Imagine for a moment that God is on trial for crimes against humanity and you are his defense attorney. How do you make your case?
Assume that it is a given that everything in the Bible is true. Also assume that the jury is made of people of various faiths and of no faith at all. Let's say that God is put on trial for any number of things he does in the Bible (example: genocide via the great flood). In this scenario God potentially faces the death penalty if found guilty. What defense would you offer to exonerate him?
Posted Jun 10, 2014, 9:14 PM UTC
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We don't punish the dude who administers the lethal injection to Death Row inmates. We (normally) don't punish Presidents who make war-time decisions which leads to the deaths of soldiers on both sides. We (normally) don't punish those same soldiers for killing people. We don't punish judges for sentencing criminals to harsh sentences of punishment. We don't (normally) punish parents for disciplining their children.
In all of these cases, why are these people allowed to do these things? Why do we let them? Because all of these people have recognized authority to do these things - either a granted authority (e.g. President), or an inherent authority (e.g. a parent).
The only time that we circumvent this principle is when these authorities begin to act in ways that lie outside of justice (i.e. outside of what people actually deserve).
So the only 2 relevant questions here are these:
Does God (if he exists) have authority to judge? The answer is yes - God (if he exists) has inherent authority for many reasons, including the fact that He is our Creator, the fact that He knows all things, and the fact that He alone has the power to judge.
Given that God has this legitimate authority to pronounce and carry-out justice, the remaining question is this: Has God stayed within the bounds of justice, or has he not?
Christians believe that he has. Whenever God carried out the death sentence in the Bible, for example, this punishment rightfully fits the crime. (The Bible teaches that all sin leads to Death).
If humans created life, do you think that would give us the moral right to do anything that we want to do to that life?
I can't see how anyone could say yes. Once you create life, you no longer have the right to do anything you want to to that lifeform.
Knowledge has absolutely nothing to do with having authority over someone.
What do you mean by "power" to judge? Physical might? Mental capability?
That isn't the question. God can't do anything he wants to the life he created either. God has the right to uphold justice. God doesn't have the right to do anything he might hypothetically want to. So your question isn't relevant.
Of course it does. Absolutely so. A jury has been granted to pronounce judgment in all sorts of cases, for example. But they aren't allowed to give this judgment until they have all the possible knowledge of the case (on both sides) that they are able to. To suggest that knowledge has nothing to do with the authority to judge is beyond silly.
Both. We can't judge Hitler, for example. He's beyond our reach. Only God is capable of judging him since Hitler isn't beyond God's reach (if God exists).
Well of course. That's simply a truism. That would be like me saying "only political liberals are convinced by political liberal ideology - all other people would reject it." That's just a tautology. Hypothetically if a non-Christian didn't reject it, then they would convert to Christianity.
In order for God to be a just God, he can only punish people for what they have done out of their free choice. So for all other cases, (let's say innocent infants who were killed in the flood), then this death wouldn't be a punishment. Instead, God would have some sort of plan in place for them - and death would simply become a gateway to some other reality (perhaps directly to heaven). What many Christians think is that death for these few individuals was actually a gift. These children would have grown up doing the evil practices of their parents and society and would have earned eternal condemnation. Instead, God rescued them from the situation where this would have come to pass and through his mercy and grace brought them to his side.
At the end of the day we have to admit that we don't know for sure what is going on in some of these difficult cases. All we know is that God (if he exists) is just, and he knows all the variables of these events much better than us, and only he is in a position to know how to treat each person individually with perfect and fair justice.
How on earth do you know that?
Why couldn't God actually be a big unjust asshole, for example?
Aside from the biblical evidence, God (if he exists) must have certain attributes. Each of God's attributes logically presuppose the others. The argument that demonstrates this is long and complex, but I'll try to briefly summarize it here:
If God is the only necessary being, this means that he is eternal. God, if he exists, is the type of being who cannot not exist. He cannot have a beginning or an end, and therefore he is eternal. It is also true that any self-existing thing cannot be limited (or if it is, it can only be limited by itself), for to be limited by another would be to have causal dependence on that other. And since this being's own essence is the basis for its self-existence (its essence is what makes it a "necessary" being), it cannot be said to limit itself either. And thus, with no limits from within or without, we have an infinite being (by infinite here we mean infinite in every perfection, and not infinite in terms of the extension of time or space).
