I recently received a letter from a reader who was thinking through objections to Christianity. One such objection, often employed by the New Atheists, is this:
How can a merciful, loving God have commanded the execution of an entire race of people?
The question refers to the Old Testament account in which God commanded Israel to rout the Canaanites and possess the Promised Land. The ensuing war was to be bloody and absolute, wasting women, children, and animals alike. It’s quite an account that’s worthy of serious thought.
But what people do with this account is another story. On one extreme are those who believe the Old Testament God repented of violence. That He, in essence, was sorry for commanding such atrocities and, I guess, sent Jesus to show He was serious about changing. On the other hand, are those who use such accounts as evidence that God just doesn’t exist.
The gist of their reasoning looks like this:
- A loving God would not exterminate an entire race.
- The biblical God commanded the extermination of an entire race.
- Therefore, the biblical God does not exist.
I’d like to touch on this briefly, because I’ve always thought that logic was flawed.
Now, the typical Christian approach is to argue that God is morally justified to command such a thing and that nations like the Canaanites were physically and morally vile, and deserved execution. Furthermore, the Israelites lived in a violent era; warfare and bloodshed were commonplace, if not necessary, to survival.
These are all valid responses to explore. However, I think there’s something that comes before all this. It is addressing the faulty assumption that biblical genocide proves God doesn’t exist.
The question, “Does God exist?” must precede the question, “Could a loving God really command the extermination of the Canaanites?” However, many opponents of Christianity argue this in reverse. They a.) presuppose God doesn’t exist, and b.) use biblical genocide as evidence. But that’s backwards. Before you can answer if God is justified in making such judgments, you must go back and conclude whether or not ANY god exists. If you conclude there’s no god, then the Jews were murderers, and their religion is dangerous. If you conclude there may be a god, then you must decide whether such a god could command such things. That’s the first point.
Secondly, God’s genocidal commands could prove an evil god exists or a savage god exists. Noted atheist Richard Dawkins has famously stated that the Old Testament God must be “the most unpleasant character in all fiction.” Of course, Dawkins believes God IS fiction. But he uses such stories to extrapolate an evil, albeit fictional, god. He’s on the right track. He just stops short in conceding the existence of God. My point is that genocide does not categorically prove God’s non-existence. It could prove that a very bad god rules our universe.
Here’s a third option: The slaughter of the Canaanites could prove the existence of a god who protects his people and will do anything to prevent their annihilation and insure their survival. Sure, this doesn’t necessarily prove a good God exists. Perhaps it’s an evil god who only loves his people and hates everybody else. He stomps on anyone who messes with his children, and doesn’t give a rip what we think. The point is that Israel’s destruction of the Canaanites does not categorically prove God doesn’t exist. It could prove that an evil god will crush anyone who gets in his, or his people’s way. It could also prove the existence of a god who will go to extreme measures to judge the earth and/or protect his people.
Finally, Whose standards of love and morality are we using to charge God with being unloving and immoral anyway? Decrying the massacre of the Canaanites as wrong assumes that you know what’s right. But do you? If so, aren’t you assuming that your standard of morality is perfect, or at least pure. How do you know this? Could your morality be skewed, culturally conditioned, or just plain wrong? If there were a god who exists above you, and is perfect, couldn’t His ways be higher than yours? Or at least, more inscrutable and complex?
Bottom line: If the biblical God exists, and if He is perfect as the Scripture suggests, then we must seek to understand His actions in that light. Arguing in reverse is the wrong way to approach it.
I think most skeptics that use this argument do so on the grounds that, should this God exist, they would not want to follow Him. The non-believer would use it in tandem with another argument or two to conclude that such a God could not exist. So the skeptic and the out-and-out non-believer end up in the same place, which is rejecting God: the latter, His existence, the former, His omnibenevolence (or omnipotency, or omniscient).
I once heard a counterargument that proposed God directed war-aggression to prevent greater evils from happening. If we bring His omniscience in the equation this would make it a defensive war and not preemptive, , which would leave the door open for errors in judgment (rimshot!). I think is a far more defensible situation to be in.
His omnibenevolence (or omnipotency, or *omniscience).
There are several tales in Rabbinic works about seeming tragedies and God’s responses to questions about them. In the movie _Charlie Wilson’s War_, Phillip Seymour Hoffman recounts a version of one of these to Tom Hanks.
The basic gist is that something bad happens and the people question the rabbi or angel or guru about why such a thing was allowed. The explanation is that by revealing past or future events God shows the questioners that the events were either earned by a previous crime or spurred to prevent even more terrible events in the future.
Rabbis have been wrestling with this for a long time. To me it’s one of the “Dog Of God” questions–a thing so beyond our understanding that we have to either have the courage to trust our Master or run away. Of course if we run away we’re in the cold world scrounging food for ourselves and shivering in the rain. But there are always those who are happier with that than with trusting something they don’t understand.
If you are out to prove God doesn’t exist then you have a million things you can point to. You can work your whole life to deny the wind, but it’ll still be there to blow the dust of your body from the grave.
Good post, Mike. I’d add one thing. Assumed in the argument the atheist lays out is that Man deserves life, not death — a position arrived at from the presupposition that Man is good. The Bible, however, gives a different view of Man as well as of God.
Your post is a reasoned, clear progression showing flaws in the atheist argument and why the traditional answers don’t take hold.
Becky
The events surrounding the taking of the promised land, and other such events in the Old Testament, have always caused me to wonder if perhaps God’s will was misinterpreted at times. When God came to earth as Jesus, He was all about love and peace, not war or violence. He was expected to become a king and overthrow the Romans, and he did, but not in the way the people thought he would. Some of his followers no doubt thought that he would bestow wealth and riches upon them, and he did, but not in the way they thought with material things. I’m with the school that believes that God’s ways are beyond our comprehension.
Bob, the things folks often miss about the O.T. is how often God reveals Himself as kind and merciful. He set up laws to care for orphans and widows, courts to seek justice, cities of refuge, and gave entire nations the chance to repent. All that to say, it’s a false caricature which suggests the O.T. God was not loving and merciful. Thanks for commenting!
I am a Christian but I don’t always know how to answer tough questions like this one. I like your arguments, thank you for sharing.
I like how a major character says it in The Knight from Steven James, “Follow the evidence to the conlcusion, even if the conclusion is uncomfortable for you.”