Discussions of the weakness of religion sometimes end up attempting to address God’s motives with questions that start with an observation about God’s character, then question that observation based on what is seen in the world.
These challenges often take the form of: “Why would a loving God allow…?” or something similar.
The idea being that the characteristic in question, in this case a loving nature, is incompatible with what we see in the world around us.
One of the common responses to this from Christians is essentially that God’s ways are unfathomable to us, so we should not expect to understand why some things happen. However, this approach is often rejected, being seen as something of a copout – avoiding the question altogether rather than addressing it.
However, note how reasonable this answer seems when talking about human behavior. It’s well known that we need to be careful when trying to understand someone else’s motives because there are so many factors we don’t know.
We even have an idiom for this: “Don’t judge a man until you’ve walked a mile in his shoes.” The idea is that someone else’s experiences can be so different from ours and so impactful, that we shouldn’t assume we know what motivates them without deep knowledge about them – the kind of knowledge that could only result from sharing those experiences.
Compare this to the previous discussion about judging God’s motives. For some reason we feel that it’s more reasonable to do that, that acknowledging the same level of uncertainty that we do for people, is somehow inappropriate.
This goes even further when we realize that we’re not talking about another person here, but a being who is profoundly more unknown than another human.
With people, we can imagine the kinds of experiences they might have had and how they might affect their perspectives. But there’s no way for us to do the same with a being that relates closely to billions of people, works over a timespan that includes eternity, and deals with matters that go beyond everything we understand in nature.
Why should we expect such a being to be any easier to understand than a human being?
For myself, although allowing uncertainty is sometimes uncomfortable, it seems like the only rational approach. In fact, it seems that not allowing that uncertainty is itself a copout, attractive because it allows one to avoid the discomfort of being unsure.
Kelvin's Clouds 