A Challenge to God’s Existence

There’s this old philosophical problem regarding the existence of God. Many people have used it either to question God’s existence, or to reaffirm the idea that human beings are responsible for their own fates. It goes like this…

Premise 1: God is all-powerful.

Premise 2: God is all-loving.

Premise 3: God is all-knowing.

Questions: If God is all-powerful AND all-loving, then how do we explain the existence of war? How do we explain the horrors of the Holocaust? Of terrorism?

If Premise 3 (all-knowing) is correct, God knew ahead of time that millions of innocent children would be raped, tortured and killed, and did nothing at all to stop it. This would either invalidate Premise 2 (all-loving), because if God is all-powerful, and He did nothing to stop these horrors, then he clearly doesn’t love the children enough, OR invalidate Premise 1 (all-powerful), because if God is all-loving, and he did nothing to stop these horrors, then surely he must not be powerful enough to stop them. If, however, God did NOT know about the horrors in advance, because human beings have "free choice," then that invalidates Premise 3 (all-knowing), and the fate of humanity rests, not on the wisdom and power of an Almighty, but rather on the whims and caprices of our flawed human society.

In simpler terms, "Why would an all-loving God allow a child to be raped? Does this mean that He has no power to stop it? Or if He does, does this mean He won’t interfere when evil occurs?"

Of course, there are those who will say that this kind of logic is flawed, and that we, as humans, cannot possibly understand the vastness and greatness that is God. True enough. But if God could directly intervene in people’s lives, such as those incidents in the Bible, when He "gave" Samson his strength one last time, or when He sent angels to save Lot from the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, then why can’t He intervene now? Does He just not want to? What made them so special that they deserved His intervention? (King David even caused the death of a woman’s husband, just so he could sleep with her… and God still let him be Israel’s greatest King) Why are so many innocents left to die today?

Others would say that this is why God created human beings… so we could do good deeds, and save the world from evil. But since when did that become solely our job? Why isn’t God getting as involved as He used to be? How come there are no more visions, no more direct communications… no more miracles?

I’ll be honest. I thought about these issues for a long time. Perhaps too long. I let them stew in my head. I let them fester and rot inside my faith. I let myself question the very existence of God.

And yet I still believe.

It’s not just a "leap of faith" as some philosophers/theologians may call it. It’s an informed, conscious decision based on empirical evidence. I believe because I can see God everyday. I believe because, even through the despair and the death and the horror, I can still see love and compassion and caring. Hurricane Katrina killed thousands… and yet there are outpourings of support from millions all over the world. For each person that died there, there are thousands left to do good things for all the survivors.

Make no mistake…evil does exist, in the hearts of men and women, if nowhere else. Bad things will still happen. But the world has come a long way from the days of colonization and slavery, and we’re going further still. Sure, sometimes we screw up… but each time we do, we have the media to remind us of how horrifying we can be in our ignorance and stupidity… and we have enough of a conscience to try to set things right, flawed though the attempt may be.

And are there really no miracles? Wasn’t it just a little over a hundred years ago that we still could not fly without a balloon? Wasn’t it just 50 years ago that we couldn’t replace a human heart? Wasn’t it just 20 years ago that we couldn’t fathom sending mail to each other that would get to each of us in less than a second? And wasn’t it just 5 years ago that we couldn’t yet reach Mars?

Now we’ve found ice on Mars… and the possibility of life on another planet. We can save unborn babies, even when their mothers are brain-dead and comatose. We can reach the stars… and we can sustain life. What more proof of God’s existence do we really need?

And through a little over two thousand years since Jesus walked the earth, our societies have learned to communicate, to band together against war and famine, to develop medicines that have cured diseases that used to kill millions, to affirm the rights of women and minorities, to reject violence and terror as a legitimate means to achieve power. We’ve seen human society change to the point where a man (Gandhi) could topple a colonial power (England’s) simply by doing nothing but ask for peace. And all this progress, all this change, has been wrought in less time than it takes to decompose a Coca-Cola can… isn’t that miracle enough?

Yes, vile, horrible things will happen. Yes, innocents will suffer and die. This is the ugliness of life. Yet the fact that we can think of this as a problem that we need to solve, the fact that we care so much about solving it that we would dare question God Himself… all this shows just how far human society has progressed since the time of the Romans, where the masses would call for public executions of people whose only fault at times was not being good enough to kill someone else. If we can still be disgusted by how bad things are, then, surely, human society will continue to strive to do more good.

I don’t know what else God has left to prove to some, but given that we still have our human freedom, and a much, much better world since He last walked the earth, I’m thinking He has proven enough.