So a necessary being logically must be an eternal being, which must logically be a being with infinite perfections, which includes moral perfects (aka God must be just).
If this being is perfect, then it does not change (immutable). To learn new knowledge constitutes a change, which this being does not do. Thus, this being must already know all the possible knowledge which there is to know (omniscience). Since God is immutable (unchanging in his essence), then God must logically also be impassible in that He does not undergo successive and fluctuating emotional states.
And so on. Each of God's attributes presuppose the others. God, if he exists, cannot be an asshole, to use your words. Its not logically possible.
That depends on how you're looking at it.
Is "justice" synonymous with "God's will," as many Christians argue? If so, then yes, he actually can do anything he wants with the life he creates.
Or, rather, is it that God, as you suggest, is a perfect being who is incapable of giving an immoral command? But if that's the case, it means that even God is constrained by morality. And if that's the case, then morality can't come from God. The standards of morality must exist independent of God if God is to be constrained by them.
Are you arguing that?
You say that it's better for the infants to die than to grow up in their parents' corrupt society. But let's look at a different example. The genocide of the Amalekites. Another people condemned by God to die because they had grown too corrupt. Except in this example, the Israelites could have saved the babies and raised them as their own. The babies would not have grown up in the corrupt society of the Amalek parents. But that's not what happened. The infants were slaughtered along with the rest of the men and women and children.
If this is God's plan, I deem it a pretty shitty plan.
God can only do anything he wants because what he wants will always correspond to his just nature. That much is true. Justice is synonymous with God's will in that sense. However, Justice is not synonymous with God's will in the sense that God's actions are called just simply by virtue of the fact that God was the one doing them.
The first is a recognition that God's justice is based in his nature rather than his actions. But because of this, his actions will always accord with his nature, and therefore his actions, too, will always by synonymous with justice. But its God's nature that holds the priority, since God's actions are constrained or limited by his nature.
The second is a form of divine command theory which most Christian theologians would never hold. Objective morality isn't based on God's actions, but on God's nature. That is to say, hypothetically if God raped someone, we wouldn't call this action "just" simply because God was the one who did it. It would still be unjust. Its just that God would never rape someone since his very nature precludes him from ever desiring anything contrary to his nature.
Yes, God is constrained by morality, but no, the second horn of the Eythphro dilemma does not apply here. When we say that God is constrained by morality, we are saying that God is constrained by his own nature. And God's nature IS God. There is no one or nothing higher than God or outside of God which is doing the constraining. Morality comes from God because its tied in with his nature. And yet his nature limits God's actions. That's what natures do. My own nature limits my actions, but this isn't something greater than me that is limiting me. My own tastebuds limit what I will choose to eat and won't choose to eat. The constraint is real. However, the constraint is nothing other than a necessary part of myself - its not something greater than myself that is imposing this limitation on me.
While this is an interesting possibility, there is nothing that says that this would be a viable solution. In fact, in previous times where the Israelites held back and didn't fully obey God's commands to wipe out a nation - in these instances it always led to trouble down the line because the people who remained alive were always instrumental in bringing back wicked cultural practices from their society into Israel. Again, I don't profess to have absolute knowledge or a smoking-gun answer here. I've simply become convinced for a hundred and one reasons that its appropriate and rational to trust the God of the Bible. And based on that trust, when I read certain passages were I don't fully understand what is going on, I choose to trust that God is able to treat these people (even the infants) with absolute justice. In other words, if the babies didn't deserve to die, then God must be bringing them to a better situation than the one they were in. If God is all-powerful, then God can even use a vehicle such as death to bring a person into goodness and joy.
We might if he was both present at the time the crime for which the death row inmate was committed and fully capable of stopping it from happening.
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heaven? there will be no sin, he will wipe every tear from our eye, etc etc.
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A police state would be pretty lame, I agree, but you already have half of that with an omniscient deity. You already have a being that necessarily surveils and knows everything under its dominion, which happens to be everything. A more accurate dichotomy would be between an Orwellian government that knows everything but still passively observes and allows every kind of rape and murder and an Orwellian government that knows and everything and acts on that information to stop those terrible things from happening. Are either good systems? No, but I know which one I'd choose if it had to be one or the other.
