Sort it out, God

Time for a new strategy

This piece may sound like it was written by a 13 year old, or Ricky Gervais.

Around three quarters of the world’s population believe in a god and most of them believe in God with a capital G - 2.3 billion Christians, 2 billion Muslims, 10 million Jews. You’ve got about 1.2 billion Hindus, 300 million Buddhists and 200 million other religions. Meanwhile 1.9 billion have no religion.

And yet the world is struggling. There are a number of existential threats looming - nuclear war, climate heating, destruction by AI, a new global pandemic. There’s no obvious correlation between good behaviour and good outcomes on Earth. Maybe all these good people who die young or suffer unjustly in their lives get their rewards in the afterlife, and all those rich, bad men get permanently pronged with pitchforks in the fires of hell. But as yet there’s no photographic evidence. You gotta have faith.

Why does an all powerful God allow all the suffering in the world? See this famous angry tirade against God by Stephen Fry in conversation with an appalled cleric. “Bone cancer in children, what’s that about? How dare you? How dare you create a world in which there is such misery that is not our fault?”

It’s almost as if we were just another species that God has no interest in, like primates, dying from disease and violence just like them.

So what is God playing at?

Without wanting or being able to get into theological debate, it seems to me there are the following possible scenarios:

1 There is no God and there never was one

Our world assembled itself step by step over several billion years, though we are not quite sure how it started. Advocates of intelligent design have argued that the possibility of such a complex would as ours being created by accident is so improbable that it is like a tornado blowing through a junkyard and assembling a Boeing 747. Now we know why its safety record is so poor. This “junkyard tornado” argument is probably fallacious though.

There’s not much hard evidence out there that God exists - just a few old books, a few neurodiverse folk over the years whom God or the Virgin Mary has visited, a cloth with a faint image of Jesus on it and a few weeping statues. It’s more of a vibes thing. The best evidence I have come across is on my recent visit to Kitzbuhel in Austria, walking in the mountains then stopping for an ice cold beer and Kaiserschmarrn. Could such a paradise simply evolve from a bunch of enzymes and amino acids? There must have been a divine hand in there somewhere.

2 God is dead

Most arguments in favour of God’s existence tend to stress the world’s creation rather than its current state. God’s last overt intervention in the world was the life, death and resurrection of Jesus over 2,000 years ago. Since then he’s been pretty low key to the point of invisibility.

My personal belief is that the world is a terrarium for some giant child in a different dimension from us, of a size and nature that we cannot possibly comprehend. But the child got bored with it and left us to our own self-destructive devices. I admit there’s just as little evidence for this theory as there is for scenario 4 - and unlike scenario 4 there’s not even an old middle eastern book supporting it.

3 God exists, but is not all-powerful

This theory sees a good God who battles constantly against Satan and demons in the world. But the evidence is he’s currently struggling - the dark is rising.

People may still worship God to achieve (checks notes): “a deep-seated sense of purpose and meaning, as a response to God's greatness and love, gratitude for blessings and redemption, a way to fulfil their inherent potential to be connected to their Creator, and a belief that they were made to worship Him”.

But the old reason for going to church, as an insurance policy for you to make sure God doesn’t punish you in this world or the next, that’s not so persuasive in this scenario. It’s like turning up to support your once-great football club undergoing difficult times, like Manchester United. There’s no guarantee of future glory, no matter how great God used to be. Faith with scant reward. On current results, Satan is slaying it, and God is losing to Grimsby on penalties.

4 God still exists, and is all-powerful

This is the one that three-quarters of us believe. So let’s go with the ask-the-audience answer. Final answer.

So what is he playing at, faffing around mysteriously when there is so much misery in the world. Donald Trump? Why create him in the first place, let alone map out a life of wholly unmeritorious luxury and power for him?

I am a religious sceptic because of the lack of hard evidence for God’s existence, the Alps and Kaiserschmarrn excepted. Why doesn’t an all-powerful God just tell us he’s there? Not with mysterious signs, but a straightforward booming announcement from the sky, commandeering all TV channels and internet sites at the same time, so that we can all re-watch clips of it on Tiktok and Youtube to be sure it happened?

Religious people say that he doesn't announce his existence to everyone because it would compromise free will. A direct, undeniable revelation would force belief and eliminate the freedom to choose a relationship with God, turning genuine love into coerced obedience.

I disagree. I don’t stop loving someone when I find out they exist - the exact reverse in fact. And God can announce himself but doesn’t need to get all heavy on us with the “coerced obedience”. He loves us and is making the world good for us. We’d still have the freedom to choose a relationship with him or ignore him. We’d just be absolutely sure he existed which surely isn’t a bad thing. It would just mean there were very few non-believers getting sent to hell - again, that’s a good thing, it must be getting pretty crowded.

God is perfect of course, but if he were judged by modern parenting standards you’d identify some areas for improvement. Old Testament God, if we are to believe the accounts we have, comes across as a stern, unloving disciplinarian who was surprisingly insecure and thin-skinned, constantly craving affirmation of his children’s devotion and occasionally exploding in vengeful rage. He seems to have been convinced right from the Garden of Eden fiasco that his kids were wrong ‘uns, and made many of their lives pretty grim, despite having a few favourites from time to time. Though even the Jews, his chosen people, have endured a pretty rough ride.

New Testament God’s parenting technique has been very hands off, to the point of neglect. He did the resurrection and now he’s letting us make our own mistakes. “No. I gave them all this, I did all this for them, and now it’s up to them if they want to make a mess of it” he’s saying, sitting in his celestial armchair, arms folded and lips pursed, deaf to the entreaties of his tearful wife (or infinity partner).

God, we need guidance. I’m assuming you are a good being who wants to make things better for us on this planet, and that you are not drawing any perverse “I told you so” satisfaction from the current shitshow.

I humbly beseech you to be a bit less unbending, perhaps a little less stubborn. Staying hidden and letting people find you is still getting you plenty of believers, but the world is not a better place for it. Even your believers can leave a lot to be desired. For example nobody loves the bible more than Donald Trump, according to him, and yet he acts in total contradiction to the vast majority of its teachings.

Your strategy has maybe been too rigid. The 3-4-1-2 may have worked before but right now you don’t have the players for the system. Time for a simpler, more direct approach. God knows You know, we need it.

Look forward to hearing from you.