Andrew Gleeson

The Intellectual and the Existential

William Hasker’s book on the problem of evil begins with this quotation from The Brothers Karamazov: Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last, but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature – that little child beating its breast with its fist, for instance – and to found that edifice on its unavenged tears, would you consent to be the architect under those conditions? (Quoted in Hasker 2008, p. 15)

Is God an Agent

The previous chapter developed an analogy between divine and human parentage. It traced an argument to the effect that the passionate, creative love of human parents was a value that could check the authority of morality to condemn them for knowingly conceiving children whose lives would be judged (certainly by the sort of cost/benefit analysis found in theodicy) miserable, and that on the basis of the analogy God could be saved from moral condemnation in the same way. Love could confront and perhaps defeat the claims of morality – ‘perhaps’ because, on my account, some people might be bound by an existential necessity to judge this is so and others bound by an existential necessity to judge it is not so.

The God of Love

The previous chapter argued that drawing an analogy between God and human parents actively undermined the claims of Swinburne and others about the in-principle relevance to God’s existence of blemishes in the world such as the slightest toothache. It also argued that if God created the world from a love akin to human parental love, then he cannot be a God of the sort we find in theodicy, who would not refrain from creating the world with horrors (at least) as terrible as those of the actual world so long as they are outweighed by greater goods, but who would resile from creation on account of evil outweighing good by the margin of the slightest toothache. In this chapter I argue that the parental love image of God points us towards still more radical ideas. If the argument of Chapter 1 were the last word on the topic of God and evil, God might very well be dead. In this chapter I argue that the parental love image of God offers the believer a possible response both to standard atheology and to Karamazov’s challenge: a response in the form of an appeal to love. The response does not ultimately succeed so long as we retain an anthropomorphic conception of God as an immaterial agent, a being who performs loving acts. It does succeed once we amend the analogy between God and human parents to acknowledge that while human parental love is indeed akin to divine love, this is not because both are instances of an agent performing loving acts.

The Greater Good

In Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan Karamazov lays down a powerful challenge to the very idea that, charged with responsibility for the evil in his creation, God could earn an acquittal before the tribunal of morality. Ivan concentrates his argument on the suffering of children. Here is one of his examples: This poor child of five was subjected to every possible torture by those cultivated parents. They beat her, thrashed her, kicked her for no reason till her body was one bruise. Then they went to greater refinements of cruelty – shut her up all night in the cold and frost in a privy, and because she didn’t ask to be taken up at night (as though a child of five sleeping its angelic, sound sleep could be trained to wake and ask) they smeared her face and filled her mouth with excrement, and it was her mother, her mother, did this! And that mother could sleep, hearing the poor child’s groans!

The Real God

In Christian understanding God and human beings are likened to one another – in certain respects. The previous three chapters have tried to elucidate some of the respects in which the likeness is a sound one and some in which it is misleading. In the previous chapter I argued that believers do not regard God as a moral agent or person, or indeed any other kind of causal force. But then how is God capable of love? The question is misleading. God is not capable of love. But this is not because he is incapable of it. Rather, God is love, as opposed to an agent performing loving acts.1 But what does it mean to say that this God of love itself exists independently of human beings and the world (as we normally take God to do), that, as I have said, God is a kind of reality, an ‘existential’ reality? Here I have space only for the sketch of an answer, but the reader has a right to know where I am coming from.2