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We do normally punish parents who abuse their children. If hell existed and parents sent their children there for misbehaving they would certainly go to jail.
God is however the only authority who seems to punish people for the thoughtcrimes of not believing in him or feeling lust, etc. What an inconvenient brain god has given me that needs tons of evidence or extremely good arguments to justify believing such an extraordinary claim. How unfortunate that no good arguments have ever been made and no evidence has ever been presented.
This is ridiculous. Anything god wants to do is "right" even if it's wrong because for Christians everything god does is inherently good and moral and right. If god decided to tell someone to murder their own son that would be seen as totally OK. God invented logic, he doesn't have to follow it. Why would he? God invented the concept of justice, he can be just while being unjust. Question 2 makes no sense.
Which is why I said "normally." Abuse is nothing more or less than when discipline crosses the line of justice. If the discipline is no longer just, then it becomes abuse.
Only God has the knowledge required to know the full effects of our sin, and so only God has the ability to make the decision as to what constitutes a just sentencing.
There are tons of good arguments and evidence for the existence of God. Which is why most people from most time periods (including right now) are convinced that a deity of some sort exists.
This isn't true if you mean that something is good simply on virtue that it was God who did it. So, for example, if God raped someone it would therefore be called morally "good" simply by virtue of it having been done by God. This is not (and has never been) what Christian theology teaches. Perfect morality is based on God's unchanging nature, and God himself is constrained by his nature and cannot act contrary to it. So even if hypothetically God wanted to do something immoral he would not be able to.
Also untrue. The concept of justice, again, is based on the eternal and unchanging nature of God. As such, its just as eternal as God is (it IS God). Therefore at no time did God "invent" or "create" or "bring into being" the concept of justice.
I'd like to see one. I suggest something unrelated to morality though because I recall having a very long discussion about it but it went nowhere.
Argumentum ad populum? Really? Most people aren't convinced in god because of evidence or hearing a good argument for it. Most people were just born in their religion.
God murdered people in the old testament but it was morally good because god did it.
Most of the cosmological arguments I find to be very persuasive. I also find the historical evidence for the resurrection of Jesus Christ to be persuasive. Its possible to discuss some of this in short-hand, but Reddit isn't the greatest format for it (there are great books and dissertations that do proper justice to these topics).
Nope. Never once did I suggest that theism is true simply because the majority currently believe in God. I suggest you read a bit more carefully.
My specific point was simply that arguments and evidence exist which cause numerous people to believe in theism. You said you weren't aware of any. And this point alone should have told you that such evidence really does exist. That doesn't mean you have to think the evidence is strong enough or that people are interpreting it correctly. But evidence certainly does exist. Its physiologically impossible to believe something in the absence of evidence for that belief (and as I said, most people hold a belief in theism).
First, citation? Second, its impossible to hold a belief (even false beliefs) in the absence of evidence that people find persuasive for that belief.
First, an argument from authority can serve as powerful evidence for some people. You may disagree with it, but its not a fallacious argument. An argument from authority, although its informal, nevertheless can be strong and compelling evidence for people to hold certain beliefs.
Second, even if some people are "born into" their religion, that doesn't change the fact that when they reach the age of rationality that many people choose to continue in their religion. Just as its possible for people to choose to no longer believe what their parents taught (which takes a conscious choice), so, too, many people make the choice to continue believing it. Clearly "being born into it" isn't enough to explain it. People differ in beliefs from their parents all the time. So to explain away most instances of theism as people simply blindly following their parents is simply a variant of the genetic fallacy.
No. It was good because it was just. It wasn't morally good simply by virtue that it was God who did it.
I keep seeing this statement in this sub and yet no one actually offers up any of these good reasons.
Or, our brains evolved in a way that incline us towards this way of thinking.
