LAZY EXCUSE FOR
NOT BELIEVING GOD
A theodicy

Stephen goes on,

How dare you, how dare you create a world in which there is so much misery which is not our fault?! It's not right. It's utterly, utterly evil. Why should I respect a capricious, mean minded, stupid god who creates a world which is so full of injustice and pain?

J Stephen Fry - ibid

It is not the God of the bible that is allegedly being viewed here. Not really.
       It would be, of some Plato thought like deity of the past. Plato's god/s did not care for the created. These Greek deities appear that they would be consistent with the evil in the world, but are they?

If my view of the God of the bible is true, it makes this excuse for not believing the existing real God as stupid and crass.

That is what offends me.
It is a lazy simplistic excuse of a view.

How do you know of evil and injustice?
It is (actually) because there is a good God that every man has a moral compass of universal right and wrong. The very thought and feeling these things should not be, is due to a moral God given conscience.

It is the reason there is a good God that the very idea exists that it is bad that war is and hurting the innocent happens is wrong.

C S Lewis who wrote The lion, the witch and the wardrobe was a reluctant convert to Christianity.

He was not lazy.

This is why he called himself a reluctant convert.

He was helped to see his misunderstanding by his friend J R R Tolkien, the author of Lord of the rings.
       Later, when Lewis wrote another book Mere Christianity in the first chapter he argues for a good and moral God existing because of this very universal moral code that keeps being observed.
It is an intelligent reasoned argument for God's existence.

You can't get that kind of conscience from the evolution hypothesis.
It would not be universal.

Also lazy and uninformed, is the idea that Jesus did not exist or did not rise from the dead, whilst instead the neutral objective observer, cannot help but see both Jesus' existence and the resurrection as real historical fact.

Jesus said,

Seek, and you will find

Matthew 7:7b

Those like C S Lewis are not lazy: those seeking for the truth.

Numerous anti-God and anti-Christian writers who truly searched, have come to this very conclusion. They too were converted in the process of their diligence.

Frank Morrison in his book Who moved the stone? came to that conclusion

Another enquirer Lee Strobel ended up writing The case for Christ reviewing the proof there was a historical resurrection.

So, why is there evil as mentioned when there is a good God?

Simple, if God was to stop evil the moment it reared its head, the very moment it came into being, then no one would be alive beyond their youth.

Why?

Because the moment you acted out on your first wrong thought, your first sin, your very initial counter act to what you understood as good and right: your first wrong, God would take you out.
That is IF God was to stop evil the moment it first appeared.

Then:

No one would be able to hate to the extent of causing murder, would they?
There would be no wars.

No one would know of their own child that got hurt or diseased or die.
Why?

Because you would have already died in your youth long before you got to have a child.
Straight after your very first sin.

Why sickness, pain and evil?
Why is there such things like sickness and pain and evil at all?

That is a fair question.

If God created perfectly then why do such things exist?

Did God make the world without evil?

Then God saw everything that He had made, and indeed it was very good.

Genesis 1:31a

For God to create evil, he would need to be able to think of evil. But we further read,

God is light and in Him is no darkness at all.

1 John 1:5b

This is not speaking of physical light and (light elements/particles) photons; this is speaking of moral darkness: evil.

Evil is other than God, just as darkness is other than light.

If this is true of God and creation, how did evil begin according to the Bible?

The nearest we have in scripture of the first rebellion, the first case of evil, is when it was "found",

You were perfect in your ways from the day you were created,
Till iniquity was found in you.

Ezekiel 28:15

Evil/darkness is the wilful act, the choice to go against the light and thus cause the first shadow, the darkness that exists. The first instance of it was "found": it was discovered. It was learned about by God because it was other than God and did not exist before nor could God conceive of it before, since it is other than him (cf. Jeremiah 32:35).

It is not God's direct creation nor His will that evil exists nor continues.

That, at this time it does continue, is only because God is love and does not want any to perish (2 Peter 3:9; Isaiah 1:18).

He could stop all evil in an instant the moment it rears its head, but then no one would be alive from the moment of their first youthful transgression.

No one could then learn, to reform, to repent, to decide if they wish to stay that way or not.

No one would exist beyond their first sin.

And so begins the proper understanding of evil and the association with God

God did not make all creatures the same. God made animals that behave by instinct more than anything else. Then, when he created man, here is a creature made with a conscience and an ability to choose to keep doing innocent and good things or, to go against that conscience and decide to do wrong.

