By Charles Templeton was a fellow evangelist to Billy Graham for a while. A chapter from his book Farewell to God: My Reasons for Rejecting the Christian Faith
Is there anyone who has not asked some of the following questions?
If there is an omnipotent and loving God, why does he permit earthquakes, hurricanes, droughts, and other natural disasters to kill indiscriminately tens of thousands of men, women, and children?
How could a loving God originate as part of his creation such horrible illnesses as encephalitis, cerebral palsy, the various cancers, leprosy, Alzheimer’s, and other incurable diseases, and permit them indiscriminately to afflict tens of thousands of men, women, and children?
When an earthquake in Turkey buries thousands alive, when a typhoon drowns 150,000 Pakistanis over a weekend, when a drought in Somalia kills thousands of men, women, and children by starvation, why does a loving God not do something to help the helpless?
How could a loving God create an endless hell and consign the majority of the world’s people to it, year after year, century after century, simply because they do not worship him?
WHAT HAS BEEN CALLED “the problem of evil” has puzzled men and women of every generation in every part of the world. Why, in a world created by a loving and omnipotent God, are disease, suffering, and death an inescapable part of life? What is the reason for it? The theologians have attempted to address the question and have offered a variety of answers, but none of them are convincing.
Most of the horrors cannot simply be attributed to or blamed on humankind’s sinfulness – so many of those who hunger and suffer and die are decent men, women, and children. Some are babes in arms. When an earthquake or a plague devastates an area, killing thousands and leaving tens of thousands injured and other thousands homeless, or when a prolonged drought turns productive soil into a desert, the people stricken by these natural disasters are not the wicked getting what they deserve; they are more often than not the poor, the defenceless, and the children.
We have come to understand something about natural disasters and are sometimes able to ameliorate their impact, but we are not the cause of them and can do little if anything to control them. A meteorologist may accurately predict the onset of a hurricane, a geologist may warn of an imminent earthquake, but neither can keep them from happening. They are, quite simply, beyond human control.
The insurance companies continue to call them acts of God.
THERE IS ALSO A host of personal disasters over which we have little or no control.
They include incapacitating illnesses, genetic defects, metabolic disorders, and those physiological or psychological aberrations that produce such horrors as Down’s syndrome in the newborn and Alzheimer’s in the aging. The victims and those who love them often suffer piteously. A foetus may be hopelessly afflicted before it is born. Some have been called “human vegetables.” Others cannot breathe without a respirator. Many of the aged are afflicted with brain or motor degeneration. Flesh and bone diminish, the body wasting away to the point where the individual is as much as dead.
Indeed, in some cases they would be better off dead.
BUT THERE ARE OTHER kinds of suffering, many that have nothing to do with natural disasters or with disease. A member of the congregation of which I was the minister, a zestful, intelligent, and beautiful woman in her early twenties, was so afflicted. I officiated at her wedding. The man she married was personable, intelligent, and apparently successful in business, but he proved to be an inveterate liar and physically abusive. And he deserted her a few months into the marriage when he learned she was pregnant – emptying their joint bank account as he left.
The pregnancy palliated her sorrow somewhat. The life growing within her gave her hope and purpose and a reason to live.
I visited her in hospital the day her child was born. She was heavily sedated, and when roused by the nurse looked at me through vacant eyes. When I held her hand and spoke to her, she made no response. The baby, I was informed by the nurse, had been born hydrocephalic and would die within days. I was shown the infant: a boy, quivering spasmodically in a respirator, the upper part of his head twice normal size and visibly pulsing with the heartbeat.
Later that week I performed the child’s funeral. It was private. I can’t recall what I said – I’m sure it was all the obligatory things: vapid statements about how God’s ways are not ours and are often mysterious and beyond human understanding; but that we must have faith in his divine purpose, believing that, one day, it will all become clear …
Afterwards, I said nothing. I simply held the woman in my arms, trying to will strength into her while she wept great, shuddering sobs. I hadn’t the wisdom – or the temerity – to offer the usual explanations.
Her tragedy was soul-destroying. But consider for a moment the millions of children in the Third World who are cursed from the day they are born: by their sickly bodies, their indifferent parents, and their place of birth. They grow up in slums, in many instances lacking home and family and affection. They suffer from those deficiencies and illnesses caused by malnutrition and the poor health of the mother. They are raised in poverty, clothed in rags, illiterate for want of schooling, and from early childhood, forced by events to scratch out a living any way they can.
Millions of children – yes, millions – are doomed from the day they are born.
SOME YEARS AGO A missionary friend told me of a girl who came into the world in Calcutta. From her birth and throughout her lifetime she never knew one moment of affection. She was born onto a filthy piece of cardboard in a filthy inner-city dump. Her mother was a teenage prostitute. She suffered from rickets from birth, and as a child of four was put onto the streets to beg. From the age of ten, the man who had fathered her sold her daily to various men for a few rupees. She was dead at the age of fourteen from pneumonia complicated by syphilis and malnutrition.
Hearing about her I was reminded of the little song we sang in Sunday school,
Jesus loves the little children,
All the children of the world.