"One idea is that our brains developed to rapidly assume that objects in the world are alive and may pose a threat, simply because while wrongly mistaking a rustle of leaves for a bear won't get you killed, failing to detect a bear early (when the leaves rustle) most certainly will. "Supernatural agents are readily conjured up because natural selection has trip-wired cognitive schema for agency detection in the face of uncertainty," write Norenzayan and fellow origin of religion scholar Scott Atran.""
If I was making a case for my defendant, I don't think I would put his existence into question - it might confuse the jurors.
I'm speaking to a jury that doesn't believe that this God actually exists, and so I include the "if he exists" phrase not only as a way to be charitable to who I am speaking to, but also to show that I'm talking about the logical implications of the argument. In other words, the argument I'm making is logically sound, whether or not God exists in actuality.
I agree, God's authority is probably the best defense. I also bet that God could show how his actions were/are ultimately for the best.
I don't punish them because I don't have the means to.
But to say that those people are justified in their actions is insane.
So are you a political anarchist who is against the idea of holding people accountable for their moral actions? And you also believe that parents don't have any inherent authority to discipline their children? Wow.
You are the one claiming that presidents and soldiers should not be held accountable for invading the property of others and committing mass murder.
As a political Anarchist, I think people should be held accountable for their actions, and that peer pressure doesn't qualify as a moral excuse.
Who should hold people accountable? Specifically. Who should be in charge of holding other people accountable, and what does the enforcement of that accountability look like.
Whatever your answer to that question is, go back and re-read my first post with that in mind. Some people who hold other people accountable (whether a parent, a President, or a judge) do so because we have granted them the authority to do so. If you think that people should be held accountable than you're affirming the same thing.
Are you a lawyer? That was.......... much better than I expected.
I'd still vote to fry him tho.
Just because Christians support their God's actions, does not make those actions correct. Otherwise, no one would be held responsible for their actions. I'm sure loads of people thought Saddam was well within his rights to kill shitloads - this does not make it moral.
Did they think Saddam had the authority to judge? Yup.
But anyway, here are some examples of God's "justice":
He killed all firstborn Egyptian children, who had nothing whatsoever to do with what was going on at the time.
He turned a woman into salt because she looked the wrong direction.
He burnt people for complaining (Numbers 11:1).
God killed Nadab and Abihu for offering him a "strange fire" (Leviticus 10:1-2).
God killed a bunch of people for eating quails (Numbers 11:31-35).
God killed "a hundred fourscore and five thousand" soldiers in their sleep.
I could go on all day. But if that's "justice," then count me out.
See - I don't think people deserve to get burned alive for supporting a different leader, whereas apparently this is standard fare for you.
Hopefully you haven't got so many replies that you ignore this but here goes my question from your response anyways.
Is it within the bounds of justice to send a flood that drowns children and babies? What crime did they commit that warrants that punishment? Referencing this:
If that is just, does that mean babies can be killed as a punishment for being born into sin? Do the babies not have the opportunity to grow up and decide their fate?
Even if, say, God knows the future of that child and they were going to hell anyways, does that still give him the right to kill it in its infancy before it even has the power to make decisions?
If not then I don't see how this could possibly be a just scenario where a crime is rightfully punished. If so, then how is everyone not predestined to go to hell or heaven from birth?
No. Which is why we believe that death for those few individuals wasn't actually a punishment or a condemnation, but a rescue. If God is God, then he is all-powerful, and he is able to use death either as a means to something bad (punishment) or as the means to something good (rescue).
It reminds me of a Western cowboy movie I watched recently, where in a small town that was over-run with bandits, the good sheriff had two people in his jail. One was there as a punishment (one of the bandits). But the other was there for his own protection (someone the bandits were trying to kill). The sheriff was being just to each of the people, given the different scenarios.
So in the case of the Flood story, for example, many of us believe that God was actually doing a kindness to the infants. Because if the infants had lived for another year or two, they would have fallen into sinfulness just like their parents, and this sinfulness would have earned them eternal condemnation. And so by removing them from this situation God was doing them a mercy and a kindness. We believe that for these persons, God was simply removing them from this plane of existence into a better one (probably directly to heaven). As such, God's treatment of these persons would be entirely just (even though it might not look to be just from a shallow phenomenological perspective).
