I’d like to address what I call the “Bad God, No God” hypothesis argued by Sarah Silverman (briefly in A Speck of Dust), people on YouTube, and Roger Waters (in his live performances), among others. The hypothesis goes something like this: “If God existed, then he wouldn’t allow pain and suffering to exist in the world. Nevertheless, pain and suffering do exist on Earth, therefore God does not.” This post is an attempt expose the weakness of the thought process behind this hypothesis, and it asks those who subscribe to it to find a better argument.
[Note: I will use “he” to refer to God, but by doing this I am not making the claim that this hypothetical God has a gender, and the masculine pronoun is simply a placeholder.]
We often hear people use this argument when a family member dies of a terminal illness, “All those prayers, and God still let Auntie die.” It’s worth noting that refuting this hypothesis does not prove God’s existence by extension, nor does it seek to. It only seeks to create a theoretical sphere in which God could coexist with the miseries of the world.
First I’ll describe the god that I deduce could theoretically exist in our current world and its suffering. This god is the “watchmaker” god who “set the universe in motion”, and established its rules but does not interfere with it. The god of Einstein or Benjamin Franklin. This “watchmaker paradigm” assumes that God did not “clamp” science – i. e., there should be no extent of physical reality that science cannot explain, no “gap” for a “god of the gaps” to fill. God presumably would have put science in place to do exactly that.
While on the surface the hypothesis seems defensible and logical, it’s my experience that this argument is usually held by people who have not thought a great deal about it. The statement “God doesn’t exist because if he did he wouldn’t let bad things happen,” contains two main assumptions. The first assumption is that God, if he existed, would and could control the world at his will. The second is that God also cares about the miseries of the world and considers them miseries as we do in the first place.
In reality, nothing obliges God to care. Perhaps, in his supposed infinite knowledge, he accepts them as necessary realities of the world as the Buddhist or Taoist may. As Alan Watts, the philosopher and writer, says (paraphrasing), “stop trying to change the world.” Even Jesus acknowledged this sentiment about suffering when he said, “The poor you will always have with you, and you can help them whenever you want.” (Matthew 26: 11)
If God created a universe in which science is the governor, he could not also, as if by magic, control that universe and micromanage it into a utopian paradise free of hardship and pain.
If we can acknowledge the truth of evolution and the fact that the earth was once mostly volcanic gas and single-celled organisms, then accepting that death and sadness still occur on earth should not be difficult – just look how far we’ve come. The universe evolved, apparently from nothing, to get to where we are now. Maybe the pain and suffering we experience are just “growing pains” on the evolutionary trajectory to utopia. Suffering is only natural, as echoed by the mantra “there’s no such thing as a free lunch.” It takes energy to do work.
If God created a universe in which science is the governor, he could not also, as if by magic, control that universe and micromanage it into a utopian paradise free of hardship and pain. This would require a force outside of science and would require God to be inconsistent, because it would leave him governing the parts of the universe that science does not – namely miracles. As Richard Dawkins often argues in debates [in reference to miracles], science cannot be conducted if every now and again we have to account for some “magic” coming in and affecting our results.
There should be no controversy if someone were to discover a scientific mechanism by which prayer or miracles work. This should not be seen to disprove God, because, if God created prayer in a universe governed by science, he should have also created a scientific means by which it would function. Otherwise, God would be inconsistent. While I’m aware that this argument hinges on the idea that God would be consistent, I feel one should expect that a God which created a logically consistent universe would himself be consistent and logical. Why should we even assume God lives outside of science? Perhaps he simply understands science so completely that he can act in such a way that appears as if it’s magic. Like the proverb, “Call on God, but row away from the rocks.” Maybe God is also bound by the science that he created, or maybe he didn’t even create it in the first place.
Would the idea of God only be reasonable if our world was perfect?
The other assumption made by the “Bad God, No God” hypothesis is that God would prefer a painless utopian world without hardship. In addition to the terminal illness example, another one we often hear is that a “loving god” would not allow so much war and poverty to exist on the earth. Why wouldn’t God put a stop to this? This argument sends us down a bit of a rabbit hole, because once we take war and poverty out of the picture, some other sufferings inevitably come in to take their places as the chief argument against God’s existence. Somewhere in between a world that is a literal living hell and a world that is a painless utopia, is there a world with a certain threshold amount of pain and suffering that supporters of the hypothesis could accept his existence, or would the idea of God only be reasonable if our world was perfect?
Could they accept that a “loving god” would create a world with disease and death if it didn’t have war and poverty? Or, if we didn’t have any of these things, could they still accept that God would create a world in which sugar is bad for us but tastes so sweet, or a world in which humans still had to oppose gravity when walking up stairs? These are both sufferings, albeit minor ones. If we lived in a utopian paradise, but a utopian paradise without human flight, would we then have people complain, “God cannot exist because I want to fly, and I don’t think God would be cruel enough to create humans with the desire to fly if they could never fly and fulfill that desire”? This is the hypothesis in a nutshell. It has no logical end.
Violence has declined.
Pleasure and pain are relative concepts. I would ask those who support the “Bad God, No God” hypothesis to answer this question: if you were to completely describe a world in which you think God could exist, would there be no pain? What does that world have or lack that our world has or lacks? I would suggest that this God-filled utopia may be this planet we live on, just aged a couple thousand years. Human life is at least on a progressive trajectory. Steven Pinker showed this in his TED talk and book The Better Angels of Our Nature. Violence has declined. Eventually there will be very little death and disease and no war, but how much is acceptable? If God created the world he made it, like biology, to evolve over time into something progressively more complex and beautiful. Alan Watts sums up the problem of suffering in Nature, Man and Woman when he writes,
But it must be obvious that unless the organism can feel pain, it cannot withdraw from danger, so that the unwillingness to be able to be hurt is in fact suicidal, whereas the simple retreat from an occasion of pain is not. It is true that we want to have our cake and eat it [too]: we want to be sensitive and alive but not sensitive to suffering.
There is value in suffering. Pleasure can only be appreciated – and known – when contrasted with pain, the “No Mud, No Lotus” concept. Hardship is only natural, but in no way does it make us less. If God wanted to create a painless, pleasure-ball of a planet he theoretically could have, but maybe in that “universe” humans would never have evolved to have intelligence – perhaps due to a lack of environmental pressure.
The nature of reality is evolution: growth, death, and rebirth, each time a little different than the last. At some point before we humans existed as humans, we were a different species altogether, and at this point no pain and misery, at least in the human sense, existed. Only after we developed intelligence could we recognize this pain and suffering. If we can accept that modern society experiences less suffering than say 1340s Europe in the midst of the Black Plague, it should not be difficult to extrapolate that in the future we will experience even less pain and suffering than we do now. At some point will our pain and suffering be so minuscule that the “Bad God, No God” hypothesis ceases to appear defensible? If we can imagine this future, then we can also accept that God, even though our present existence contains some pain and suffering, could still possibly exist along with it.
Sam
Trader Joe