On God: An Uncommon Conversation Read Free Page A

All-Good, then God is not All-Powerful. To answer this contradiction, theologians have been tying themselves into philosophical knots for the last ten centuries.
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    Much of your thinking seems to be premised on the event of the Holocaust. I wonder if there had never been Hitler, would your notion of a limited, embattled God have been conceived? Is Hitler the final thing that pushed you into that belief?
    Since I’m Jewish, the fair answer to that is probably yes. But there still would have been the gulags. And the failure of Bolshevism. The noblest social idea to come along, the most intense and advanced form of socialism, proved to be a monstrosity. That alone would be enough. Then came a capitalist contribution—the atom bomb, the fact that one hundred thousand people could be wiped out at a stroke. And this in the early stages of nuclear development. So if you eliminate all three of those, Hitler, gulags, atom bombs, then maybe I couldn’t have come to these ideas. But historically speaking, you can’t perform such an excision. Those three horrors dominate the twentieth century—not to mention the trench warfare of the First World War, which, indeed, accelerated the growth of communism.
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    The whole problem of evil—Voltaire heard about the earthquakes in Lisbon in 1755 and said the destruction proved there was no God. Throughout our history, humans have questioned God whenever there was a disaster—of course, many of these were natural disasters. That was bad enough. But, of course, why would God allow a natural disaster? You can’t blame any of that on humans. That was Voltaire’s point. At least we can blame the Holocaust on human evil or the Devil—in part, at least. We can’t blame an earthquake in Lisbon in which one hundred thousand people were killed—we can’t blame that on human beings.
    No.
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    So that forced many philosophical thinkers of the Enlightenment into declaring, “That’s it. God can’t possibly exist.” But if you take a step back, you can say, Maybe we’re looking at too small a scale. Yes, in the concentration camps, eleven million people were exterminated with untold suffering. The suffering was so great it’s impossible for us to conceive of it. To anyone who’s ever looked at the photographs or read the accounts, it’s horrifying to an extreme degree. But maybe, in the larger scheme of things, God was allowing this to happen to send a message to humanity on how far we have slipped, and He was even willing to sacrifice his Chosen People, or a great number of them, in order to send a message to humanity that it was time to embrace love, compassion, justice, whatever had to be done. Strong medicine, I’m saying. More and more—the earthquake in Lisbon doesn’t do it, okay, we’ll have trench warfare. And then we’ll have gulags, the Holocaust, then the threat of the atomic bomb. And indeed, the atomic bomb was dropped, but after all we have not had a nuclear holocaust—we backed away. Maybe we’ve learned, and we’ve backed away from the brink of a nuclear disaster and spared the world.
    I think we have. It’s possible that even the Devil was appalled by the bombs. Nuclear warfare could destroy all of his technology.
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    So maybe it worked.
    Let’s go back to the earthquake in Lisbon. Let me give you my notion of God as the Artist—that is, a God limited in power. For example, why are there volcanoes? I would answer: because God is not a perfect engineer. That makes as much sense to me as God punishing us and punishing us with dubious compensatory result. It’s very hard to argue that these acts of nature engender more than a passing shiver of religiosity in most people.

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    God, the Devil, and Humankind
    MICHAEL LENNON:
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