Getting away with murder.

Though what I will describe in this post is probably irrelevant for most people, you may find it interesting as a worked example of my foolishness. Just to back that up, in case anybody had been duped by the fact that I do discuss philosophical issues into thinking that I'm any good at it, I'm not. You should be able to see that by the end of this post.

After I lost my faith, I remained confident that evangelical Christianity (the brand I had happened to hold) was still coherent, I just no longer believed that it was true. I knew there were objections, and was sure they could be worked around. A week and a bit ago I went to a talk and realised that there were two objections for which, although I'd thought I knew how to deal with them, I didn't. I'd just assumed that I'd already worked it out sometime, and not thought about it much.

Both objections are to the idea that the Bible is in any sense wholely true. The first refers to God's recorded act of genocide. Again and again the Bible says that God is good, so how could He do such a morally reprehensible thing? The second refers to the promised return of Jesus. Jesus Himself was pretty sure that it would be within his generation, as was Paul. The author of the book of revelation referred to one of Jesus' parables to give an impression of even greater urgency. But it hasn't happened.

I discussed the first objection with the speaker and with the folk at a Bible study group I attend, and I think I can now see a way around it. There is no getting around the fact that the Bible claims God committed genocide; the question is whether He was morally in the wrong. A crude application of the idea that moral principles apply to all persons equally would say that since it's wrong for Adolf Hitler to commit genocide, it's also wrong for God. But that misses an important idea; that the context and not simply the action must be taken into account. The fact that it is morally OK for a policeman to handcuff a prisoner doesn't make it morally OK for the prisoner to handcuff the policeman. The equality only says that if the whoever is now a prisoner were at some point to become a policeman, and vice versa, then it would be OK for them to do the handcuffing. To apply the principle, you need a sufficient similarity of context. This opens up a grey area, but most moral situations are so far into the black or the white that in practice this isn't a huge problem.

Now, the context here, according to the Bible, is that God is the creator and people are the creation. This huge asymmetry in the context means that we cannot say that an action is immoral for God just because it would be immoral for anybody else. Of course, we now face a different problem. The Bible claims that God is recognisably good. The principles I mentioned a few days ago only tell us that an action of God is good if it is in His own ultimate interest. However, that God shows His goodness by acting in His own interest is exactly what the Bible seems to claim. So how is genocide in God's interest? Nowhere is it claimed that God is a racist or a sadist. Instead the given reasons are tied to God's practical purposes and self-expression. I don't claim to be able to see that massacre was what was best for God, but then I don't have a good enough understanding of the world to see that it wasn't.

I thought that all of this could be circumvented by looking at the recorded personality of Jesus. After all, Jesus is supposed to be God, and most people who wore WWJD wristbands didn't think indiscriminate slaughter was high up on the list. But though he never did anything of the kind himself whilst he was on Earth, Jesus seems to have been convinced that God had wiped out nations. So Jesus' behaviour on Earth was at a higher standard. But it's reasonable to think of this as one of the things that goes along with the incarnation. That is, in becoming human, Jesus gave up his right to treat other humans as property, and acted as if He were as morally accountable as anybody else. This is a special case; we can't expect God in general to behave like that.

I still have no idea how to resolve the second objection. But since I also had no idea how to resolve the first one for a while, I have good reason to keep looking.