Black and yellow, red and white,
They are precious in his sight …
CARE International reports that some five million children die each year from cholera simply because they lack clean water to drink. The World Health Organization estimates that forty thousand people a day die from preventable diseases. Thousands of others die in famines such as those in Eritrea, the Sudan, Somalia, and elsewhere. Who can ever erase from their memory the pictures on television showing these men, women and, most pathetically, children – human beings literally starving to death. Mothers with babies, whose limbs are like bundles of dry sticks, held to a dry breast. Children without the energy to cry or raise a hand to drive the flies from their eyes and the corners of their mouths.
Yes, the politicians and the feuding armies and the various warlords in the region are partly to blame – often they appropriate for their own use the shipments of food and medicine sent to the area by foreign governments or charitable institutions – but these children did not choose to be born into this world nor were they or their parents the cause of the drought.
It is sometimes argued that these innocents suffer not so much from nature’s failure as from man’s inhumanity to man. But surely both are true. Yes, many of them die because evil men do evil, but beyond that and apart from it they die because there has been no rain! – something over which neither they nor their parents nor the politicians nor anyone else has any control.
And all the while, other people in other parts of the world are dying by the tens of thousands because there is too much rain!
When, in 1989, Hurricane Hugo swept through the Caribbean, it killed hundreds of Jamaicans and left thousands homeless. Every year there are reports from various parts of the world of towns and settlements wiped out by high winds or by what are called “storm surges” – masses of water driven before an oncoming hurricane. Who can forget the reports of the onslaught of the elements that swept across Bangladesh in the spring of 1991, killing 125,000 men, women, and children and leaving ten million homeless.
It was not the first time it had happened.
Nor will it be the last.
Who was not moved to pity in December 1988 by the newspaper and television reports of those Armenian refugees who, driven from their homeland by their traditional enemies, the Turks, fled to the apparent safety of Azerbaijan only to have a violent earthquake kill fifty thousand of them?
THE PERVASIVENESS OF pain and suffering and death is equally horrific in the animal world. It is a world pervaded by – based on – suffering and death.
According to the first chapter of Genesis, before God made man he created animals: the great and lesser beasts, the birds, the reptiles, the fish, and “all manner of creeping things.” They are all in different degrees sensate creatures. They manifest fear, they feel pain, they suffer and die. Their life and death is part of what has been called nature’s grand design.
This being so, one is bound to ask why the loving God found it necessary to base the sustaining of the life of so many of his creatures on killing and devouring? Surely it would not be beyond the competence of an omniscient deity to create an animal world that could be sustained and perpetuated without suffering and death.
Why does God’s grand design require creatures with teeth designed to crush spines or rend flesh, claws fashioned to seize and tear, venom to paralyze, mouths to suck blood, coils to constrict and smother – even expandable jaws so that prey may be swallowed whole and alive?
There are three basic types of animal: the herbivorous, the carnivorous, and the omnivorous. The herbivorous ingest plant life, the carnivorous subsist mostly on flesh, and the omnivorous – which includes us – on anything that has nutritive value and can be ingested.
As a consequence:
On land: the big cats kill zebras or wildebeest or impala or any creature they can bring down. Hyenas and jackals kill anything they can overwhelm by numbers. Crocodiles kill anything driven to their waterhole by thirst. Wolves kill hares. Grizzly bears kill salmon. Foxes kill birds and burrowers. So do snakes, which also kill larger prey through the injection of venom or by squeezing the life out of them or by swallowing them alive.
In the waters: whales kill krill, killer whales kill seals, sharks kill porpoises, porpoises kill mullet, sea-lions kill penguins, conger eels kill squid, bass kill fingerlings, mullet kill minnows.
From the air: eagles kill salmon, hawks kill rodents, vultures eat carrion, gulls eat anything they can ingest, alive or dead. On and on, day and night, the maiming, killing, and devouring continues, with all the omnivorous or predatory creatures “doing what comes naturally.”
The grim and inescapable reality is that all life is predicated on death. Every carnivorous creature must kill and devour another creature. It has no option. Meanwhile, all the herbivorous creatures engorge themselves on grasses and grains and berries so that – albeit unwittingly – they may provide nutrition for the carnivores through what is called the food chain.
This is the way the world works. All life is predicated on death. Ingest some living thing or die of starvation.
The reader of these lines – unless he or she is a vegetarian – is alive because a steer or lamb or pig or calf or chicken was butchered and brought to market. In one large Canadian city 12,500 cattle, 8,000 pigs, 2,700 sheep and 50,000 chickens are slaughtered every day so that we omnivorous humans may live.
Nor is mercy admitted to the occasion. When animals kill, as often as not the victim’s death is painful and protracted. When a pack of hyenas or wild dogs runs down a zebra they first cut it from the herd and then bring it down through sheer numbers. No individual could accomplish the kill. The prey is seized by the muzzle. Another member of the pack clamps onto the tail or fastens on a haunch, and the remainder swarm in to bring the victim to the ground. Hyenas cannot do as a lion might, break the neck or close off the windpipe, and as a consequence their victims die slowly. Usually, because it is the area of easiest access, predators go in through the belly, often beginning to devour the innards while the victim is still alive.
