The God of the Bible instructed the Israelites to commit genocide several times (a timely issue for 2024!). There's more, so much more that can be said, and it's not just the Old Testament, either; the God of the Bible killed Ananias and Sapphira for lying! It's actually not hard for a person to make the case that the God of the Bible is a terrible being!

It's something that on some level every person who believes in the goodness of God needs to reconcile, even if they don't believe in the Bible. How can you believe that God is good when (fill in the blank)? And there are so many things that can fill in the blank! As I've blogged so many times, this is an issue philosophers wrestle with, but we also have to deal with on a basic level in tangible reality.

I haven't mentioned it either in my blogs or in emails to Wells, but I suffer from chronic pain. It comes and goes in varying degrees from day to day, but on several occasions it has been so intense that I have contemplated suicide, not out of depression, but as a painkiller! No painkiller can touch it, though, because it's something neurological. I don't understand why God would allow me to have this condition. It's not the result of any sin that I've committed. Do I quote 2Corinthians 12:6-9 again as I did in the comments of my last post? Is that really a good answer? Maybe, but it can sound like a cop-out. Isn't Paul just making excuses for God's bad behavior?

I received Wells's email this morning, as I said, but it was actually specifically as I sat in my church's auditorium waiting for the Sunday service to begin. Here I was, about to do the church thing, and Wells hits me right in the faith! And what did church bring to me? Well, there was an announcement that the church was starting a support group for people with chronic pain. And then the sermon, which delivered the message that (1) sometimes life is confusing, but (2) God is always in control. Maybe it's odd, given all that I was contemplating about God, but I found this message to be very comforting.

I talked with my wife about the email and the sermon, and found that she was one of the people in the camp that I'm sure I've talked about before, the ones who say, "It's God's house, so it's God's rules." This viewpoint implies that God by definition of being the creator of the universe is not beholden to our measurement of morality. It may be true, but I don't personally find it satisfying. If God subjects humans to his rules of morality, it seems that they should at least be consistent. (How do you reconcile "Thou shalt not kill" with genocide? Yes, I know I tried to address this issue when I covered the book of Joshua, but how many atheists found that argument convincing or reasonable?)

If you can convince yourself that genocide is ever justified, maybe you can convince yourself of anything? But what if the argument is logically sound nonetheless? Maybe logic and morality aren't as compatible as I like to think? These are big questions without easy answers. The Bible teaches that God is perfect, but it also teaches that God prefers to work out his perfect will through the actions of imperfect people. Modern-day Israelis are largely convinced that their genocide of the Palestinians is completely justified. I believe they are wrong. Yet the genocide continues, at the hand of God's "chosen people". My government under President Biden is complicit in the genocide, and my omnipotent God is not stepping in to stop it. Why do I protest the one and continue to accept the other?

I'm not presenting an argument here as I often do; I'm presenting moral conflict. I do still believe that God is good, but I admit it isn't always easy to explain why. Am I a model of good faith, or am I a model of moral failure? I think sometimes that this conundrum is very like the conundrum of believing that God exists at all: there is some compelling evidence on either side, but no real proof that one can cling to. At least, I haven't seen it. Is the Bible a fit moral guide when it tells me I can sell my daughters into slavery, but I'm appalled by the idea? Steve Wells would tell me that alone is proof enough, I'm sure; but I'm still not convinced. It's not my belief that every part of the Bible is meant to be all things for all people for all time. So what do I believe the Bible is? It's a collection of books that tells a story about imperfect people and their imperfect relationships with God. It's a story that is mostly real history, but it functions like one of Jesus's parables; it doesn't hand us morality and wisdom on a neat little plate, but makes us think about it. It's simple for some people, while being far from simple for others, and I'm definitely in the latter camp in the end.

I don't pretend to have the Answer-with-a-capital-A, but see myself as occasionally having an answer-with-a-little-a, and from there, I work out my own salvation with fear and trembling (Philippians 2:12).



*I always have to note here whenever I denounce Trump that I'm no fan of President Biden, either. I feel they are both racist rapists who are pushing our country toward fascism; Biden's just fascism with a smiling face on it.