In a recent post Eric Hunter asked: “Why doesn’t God save the world?” (P&I, 10 February 2025). It’s an interesting question, usually framed under the rubric of “the problem of evil.” Hunter prefers to believe in science rather than to believe in God. So why did he post about God in the first place?
There is a conceptual mirage that confuses the debates about God and the problem of evil – a vastly abstract idea of an Old Man in Sky, all-powerful, all-knowing. It is reasonably asked: How could such a God permit so much evil in the world? Either God is complicit in evil, or he doesn’t exist.
However, this is an infantile conception of God. It belongs to a patriarchal tradition of thinking in which male figures are all powerful, distant father-authorities, stern judges, to be feared rather than loved. In the patriarchal tradition, loving is left to mothers and women. It’s not manly to love, at least in public.
It’s time to dismiss the patriarchal God mirage and to cease “limiting the deity by sex” (as a Scots-Presbyterian minister preached years ago, in a sermon on a Mothers’ Day). Rather than thinking abstractly of a God figure, we need to focus on the founders of the great religious traditions who offer intimations of, and insights into, a profoundly creative or transcendent force mysteriously at work within the universe. They enable us to anticipate how that creative force is working its way into the world through human ingenuity.
For example, in Judaism, think of Moses and the prophets. In Christianity, it is Jesus. In Islam it is the Prophet Muhammad. In Hinduism it is an exuberant panoply of Gods. In Confucianism, it is Confucius (Kongxi). In the animistic religious traditions, it is ancestor spirits and spirits invisibly enlivening the physical world (in traditional Indigenous Australians’ terms it includes the Rainbow Serpent). And then there are the mystics in most religious traditions (think of Hildegard of Bingen) whose experiences of transcendence can be educative, inspiring and suggestive of a world beyond the physical world. As Robert Bellah notes in his book Religion in Human Evolution:
Without the capacity for symbolic transcendence, for seeing the realm of daily life in terms of a realm beyond it […] one would be trapped in a world seen solely as […] dreadful immanence. For a world of daily life seen solely as a world of rational response to anxiety and need is a world of mechanical necessity, not radical autonomy. It is through pointing to other realities, through beyonding, that religion and poetry, and science too in its own way, break the dreadful fatalities of this world of appearances.
Hunter prefers what he identifies as a scientific approach to any theological account of God, thus elevating “science” to the level of an incontestable and exclusive version of the truth. However, this misunderstands that the physical sciences constitute a belief system that is every bit as metaphysically based as any religious belief system. The physical sciences are focused exclusively on interrogating the empirical world – that is, the world we experience through our physical senses. It bypasses (or some of its more fundamentalist advocates even deride) other actual or potential sources of knowledge. The philosophical term for this is positivism (see Leszek Kolakowski, Positivist Philosophy: From Hume to the Vienna Circle).
Intelligent scientists acknowledge that positivism limits their research and theorising to what is observable and measurable. While positivism has been a very effective way of understanding the empirical world, at best it offers a modest explanation of the meaning of life (its ontology). Or it offers a grim view of life’s meaning – a view that states all life forms are purely a mixture of accidentally constructed physical attributes whose ultimate extinction is inevitable when the sun finally dies, or when the universe implodes, or when climate change wreaks its horrific vengeance on humankind. At this level, it can be seen to underpin a deeply cynical ontology that aligns with some of the bleakest views of what it means to be human in a complex and infinite universe. It is an ontology seemingly shared by men like Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Benjamin Netanyahu among others.
Despite his belief in science, Hunter appears unsettled by the fact that if God were to exist, he (or they) should be condemned for allowing the problem of evil to exist at all. There are numerous theological debates about this that can’t be dealt with here. But it is a cheap shot and one that massively undervalues the notion of free will – the notion that humans are in charge of their own destiny and even though God has “spoken through the prophets” they continue to chomp on the apple that the tempting serpent proffered Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. (I’m playing with an allegory here; in case I’m mistaken for speaking literally.)
The fact is that the problem of evil is not a God problem at all. It is a human problem. Consider the resources today that are spent on preparations for war through, for example, the “military-industrial complex” in the United States (and its equivalent in other countries, including Australia). The combined budgets underpinning those preparations (and conduct) of war could easily and permanently eradicate poverty, famine, and pretty much all human suffering across the globe.
And there are other myriad woes affecting our world: the grotesque inequality that we see with a few multi-trillionaires owning more capital than 90% of the global population and using it for their own pleasures; the realities of famines, poverty, disease that afflict so many people in the “global south”, and increasingly within the rich countries too; the hideous use of torture, imprisonment and capital punishments in far too many jurisdictions around the globe. The list is endless. And the fact is that not one of these woes is beyond the capacity of humans to resolve, if only we could work together compassionately to make a peaceful and joyful world.
There is no doubt that the problem of God is a profoundly disturbing problem. Why is there something rather than nothing? What is the poet Gerard Manly Hopkins referring to when he writes of “dearest freshness deep down things”? What is the philosopher-theologian Paul Tillich saying when he speaks of the “ground of being” and the “depth of existence”? These are matters that deserve deep thought and creative responses. Blaming a non-existent abstract God for the problem of evil is simply a distraction. You don’t need to be religious to understand that life — all lives — are always sacred. But it helps.
Dr Allan Patience is an honorary fellow in political science in the University of Melbourne.