God is into real and realistic relationships.
So instead of making robots, he made us like himself, having a free will.

So, having made us like this, instead of wiping us out when we do evil, when we choose wrong, he allows us time to learn that it is not helpful and bad for us and bad for others when we sin.

But, he has set limits as to how long we can do this.

That is a God of love and justice.

The one who is excessively wicked the Bible informs us, dies early.

That is a God made limit.

They die long before they were meant to.
Only because of their excessive wrongdoing (Ecclesiastes 7:17; Psalm 55:23; Proverbs 10:27).

But, to have stopped that (wicked) man from doing evil after their very first sin, would not have given time to learn or choose for what they really wanted in the long term, would it?
Of course not.

So it is crass.

It is unintelligent to blame a good God for existing evil.
It is laziness to blame these things on the God of the Bible.
It is because of God's patience, his very longsuffering that they are still around (Romans 9:22).

Jesus, knowing that the Jews understood from their scripture, the Old Testament just referred to, that God punished the wicked and also in the knowledge of those mentioned above who die early due to excessive wickedness, he had this to say:

There were present at that season some who told Him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices.
And Jesus answered and said to them,
"Do you suppose that these Galileans were worse sinners than all other Galileans, because they suffered such things?
I tell you, no; but unless you repent you will all likewise perish.
Or those eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed them, do you think that they were worse sinners than all other men who dwelt in Jerusalem?
I tell you, no; but unless you repent you will all likewise perish."

Luke 13:1-5

And, God has put a time limit on all evil.

He has set a date for when all these things will cease.
His plan is to let man do his thing, within general limits put in place and, within limits of individual lives as mentioned, until such a time when he will stop it all, completely.

Only a good God would do such a thing.

What about disease and sickness?
If the world was created perfect, why do these exist?
It is because of sin and wrongdoing that sickness exists. Our bodies were not created to sin, but to be clean and holy. So, when we decided to do our own things contrary to God given conscience, we ended up hurting ourselves in our bodies and hindering natural healing which is in our make-up. Disease and sickness are a result of the initial wrongdoing in the world and carries on.

This is both by virtue of sin and by the necessary changes to the created world caused by ongoing sin, to limit the extent of these things. The curse on the ground (after the named "fall" of Adam - Genesis 3:17) was to help man be so busy he had no new passivity related temptation fulfilled. But this only helped so far. So instead, after 17 centuries, God went on to cause a flood² to form new limits on sin's growth - new mountain ranges, new rivers, new continents - and having put these in play, he removed the curse on the ground knowing now that all men sin from their youth (Genesis 8:21). Then to that new mix, he gave languages (Genesis 11) to further limit the growth of wickedness when these wicked work together…

What I am saying is the pointers in the bible show that the good and perfect created world is not the world of today and this has been so for thousands of years. To answer Fry, I say,

No Sir, God did not create it like this.
It is not an honest claim that can be made on the bible.

To say so is not to have honestly looked seriously into how the bible very well shows it was not created like it is now. That is what is offensive of this lazy remark.

But why little children?
Picture for a moment, if you insist, a world with no pain, no sickness, no disease, that ever happens to any baby nor to any little child. Would we really think that this was normal? Would we not think of what is different about them and us who are older? Of course, we would. And would that not make it even harder to think and believe freely without compulsion that there is something more special about the little ones in contrast to us the older ones? And so, would that not cause us to believe all sorts of weird and fantastical things too?
Yep.

And yet, God limits these harms so often that we barely notice it.

Or, should I say, we therefore choose to ignore them?

How many times have you heard of incredible car accidents where it baffled the experienced rescuers (as to) how on earth did the occupants survive or, that they had such little or no harm?
This is not all the time, yes, I agree. This is not even too often. But these do happen regularly enough to pose the question: what and how were these to happen at all THAT regularly?

But God has also raised many to help us learn how to heal, how to mend, how to make things better for our health and healing. And God showed us what he is like in Jesus. The healer recorded as healing all who came to him for this. And he goes on doing so through the Church, the body of saints that believe and practise this.