If I die and find out that God did not treat these infants with justice - if he treated them with anything less than perfect justice, then I would immediately conclude that this is not a God who is worthy of worship. But with everything I know about God, and with all of the instances that God himself has given to us that he will never be less than just, I feel that even in these sorts of cases I can safely trust that he'll do the right thing.
Again, if God in his foreknowledge knew that a baby would grow up living the same sort of wicked life as her parents, then it would be a grace and a kindness for God to take radical steps to remove her from that situation. Given that he is the Creator of her, yes, God has the right to decide her fate for her if he wants to (provided that God's decision is never less than perfectly just - God would not have the right to decide an unjust fate for her).
Did the flood work? Are infants no longer born into wickedness, evil, corruption, and violence?
You are misinformed as to the goal of the Flood. The Flood wasn't some sort of magical formula that somehow made future generations magically always do the right thing. There is nothing in the text that supports such a view.
Yes, the Flood worked, because the goal of the Flood was to eradicate the current sinful and wicked generation of people who were living at the time. It worked exactly as planned.
Even as far back as Adam and Eve (and certainly as far back as the Flood), God was already planning the Christ event to meet the need you reference in your question - the need to find a way to stop the problem of sin by healing the hearts and minds of individuals. The entire Old Testament is a gearing up and a foreshadowing of the Christ event.
Ok so this is a form of predestination. God knows for a fact how that child will end up even before birth, which means he also knows whether or not you or I will end up in heaven or hell before birth.
I find something disturbing using this rationale though. The actions of God are exactly the same in this instance, punishing everyone who's a sinful adult, and rescuing infants. He's drowning both of them, but you say for different reasons. How do you distinguish different reasoning for the same action if the end action is the same?
Not to mention if God is omnipotent and wants to rescue these babies, he could think of an infinite amount of better things to do than drown them to rescue them. He's not limited in terms of power so why not age them all to teenagers and put them on the earth after the flood is over? That's literally one situation, he could have even just brought them straight up to heaven instead of drowning them. As I said, infinite possibilities.
If God is justified in killing infants because he knows they'll end up going to hell, robbing them of any choices and any life experiences, why even create humans and put them on earth to begin with?
God created earth and put humans on it for a specific purpose according to the Bible, to eventually bring all the righteous up to heaven and live with them worshiping him for eternity. IF it's justified for him to drown babies because he knows their fate, why even create this whole situation to begin with? He's truly omnipotent and he's killing people before they reach any age of accountability, why not instead just create the end result you want? So for instance why not just instantly, from the beginning, create all the people he knows are going to go to heaven, but create them as just spirits already in heaven?
Divine foreknowledge is a separate concept from divine predestination. While predestination requires foreknowledge, foreknowledge doesn't require predestination.
Before God created you or me he knew how our lives would play out. He knew whether or not I would use my freedom to do evil or to love others the way I was supposed to. In my case, God foresaw that I would choose poorly and thus earn condemnation. God then also had foreknowledge as to whether or not I would accept his forgiveness of that condemnation by putting my faith in Jesus Christ. But again, divine foreknowledge does not (on its own) entail divine determinism. That is a logical mistake that was recognized even by ancient Greek philosophers.
The end action isn't the same. Death was simply the gateway for both parties to receive just recompense. The sinful people are judged for their crimes in the afterlife, and as I said, the infants (who weren't yet morally culpable) simply went to heaven. The end action isn't the same. The justice was different. It only looks the same from our limited perspective since we are only seeing the very initial action by God and not what happened next.
God created a world with morally free creatures. What this means is that its possible for some free creatures to inflict pain and suffering on other creatures who don't deserve it. When someone gets raped, that person doesn't deserve it. Its simply an unfortunate byproduct of moral freedom that people can use their freedom in ways that hurt innocents. Shame on them for this. But this is how the world works. (This is also what causes societies and governments to form so that we can collectively hold each other accountable).
So in the case of the Flood, its the morally wicked decisions of the adults which ends up having a negative effect on their children. But this is the fault of the adults, not the children. (And again, God is powerful enough to rescue the children, bring them immediately to Paradise, and even to erase all memories of the experience should he want to).
