The Impossibility of Deity

by Martin L. Bard

All people of faith believe that their gods are good. Many have used the term “The good Lord,” and those who haven’t used it have approved of that expression. This would make us suppose that if there is a god, he must be kind. But one of the many objections we have to the Bible is its portrayal of its god as cruel.

The Bible tells us that its god ordered men to wage wars of extermination. They were to invade the land of other nations and kill all who lived there. Men were commanded by this god to practice human slavery. The biblical deity required his people to engage in religious persecution. They were to stone to death those who followed other gods. We must say that the Bible lies. Shouldn’t a god be only kind and never cruel? Surely, a god would not condemn men and women to eternal pain because of a failure to believe a prescribed doctrine. A god would know that we believe as we must.

However, we also realize that if there is a god, he is intensely cruel. In the spring of 1994, in the small African nation of Rwanda, more than a half-million people were hacked to death during a tribal conflict. This was one of many sickening genocidal events in the terrible history of the world. God did nothing. He who supposedly had the power to prevent all of the suffering hindered none of it. Not one hatchet or machete was arrested in its murderous course. Not one vicious mind was changed. Surely, some wicked intentions could have been altered without the awareness of anyone that a god was at work. Some have protested that a god therefore may have been at work. It is certain that he was not at work to the effect of reducing the horror in Rwanda, because those people were butchered alive. Among them were at least one hundred thousand little children. Perhaps there were many more.

By what great irrationality can we possibly believe that there is a god who, having completely neglected those precious, mutilated children, nevertheless has concern for us? Most of the slaughtered Rwandans were Christians. Was prayer effective for them?

Some will say that their god did not kill those victims, but that the violence was done by men who were influenced by an evil spirit, thought to be Satan or the Devil. However, their god could have prevented the slaughter so easily that, since he did not, we must blame him no less than the perpetrators.

Yet, this god cannot be cruel because he must be kind. The various alternatives are unthinkable. If we had ultimate power we would not permit any suffering. How can it be that a god is less kind than we?

When we consider the magnitude of human suffering and contemplate the oceanic immensity of pain that engulfs the lesser creatures of the earth, we realize that a god that is real must know of it all. If he has the power to end it all without effort or cost or danger to himself, we must conclude that since he prevents none of it he is not only cruel, he is totally cruel. There is no kindness in him, because if there were even a bit of kindness it necessarily would be expressed in the prevention of the anguish of which we are aware. No other consideration could overrule it. That would not be possible.

So, we have a god who is both totally cruel and not totally cruel. We know that he cannot be totally cruel because, if he were, only cruelty and its resultant suffering would be valued at all. There would be no toleration for kindness and joy. Most certainly, if there were a god of total kindness there could be no cruelty and misery in the world. We can understand then, that god of total cruelty would allow no kindness and happiness. All of us necessarily would be engulfed by evil, and yet we are not. Indeed, there is much goodness.

We have a god who is self-contradictory in essence, being totally cruel and not totally cruel. No being can be both totally cruel and not totally cruel, any more than a figure can be both a square and a circle. God is an impossibility. Nothing can contradict itself essentially. It is impossible that a being can exist if this being contradicts itself in essence. The alleged deity is purely imagination. God is an imagined deity. Any benefits attributed to this supposed spirit must be viewed as having purely natural cause.

We must accept that the universe is completely natural. There is nothing which is unnatural or supernatural. There are no spirits. There has never been the slightest evidence of a spirit. Those realities which are often considered to be evidence of a creative spirit, the complexity of living forms and the remarkable courses of the planets of the solar system in their revolutions around the sun, to mention some examples, constitute evidence of the process of evolution. All that occurs or exists does so as the result of an immensely long evolutionary process.

The universe is eternal, and its natural functions have resulted in the multiplicity of forms and forces with which we are acquainted. There has been nothing for a god to do, and therefore there cannot be evidence of creation, or of interference otherwise in the natural processes of the universe.

However, if there were a supreme being, there essentially would be evidence of his existence. So great a being would not hide himself. He would not permit the great bulk of humanity, the overwhelming majority of mankind - if not the world’s population in its near entirety - to believe that he is other than who he really is, and to worship “false gods.”

Then too, we must ask if a real god would have tolerated all of the monstrous evil which has been done in his name. Would he have put up with all of the cruel religious wars, the horrible crusades, the unbelievably awful inquisitions, all of the torturing and burning, the brutal dungeons, the terrible suffering caused by religion? Could he have condoned the destruction of the realm of science? This devastation was brought about in the Dark Ages of Faith by men who believed it was desired by their god.

We may as well ask if a god really caused a world of humans and animals to drown, or if he actually killed the children of Egypt, or if he would permit us to believe that he did so.

We must respond with a negative reply, and settle in like fashion any mental inquiry as to the existence of such an imagined being.

A long-time member of American Atheists, Martin Bard is a U.S. Army Air force veteran of World War II. He is the Author of the Gustav Broukal Press book the Peril Of Faith. (The Second Edition of Mr. Bard’s book is available from American Atheist Press for ten dollars. The product number for his excellent book is #5012.)

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