The Trump Card

The trump card for the atheist, it seems, is the claim that the God of the Bible is evil. You don't have to look at the debate very long to find them pointing to the command of God to wipe out the Canaanites and the Amorites. Look at the Flood. God killed the entire human race except for eight people. That means that men, women, and children were all drowned by God. "Clearly," they hold, "that portrays God as evil." Then there are those nasty commands of Scripture, like "He who reviles father or mother must surely die," and the fact that Jesus agrees (Mark 7:10), and we're left with a mean, spiteful, evil God.

Christians have offered lots of answers over the years. Many of them are good answers. The part that puzzles me is not the Christian position on these "problems," but the atheist position. You see, if the premise is that there is no God, the argument falls apart. Allow me to illustrate from my birding experience. A few months ago a hawk pounced on a quail in my back yard. It was amazing to watch. The predator pinned his prey to the ground and simply stood there. The poor meal struggled to get free but was trapped by the powerful claws and sheer weight of the hawk. Then, without waiting for the quail to die, the hawk started pulling apart his meal for the day. My wife was appalled. I was impressed. But neither of us thought, "That's immoral." It didn't occur to us to think that the hawk was being evil. It's not evil for an animal to kill another animal. It's nature. So, strip out "God" from the equation, and humans are simply another animal on the animal chain. In this position, why is it evil for one human animal to kill another human animal?

The argument is tossed out there as if it's a done deal. "It's wrong of God to kill human beings," as if the idea of killing human beings is a de facto evil. Everyone knows it. End of argument. Do they? In gang mentality it is good to kill people from rival gangs. In cannibal mentality, killing another human is providing a meal. In much of Islam it is godly to kill people from rival religions. Logically, if humans are animals on the animal chain, then killing a human is no more immoral than killing an ant. It's just degrees. In fact, some evolutionists have a term for the belief that it's wrong to kill humans, but not wrong to kill other animals; they call it speciesism. "You guys are showing unwarranted bias toward your species," they would say. Logically, they're right.

So the atheist plays his trump card. "God is evil for killing people." Then he removes God. Suddenly it cannot be evil for a biochemical bag to terminate the existence of another biochemical bag. And the problem goes away. Indeed, without a moral law giver, it cannot be maintained that there is a moral law, and all the complaints we hear about how "evil" religion is have to go away. It becomes self-contradictory.

Okay, so maybe it's not a very good trump card. But, trust me, they'll keep on playing it, and Christians will keep on providing reasons why God isn't evil for doing what he did. They won't stop playing the card, nor will they accept the answers. At some point you have to wonder if there's a point to this game.