Because in order for people to be in heaven and have arrived at a state where they do not sin (even though they have the ability to do so) seems to necessitate a back-history of complex experiences and the exercise of moral progress. To simply create people in heaven in this way would leave them devoid of this complicated back-history. The human will is like a muscle. It must be exercised in order to arrive at a place of moral perfection. We call this a form of soul-making theodicy. There is something about life on Earth which is a necessary pre-condition to the state of our moral perfection in Heaven.
Oh, so instead of magic-ing them inside the ark to give them a chance with an allegedly decent family, he drowns them?
If life were truly so non-important then we wouldn't have it. if God exists, and if he wanted people to live out their lives on earth before they died, he would not have drowned innocent babies before they had a chance to do so.
No, God doesn't have the right to judge humans for their humanity. Although I am an atheist I would argue that if Jesus existed, he would be the only one able to judge humans on earth.
Not at all. How can you justify your authority when it remains outside of our realm of perception. This unjust God is judging imperfect beings he created for being imperfect.
God doesn't have the right to judge humans for their humanity. But God does have the right to judge people for how they use their humanity. (Our humanity, our very existence, is a gift that came with strings attached).
The Bible is crystal clear on the fact that Jesus has been appointed the final Judge over all humanity.
I'm not following your line of argument. This sentence could be taken in one of two ways:
First, you could be saying "I wasn't aware of my judge when I committed my crimes, and therefore he shouldn't judge me." But this argument doesn't hold water. Most defendants in human courts hadn't met their judges before they committed their crimes either, and the first time they saw their judge was the first time they went into his or her courtroom.
Second, you could be saying "How can God judge me if I'm not aware of the judgment taking place? What gives him the right to judge me when I cannot even see him?" In other words, instead of talking about not perceiving the judge in the moment of the crime itself (the previous interpretation I brought up), this one is talking about not perceiving the judge during the moment the judgment is pronounced.
But this argument doesn't work either, because according to Christian theism you will stand face to face with your judge in the moment of your judgment. You will have perception of him.
A couple points:
First, you call God an "unjust God" here. By what standard of justice are you making this judgment?
Second, you appear to have the implicit assumption in this sentence that God is judging people for having what he caused them to have. In other words, you could read your sentence as saying "God is judging people for being sinful when he made them to be sinful in the first place."
But if this is what you are saying, you need to realize that you are no longer arguing against Christianity, because Christian theology does not teach this. Certain ancient gnostic theologians DID teach this, and they were universally declared heretical by Christians.
That's the same thing. I also refuse to believe my life was a gift from anyone but my parents. If god did exist, Christians would do him the greatest injustice by making him seem selfish and petty. He is god, it didn't cost him anything to make us. He could literally make 10 billion earths and all of the people do what they want, but for no reason other than his own self-interest he makes sure we live the way he wants us to.
On another note, my mother (and just about everybody's) went through roughly 9 months of pregnancy, labor and countless days and nights working just to support my life. The time that my parents weren't working they dedicated their free time to enriching my life and providing the best they could for me. What has your God done?
What I mean is that if your God wants us to follow his rules and fairly judge us then he should give us his rules personally. You can't hold me accountable to the bible because it was written 2,000 years ago in another language when they didn't even know about any of our modern advancements which make up most of our daily lives. I can't know if i'm supposed to be following a bible verse or if it is metaphor. I'm not sure if the pastor at one church is telling me the truth about how God will judge me when it differs from the priest at the other church. God cannot hold me accountable for rules I cannot be sure of.
This is exactly what i'm saying. Just because Christians don't teach this doesn't mean it isn't true. God created humans and they choose to sin. God designed them to be capable of this and if you believe he is omniscient then he even knew this would happen and yet he did it anyway. Therefore, God is responsible for humanity's faults.
In case you needed further clarification, because I would bet you will come back with something about free-will and maybe even talk about satan or evil. To make it easy I will use an analogy that you are free to argue the validity of. If I have a child and before they are taught right from wrong I tell them not to touch fire, would you blame them for getting hurt? Would you kick them out of your house? How about a question for the nature of God being separate from our reality. Would you give your child up for adoption and then demand them to still follow your rules?
What we should really learn from this is that it is up to us to determine what right and wrong are because we have to live with the consequences.