The death of babies and little children en masse in the bible
With the flood² of Genesis 6-8 only 8 souls survived, that is Noah and his wife with their 3 sons and their wives. All these being adults the flood involved the death of all babies and little children then remaining. Then later, God instructed Israel as a people and nation to wipe out, yes, to carry out full genocide on whole tribes and nations. This included their babies and little children: the Amalekites a classic case (Exodus 17:14; Deuteronomy 25:19; 1 Samuel 15:3). How does that marry up to a loving God?
       What would happen if no babies or little children ever died? I touched on this earlier in regards to sickness of little ones. What if it never happened to them? We would think about a cut off time of age and believe all sorts of things on this matter.
       Now God is involved in taking home all his saints. We read that,

Precious in the sight of the LORD is the death of His saints.

Psalm 116:15

But I hear you say, babies and little children are not known as saints, are they? Yes, you would be right. But instead, they are all held as having innocent blood by God.

They even sacrificed their sons and their daughters to demons, and shed innocent blood, even the blood of their sons and daughters, whom they sacrificed to the idols of Canaan; and the land was polluted with blood.

Psalm 106:37-38

We are also told that little ones have no knowledge of good and evil.

Moreover your little ones and your children, who you say will be victims, who today have no knowledge of good and evil, they shall go in there; to them I will give it, and they shall possess it.

Deuteronomy 1:39

So, with any baby or little one who dies, God has no recognition of sin in them at all. We are told, indeed, that we sin from our youth: not before birth nor before infancy.

…the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth…

Genesis 8:21b

…we have sinned against the LORD our God, we and our fathers, from our youth even to this day…

Jeremiah 3:25b

We each turn to our own way. We each go astray from our youth; not before.

All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned, every one, to his own way; and the LORD has laid on Him the iniquity of us all.

Isaiah 53:6

Yes, we all begin life in the right way, but we each turn from that.
We all begin life upright.

Truly, this only I have found: that God made man upright, but they have sought out many schemes.

Ecclesiastes 7:29

So that all babies and infants are recognised by God as morally clean and sin free. This means that they are treated like saints in that when they die, they go to the same place.

So why death?
Physically speaking man was not created immortal, but mortal. Man was made with a perishable body, but one that is designed to heal itself with a blood clotting mechanism and renewal of cells to heal any damaged part and an immune system. So that when we read "in Adam all die" (1 Corinthians 15:22) its meaning in context is that with that same body as Adam, we all are perishable and die. We are physically mortal and perishable.
       This being so, death is inevitable for every man.
But would not the world be strange or peculiar if no one died up to a certain age?
Yes, it would be. So, God is in a place, in a position morally that any baby or little child that dies is safe as someone who lived as a saint would be.

What about pain?
Well, physical pain like a sensation of hot and burning is good, or else we would not know to keep away from harmful flames.
Nor would we know to tell others of the danger.
       So, pain is good. Up to a point.

It is excessive pain and continuous pain that tends to be at issue.
And this too God has also promised to cease,

And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes; there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying. There shall be no more pain, for the former things have passed away.

Revelation 21:4

And in Jesus he showed what his love for us is like. The evil existing (other than God), that caused division between us and God (and each other), he decided to experience - real division - in order to remove the blame put on us for sinning: he experienced his separation by dying all alone, knowing that his shed blood would cover all sin. And right there, in the midst, of this very personal suffering for us, he also showed his heart not just for those who had just done him harm and wrong, but to all by saying,

Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do.

Luke 23:34b

Is that really the evil god you were picturing?

I have a question for those who have up till now made this excuse mentioned:

Do you think these famous scientists from whose work we have benefitted were lazy to believe in the Creation by God of all things?

Isaac Newton³
       Lord Kelvin (William Thomson)
              Michael Faraday
                     Robert Boyle
                            Louis Pasteur
                                   James Clerk Maxwell

(To name just a very few)

       Were they lazy?

For more information I recommend the books I mentioned above, or how about doing The Alpha Course?

              Have you heard of it?

Or, why not, talk to God for yourself?

Here is a prayer you can read and if you mean it, why not say it, speak it out to God?

Dear God, I do not know you.
I do not even know for sure if I am speaking to you or,
just thin air right now?!
But, God, if you are real, and you are good,
as mentioned in this piece of writing,
then I would like to know you.
Will you make yourself real to me?
Please reveal yourself to me.

NOTES:
¹I wrote a letter to Stephen Fry on 27th November 2024 and included a copy of this article.
              Click here to return to associated (same) part of text

²I recommend The Flood Reconsidered by Frederick A. Filby
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Click here to return to associated 2nd mention of "flood" in the text

³See my article GREAT SCIENTISTS AND CREATION or my YouTube video Isaac Newton on Creation (2:17)
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