Yes, you can be a moral God… but why bother?

If God is the God of the Old Testament and ordered genocide then God is not a nice guy, therefore God does not exist. If God exists doesn’t he hear all the children in the world crying out to him that are slowly dying of hunger? Therefore God does not exist. If God is moral, loving, compassionate or whatever then why are their so many crappy things going on in the world? Why are their wars and rape and bank fraud and wire tapping? Why are there tsunamis and earthquakes and skin cancer? Therefore God does not exist.

Why would God have to be moral to be God?

When I was a child I used to set up these little plastic figurines and shoot them with my BB gun. Now, if I somehow could have magically animated those bits of plastic to make target practice more interesting, maybe I would have. Maybe that’s why God created the whole shebang just to stick us on a collective microscope slide, dropping tincture on us to observe as our organs slowly grind to a halt. If the world has design, does the designer have to be a nice guy?

When I was a little older I was in shop class. I was a little bit lucky because I managed to skip Shop 1 which was doing everything with hand tools and sand paper and useless crap like that. In Shop 2 we were allowed to use power tools and we would make wooden knives on the sanders and shoot each other with the nail guns. In shop I built a chair from scratch. The school provided the wood, but when I was done I owned the chair. I didn’t actually make the wood, it grew in a tree, but I fashioned it and assembled it into a chair, so by virtue of my labor, I owned the chair. I actually changed the design a bit because I made a rocking chair for my Mom, so it became my Mom’s chair. I screwed up the angle though, so when you sit in it you always feel like you’re falling out, which is a particularly fatal flaw for a rocking chair. Anyhow, despite the inadequacies of my design I owned the chair because I made it and I think my Mom still has it, not because it’s a brilliant chair, but because I made it.

Here’s where you may have to suspend your disbelief for a minute, depending on your paradigm. So if God or the Invisible Flying Spaghetti Monster or Zeus really did create the Earth, the universe and all that’s held within, then wouldn’t it stand to reason that he would “own” it? If he owns it, can’t he do what he likes with it? For that matter, if he created all matter, then even my body is his. The only thing that I can claim as strictly my own is my mind or whatever I have that is not dependent on my body for survival, if anything. But I still think God should at least act in a moral way. If I was God I would just create the universe in such a way that whatever my natural bent is would be considered right, and that’s exactly what he did. He made the rules.

In our current culture we have adopted a general code of conduct of do no harm. More specifically, do no harm to other human beings. We seem to be extending that philosophy to animals, yet we still farm and slaughter millions of animals every year, that doesn’t seem like a nice thing to do. Right now, there is no law endorsing assisted suicide for terminally ill people or people that just don’t want to live anymore, but it seems quite probable that one day this will be a regular occurrence. In the not too distant past, people with disabilities were killed because they were not considered useful. Today we look on that as shameful. The point being that our morals are on a shifting scale. The concept of do no harm to others works well in our modern, secure, egalitarian society but what would that mean if we lived in a tribal society where there was a shortage of food and more people than the amount of available land. People in our tribe might kill some people of the neighboring tribe and eat them because this creates less demand for the land and a meal for someone in our tribe. In this context it would be do no harm to people in our tribe, but people outside the tribe are fair game.

It seems to me a bit illogical that we should judge God by our movable scale, as if God should accommodate us, not the other way around.

So what about the genocide in the Old Testament when the Israelites were conquering the promised land? That’s indefensible, surely? Well I don’t know, but if, by virtue of creating it from nothing, God actually owns the whole world, including our bodies, he calls the shots and determines when to pull the plug. Would it have been more palatable if God had just wiped out the inhabitants of the land with a plague and not make the Israelites get their hands dirty? According to the Bible, God himself used the enemies of Israel to straighten them out by occasionally invading their land and oppressing them in the process killing several thousand people, so the Israelites were not immune to judgment by the sword.

One of my favorite lines that some smokers use to defend their habit is, “statistically speaking 100% of non-smokers die”. The flip side of that is “if you live long enough, smoking will kill you”. The point is everyone dies. If we look at this from the perspective of a God that created time and likely exists in and outside of time, the time we spend on earth will be approximately the same whether we were here for 1 minute or 100 years. It’s like being in an examination and we don’t know when the bell will ring, but we will only be tested on what we were able to finish. That’s a crude analogy but give it the benefit of the doubt if you don’t mind.

I know this suspension of disbelief is a difficult exercise for someone reading it of another paradigm. You can put your realism glasses back on now. To be sure, I don’t have a complete answer for the problems of pain in the world, but I do know that the periods of pain in my own life have been times of personal growth and formation of my character. The slack times I often question if God really knows what he is doing and selectively forget the things he has done for me in the past. I understand that some people would explain that away as fluke, but that’s a topic for a different post.

If you want to find out more about the subject of pain in the world, read the book of Job. Job and his friends deliberate almost endlessly (sort of like bloggers). In the end God shows up, not to give Job and his posse answers but basically says “who are you to question me?” I know that sounds like an incredibly arrogant thing to say, but he is after all, the Creator of the Universe.

So I guess if he wanted to, he could act morally, but in the end, when you’re God, you make the rules and why would he bother playing by our rules?

In the end, I’m not here to defend God. He is certainly able to defend himself when he sees fit, I’m just presenting my personal convictions and the conclusions that I have come to.