The predators – at whatever level and whatever their method of killing – are not evil; they are doing what they were born to do. It is the way the world works, and has been across millions of years as various species of mammals, birds, fish, snakes, and insects – and even humans – have perpetuated themselves by eating one another.
Nature is, in Tennyson’s vivid phrase, “red in tooth and claw,” and life is a carnival of blood.
The grand design also includes the creation of parasites: worms, fleas, ticks, lice are themselves unable to kill, but following their destiny, are capable of penetrating the skin, burrowing into the body, or flourishing in the lungs, bloodstream, or digestive system, often destroying the health of and sometimes killing the host creature, and generally making life miserable.
On an even more minuscule scale are the bacteria, the viruses, the aberrant cells that attack the body or the organs or the brain, and the malignant cells that stimulate abnormal growth or the development of diseased tissue.
CONSIDER FOR A MOMENT the epidemics or plagues that in every age have devastated the population in various parts of the world. The word plague is used to describe any contagious, malignant, epidemic disease. The bubonic plague and the black plague – so named because multiple haemorrhages beneath the skin turned it black – were two forms of the same disease, one transmitted by fleas from infected rats, the other by infected squirrels, rabbits, and chipmunks. The afflicted died in three to four days. And there was no cure.
The earliest visitation of which there is a record took place in Europe in 430 B.C. and began in Athens. An outbreak in Rome in the third century B.C. killed as many as five thousand men, women, and children daily.
The most widespread plague in Western history began in Constantinople in 1334 and moved through Europe – spread in part by the returning Crusaders who had been off killing infidels to the greater glory of God. It is estimated by historians that, in fewer than twenty years, that particular plague killed as much as three-quarters of the population of Europe and Asia. In untreated cases – and there was little if any treatment available – the mortality rate ran as high as 90 per cent.
After Columbus “discovered” the Americas he was followed there by the Spanish conquistadores, who brought with them various European diseases. The Latin American Indians had no antibodies to protect them and sickened and died in uncounted numbers. In Brazil alone, the pre-conquest population of 2.4 million was reduced to slightly more than 200,000.
Today, we are facing a relatively new international plague – AIDS. The cause is the HIV virus. There is no known cure. The virus spreads by passing directly from the blood of an infected person into the blood of an uninfected person – or, less commonly, through semen or saliva. In North America it is primarily (although not exclusively) a homosexual disease, but in parts of Africa, where the disease is rampant, it most commonly afflicts heterosexuals, men, women, and their children alike.
Let me add to this list of physical afflictions that degeneration of the human brain commonly called Alzheimer’s disease.
Alzheimer’s is a geriatric illness that diminishes and even erases memory, and in its late stages obliterates any sense of personal identity and family relationships. The Alzheimer’s sufferer may manifest few physical symptoms, may not be confined to bed, and may be able to function in many ways, but – and this is surely the ultimate loss – he no longer knows who he is!
In its later stages, the victim of the disease cannot be permitted to leave his place of residence alone because he cannot recall where he lives, those he lives with, or even his own name, and within a city block from home can become hopelessly lost.
How by any reach of the imagination can this bizarre and tragic affliction serve any good end? It commonly destroys marriages, parenthood, friendships, and a sense of family – the things on which most loving relationships are predicated – and replaces them with quarrelsomeness, rancour, resentment, estrangement, despair, and finally, death.
How, one must ask, could a loving Heavenly Father so order it? Alzheimer’s is not a punishment for wrongdoing; it does not afflict only the wicked. It seems to be genetically destined and strikes indiscriminately and without apparent cause both the decent and the reprobate.
Perhaps the worst aspect of the illness is that it destroys not only the victim but the victim’s loved ones. For the families of Alzheimer’s sufferers, it is as though the loved one had died and been resurrected as an irascible look-alike stranger. Love and affection has been replaced by estrangement, suspicion, and resentment. Somewhere in the brain of the individual the past has been erased.
HOW COULD A LOVING and omnipotent God create such horrors as we have been contemplating? Jesus said: “Are not five sparrows sold for a penny, and not one of them is forgotten before God; and are you not of more value than many sparrows?” But if God grieves over the death of one sparrow, how could even his eternal spirit bear the sickness, suffering, and death of the multiplied millions of men, women, children, animals, birds, and other sensate creatures, in every part of the world, in every century since time began?
Especially when he would know that it all stems from his creativity!
The inescapable answer is that “a loving God” could not possibly be the author of the horrors we have been describing – horrors that continue every day, have continued since time began, and will continue as long as life exists. It is an inconceivable tale of suffering and death, and because the tale is fact – is, in truth, the history of the world – it is obvious that there cannot be a loving God.
Templeton, Charles (2011-01-14). Farewell to God: My Reasons for Rejecting the Christian Faith (Kindle Location 2821). McClelland & Stewart. Kindle Edition.
Charles Templeton was a fellow evangelist to Billy Graham for a while
Naturalism and Religious Experience 