A man was walking in the street when he heard a voice: "Stop! Stand still! If you take one more step, a brick will fall down on your head and kill you."
The man stopped and a big brick fell right in front of him. The man was astonished.He went on, and after awhile he was going to cross the road. Once again the voice shouted: "Stop! Stand still! If you take one more step a car will run over you and you will die."
The man did as he was instructed, and a car came careening around the corner, barely missing him.
"Where are you?" the man asked. "Who are you?"
"I am your guardian angel," the voice answered.
"Oh yeah?" the man asked. "And where the hell were you when I got married?"
This quip reminds us that we live in a world of opposites. Good things happen but so do bad things occur.
Any theory of God must note both and account for both. It cannot wear rose-colored glasses or only see the glass as half full. It is nice to define God as benevolent but when bad things happen in His universe He must bear the responsibility for them.
If a human seeded a resort with toxic water, venomous snakes and poisonous fruit the perpetrator would be apprehended and thrown in jail as a criminal deserves. We seem to have a double standard where God is concerned and excuse the existence of elements inimical to human life as necessary for God's plan which we humans are too dim to comprehend. We save God from censure and irrelevance and allow Him to act in mysterious ways even when we know that if He exists and dangers exist that He does not warn us about He is committing a sin. Our defense of His immorality is a double standard that we so often deplore when we find it amongst ourselves. We don't hold God to the same standard because that would destroy our faith in Him. We hang on in the hope that the existence of good AND evil somehow makes sense and we try to explain away natural evils such as disease as being necessary to teach us a lesson if we would only take time to discern what it was.
What lesson is the criminal teaching us?
The existence of God depends upon faith and ignoring the obvious. Religion teaches us to close our minds to reality and just believe.
Fortunately not all of us think that way and science acknowledges that there is evil in the world that needs to be understood in natural terms so that it may be overcome with knowledge and technology. We want to conquer disease not excuse or accuse its creator.
In a godless universe guided by evolution disease is an unsurprising outcome. The universe may be such that life can emerge from its interacting elements but that does not mean that life was in any way intended as an outcome. Disease and other natural events that are precarious for life don't care if humans are here or not. They just do their thing impersonally, without malice and will uncaringly snuff life out if life gets in the way of its activity.
Life may have emerged on earth but it will not survive without a constant struggle to defend itself against a harsh world that is no garden of Eden. Hurricanes have no malice against life but they do act in accordance with their nature and will wipe life out that does not take appropriate action to defend itself. To borrow a phrase from Richard Dawkins, we have grown up in the universe but without benefit of an operating manual. We have been writing our own guide for thousands of years. We learn of the toxic nature of some plants by watching the demise of a fellow human when our ancestors made the connection between death and eating a certain berry or mushroom. No heavenly father gave us a field guide to consult to spare us the necessity of victims to advance our ken. There is no one to care but us.
Life has emerged in spite of all the enemies allied against it. Once life took hold it is loathe to let go. It seeks to perpetuate itself though self-replication. While natural disasters can destroy individual lives catastrophic loss of all life is unlikely without a cataclysmic event. Such an event does await our descendants but not for billions of years. Perhaps we will have escaped into a safer region of space before our sun enlarges to engulf the earth.
In our part of the universe self-conscious life has emerged and in our part of the universe living beings will return to the constituent parts of matter at the end of life. Life and death. Beginnings and endings. A world of opposites. We can't have one without the other. We battle against the enemies of life because we find that life is worth living. We seek to improve our existence and progress from God's country to a civilisation that is robust and fair. In the process as they are exposed we slough off old ideas that retard our progress.
In enlightened societies, gone or going are misogynist structures, slavery, belief in evil witches, demon possession, homosexuality is evil, masturbation is evil, working on Sunday is evil, human or animal sacrifice, belief that the world is flat, blasphemers should be killed, etc.
To create a fair and just society some old practices, attitudes, ideas and beliefs must be abandoned. They belong to our more ignorant history and should be left there. Unfortunately, to our misfortune, some still hold on to the discredited past with murderous tenacity.
A God theory must explain the good, the bad and the ugly we find in our domain. A god who wears nought but the coat of benevolence is a figment of our imagination. This idea runs smack into the harsh reality we face on a daily basis in our struggle to survive and prosper in a world filled with natural booby traps.
It is my contention that God exists in the same sense that Mickey Mouse, Superman, Santa and the Tooth Fairy do. As the Greeks did with their gods and the Hindus do with theirs: let us have fun with him and not take him too seriously. For we have made him as fallible as we are.
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