No Loving God

In a recent hour of Dennis Prager’s radio show, Bart Eherman, professor and author of many books critical of Christianity, was the guest brought on to discuss belief in God. During the discussion, Mr. Eherman articulated what may be the most classic argument against the God of Judaism and Christianity.

"In the Judeo-Christian tradition, people have typically made three assertions [1) God is all powerful. 2) God is all loving. 3) There is suffering.]. Each one of which seems to be true on it’s own, but when you put them together there seems to be some kind of contradiction. The reason it creates a problem is because if God is all powerful then he is able to do anything that he wants, and if he’s all loving then he doesn’t want people to suffer and yet there is suffering. Why did this world have to be created in such a way as to cause such suffering…there is nothing written into the rules of the universe that says the world has to be this way.”

Apparently, to the atheist/skeptic this argument is very convincing, judging from the frequency with which it is raised.

I bring up this little episode because there is one thing this particular argument demonstrates very effectively, unfortunately for people like Eherman it’s not that the God of the Bible is rationally inconsistent, but rather that otherwise intelligent and well-educated people are not immune to believing wholly foolish things.

The argument, as Eherman correctly posits it, relies entirely on three assumptions:
1) The understanding of what “all-powerful” means.
2) That one knows what God would do in a certain situation.
3) Related to 1), that the world could function differently than it does.

I will take 1) and 3) together since I believe them to be related. Many people, Christians included, labor under the impression that being “all powerful,” or “omnipotent” as the Bible puts it, means that any being who possessed that quality, i.e. God, could do anything. This is simply not true.

The problem arises because most people confuse power with ability. Some Christians may want to write me off after they read the next sentence, but please hear me out. God is limited in His ability, not in His power; there are things that He cannot do. He cannot do anything against His own nature (unloving, unjust, unrighteous, etc.) nor can he do anything irrational (He can’t create a square-circle, for instance).

This brings me to the third point, that the world could function differently than it does. Possibly. But theologians have argued for millennia that for God to create a creature (man) that was truly in His image that creature must be capable of a number of qualities, love among them. For love to be genuine it must be freely given, there is no such thing as forced love. Thus for man to be made in God’s image and to love Him, man required the ability to reject God and engage in behavior disobedient to His laws. We call this disobedience immorality which often results in suffering. Theologians and philosophers have long understood that for man to be genuinely created in God’s image, the world could not other than it is.

Point 2) is far easier to clear up than even 1) and 3). How do we, with our limited understanding of the world, claim to know what a being such as the Judeo-Christian God would do in any given situation? In reality, all Mr. Eherman has done is tell us what he would do with limitless power, but with incredibly finite foreknowledge and understanding. This is truly incredible arrogance.

Sorry Bart, the old argument doesn't wash. If you want to indict the Bible for inconsistencies, then you need to do so on it’s terms and not pour your own presuppositions into the text.