George Williams, a great evolutionary biologist, made a point about God in several of his books which deserves exploration. He had no time for arguing over the existence or otherwise of God, merely defining “God” as the creative Something which caused the world we observe. He then proceeded to demonstrate from the apparently stupid and cruel features of the biosphere that God was both unintelligent or blind to consequences, and evil, not good. Fortunately this apparent evil was off-set by an huge measure of stupidity.
I think, for many atheists and agnostics – including myself for many years – the problem with the idea of God was the character of such a being, as presented to us by the Creation, is not worthy of worship. The Cosmic Creativity seems inhuman and inhumane, and it seems better to believe that God is not a loving Father, but it merely a mindless cosmic process that doesn’t deserve the name “God”. In fact the character of God, as ostensibly believed by many of the Faithful, is antithetically opposed to the values of modern liberal democracy and humanistic society, that such a being can only be a diabolical delusion to be opposed by right-thinking persons.
But, a big “but” admittedly, the faithful have pondered the inconsistencies of believing in Divine Justice and have tried to answer the problems in many different ways. One way is the “Answer to Job” – the Theophany in the tale of Job, which answers the claim, by a righteous and afflicted man, that God is unjust by pointing out the wonders of Nature and God’s visible power in all those mighty works… which doesn’t really make a direct answer. Indirectly God is saying that God’s reasons for Job’s plight are beyond Job’s understanding just like the “big wide world” is beyond Job’s understanding.
Does that work? Many of the wonders that God shuts Job up with aren’t as beyond human understanding as they once were, and so the whole exercise – to me – rings a bit hollow. I think it rang a bit hollow to the Redactor of “Job” because the original dialogue has a start and conclusion which seem to be later accretions to the core text, and the Redactor’s conclusion has a happy ending for Job with him receiving double what he had lost. But that doesn’t really work for me, especially since Job’s children were killed.
So what did the faithful do next?…