The Rev. T. Rhondda Williams, in _Shall We Understand the Bible?_ shows
very clearly the gradual evolution of the idea of God amongst the Jews
from a lower to a higher conception.
Having dealt with the lower conception, let us now consider the higher.
The highest conception of God is supposed to be the Christian conception
of God as a Heavenly Father. This conception credits the Supreme Being
with supernal tenderness and mercy--"God is Love." That is a very
lofty, poetical, and gratifying conception, but it is open to one fatal
objection--it is not true.
For this Heavenly Father, whose nature is Love, is also the All-knowing
and All-powerful Creator of the world.
Being All-powerful and All-knowing, He has power, and had always power,
to create any kind of world He chose. Being a God of Love, He would not
choose to create a world in which hate and pain should have a place.
But there is evil in the world. There has been always evil in the world.
Why did a good and loving God allow evil to enter the world? Being
All-Powerful and All-knowing, He could have excluded evil. Being good,
He would hate evil. Being a God of Love He would wish to exclude evil.
Why, then, did He permit evil to enter?
The world is full of sorrow, of pain, of hatred and crime, and strife
and war. All life is a perpetual deadly struggle for existence. The law
of nature is the law of prey.
If God is a tender, loving, All-knowing, and All-powerful Heavenly
Father, why did He build a world on cruel lines? Why does He permit evil
and pain to continue? Why does He not give the world peace, and health,
and happiness, and virtue?
In the New Testament Christ compares God, as Heavenly Father to Man, to
an earthly father, representing God as more benevolent and tender: "How
much more your Father which is in heaven?"
We may, then, on the authority of the Founder of Christianity, compare
the Christian Heavenly Father with the human father. And in doing so
we shall find that Christ was not justified in claiming that God is a
better father to Man than Man is to his own children. We shall find that
the poetical and pleasing theory of a Heavenly Father, and God of Love
is a delusion.
"Who among you, if his child asks bread, will give him a stone?" None
amongst us. But in the great famines, as in India and Russia, God allows
millions to die of starvation. These His children pray to Him for bread.
He leaves them to die. Is it not so?
God made the sunshine, sweet children, gracious women; green hills, blue
seas; music, laughter, love, humour; the palm tree, the hawthorn buds,
the "sweet-briar wind"; the nightingale and the rose.
But God made the earthquake, the volcano, the cyclone; the shark,
the viper, the tiger, the octopus, the poison berry; and the deadly
loathsome germs of cholera, consumption, typhoid, smallpox, and the
black death. God has permitted famine, pestilence, and war. He has
permitted martyrdom, witch-burning, slavery, massacre, torture, and
human sacrifice. He has for millions of years looked down upon the
ignorance, the misery, the crimes of men. He has been at once the
author and the audience of the pitiful, unspeakable, long-drawn and
far-stretched tragedy of earthly life. Is it not so?
For thousands of years--perhaps for millions of years--the generations
of men prayed to God for help, for comfort, for guidance. God was deaf,
and dumb, and blind.
Men of science strove to read the riddle of life; to guide and to
succour their fellow creatures. The priests and followers of God
persecuted and slew these men of science. God made no sign. Is it not
so?
To-day men of science are trying to conquer the horrors of cancer and
smallpox, and rabies and consumption. But not from Burning Bush nor Holy
Hill, nor by the mouth of priest or prophet does our Heavenly Father
utter a word of counsel or encouragement.
Millions of innocent dumb animals have been subjected to the horrible
tortures of vivisection in the frantic endeavours of men to find a
way of escape from the fell destroyers of the human race; and God has
allowed the piteous brutes to suffer anguish, when He could have saved
them by revealing to Man the secret for which he so cruelly sought. Is
it not so?
"Nature is red in beak and claw." On land and in sea the animal creation
chase and maim, and slay and devour each other. The beautiful swallow on
the wing devours the equally beautiful gnat. The graceful flying-fish,
like a fair white bird, goes glancing above the blue magnificence of
the tropical seas. His flight is one of terror; he is pursued by the
ravenous dolphin. The ichneumon-fly lays its eggs under the skin of the
caterpillar. The eggs are hatched by the warmth of the caterpillar's
blood. They produce a brood of larvae which devour the caterpillar
alive. A pretty child dances on the village green. Her feet crush
creeping things: there is a busy ant or blazoned beetle, with its back
broken, writhing in the dust, unseen. A germ flies from a stagnant
pool, and the laughing child, its mother's darling, dies dreadfully
of diphtheria. A tidal wave rolls landward, and twenty thousand human
beings are drowned, or crushed to death. A volcano bursts suddenly into
eruption, and a beautiful city is a heap of ruins, and its inhabitants
are charred or mangled corpses. And the Heavenly Father, who is Love,
has power to save, and makes no sign. Is it not so?
Blindness, epilepsy, leprosy, madness, fall like a dreadful blight
upon a myriad of God's children, and the Heavenly Father gives neither
guidance nor consolation. Only man helps man. Only man pities; only man
_tries_ to save.
Millions of harmless women have been burned as witches. God, our
Heavenly Father, has power to save them. He allows them to suffer and
die.
God knew that those women were being tortured and burnt on a false
charge. He knew that the infamous murders were in His name. He knew
that the whole fabric of crime was due to the human reading of His
"revelation" to man. He could have saved the women; He could have
enlightened their persecutors; He could have blown away the terror, the
cruelty, and the ignorance of His priests and worshippers with a breath.
And He was silent. He allowed the armies of poor women to be tortured
and murdered in His name. Is it not so?
Will you, then, compare the Heavenly Father with a father among men? Is
there any earthly father who would allow his children to suffer as God
allows Man to suffer? If a man had knowledge and power to prevent or
to abolish war and ignorance and hunger and disease; if a man had the
knowledge and the power to abolish human error and human suffering and
human wrong and did not do it, we should call him an inhuman monster, a
cruel fiend. Is it not so?
But God has knowledge and power, and we are asked to regard Him as a
Heavenly Father, and a God of infinite wisdom, and infinite mercy, and
infinite love.
The Christians used to tell us, and some still tell us, that this
Heavenly Father of infinite love and mercy would doom the creatures He
had made to Hell--for their _sins_. That, having created us imperfect,
He would punish our imperfections with everlasting torture in a lake
of everlasting fire. They used to tell us that this good God allowed a
Devil to come on earth and tempt man to his ruin. They used to say this
Devil would win more souls than Christ could win: that there should be
"more goats than sheep."
To escape from these horrible theories, the Christians (some of them)
have thrown over the doctrines of Hell and the Devil.
But without a Devil how can we maintain a belief in a God of love and
kindness? With a good God, and a bad God (or Devil), one might get
along; for then the good might be ascribed to God, and the evil to the
Devil. And that is what the old Persians did in their doctrine of Ormuzd
and Ahrimann. But with no Devil the belief in a merciful and loving
Heavenly Father becomes impossible.
If God blesses, who curses? If God saves, who damns? If God helps, who
harms?
This belief in a "Heavenly Father," like the belief in the perfection of
the Bible, drives its votaries into weird and wonderful positions. For
example, a Christian wrote to me about an animal called the aye-aye. He
said:
There is a little animal called an aye-aye. This animal has
two hands. Each hand has five fingers. The peculiar thing
about these hands is that the middle finger is elongated a great
deal--it is about twice as long as the others. This is to enable
it to scoop a special sort of insect out of special cracks in
the special trees it frequents. Now, how did the finger begin
to elongate? A little lengthening would be absolutely no good,
as the cracks in the trees are 2 inches or 3 inches deep. It
must have varied from the ordinary length to one twice as long
at once. There is no other way. Where does natural selection
come in? In this, as in scores of other instances, it shows
the infinite goodness of God.
Now, how does the creation of this long finger show the "infinite
goodness of God"? The infinite goodness of God to whom? To the animal
whose special finger enables him to catch the insect? Then what about
the insect? Where does he come in? Does not the long finger of the
animal show the infinite badness of God to the insect?
What of the infinite goodness of God in teaching the cholera microbe to
feed on man? What of the infinite goodness of God in teaching the grub
of the ichneumon-fly to eat up the cabbage caterpillar alive?
I see no infinite goodness here, but only the infinite foolishness of
sentimental superstition.
If a man fell into the sea, and saw a shark coming, I cannot fancy him
praising the infinite goodness of God in giving the shark so large a
mouth. The greyhound's speed is a great boon to the greyhound; but it is
no boon to the hare.
But this theory of a merciful, and loving Heavenly Father is vital to
the Christian religion.
Destroy the idea of the Heavenly Father, who is Love, and Christianity
is a heap of ruins. For there is no longer a benevolent God to build our
hopes upon; and Jesus Christ, whose glory is a newer revelation of God,
has not revealed Him truly, as He is, but only as Man fain would believe
Him to be.
And I claim that this Heavenly Father is a myth: that in face of a
knowledge of life and the world we cannot reasonably believe in Him.
There is no Heavenly Father watching tenderly over us, His children. He
is the baseless shadow of a wistful human dream.