4 6 2C H A P T E R 2 1 ■ R e l i g i o u s R e a s o n i n gThe mention of Ivan Karamazov brings me to my final objection. Ivan
claims that if God does not exist, everything is permissible. Dr. Craig
believes the same thing. Dostoevsky, speaking through Ivan, may have
stated the problem of evil as powerfully as any atheist; but he was himself
a Christian, who believed that God must exist if we are to make sense of
morality.
I think the opposite is true. I think Christian belief makes morality, as
we normally think of it, unintelligible. Consider the story of Abraham and
Isaac. One day God put Abraham to the test. He said to Abraham: “Take
your only son, Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer
him there as a burnt offering.”* God gives no reason for this horrifying com-
mand. And Abraham asks none. He simply sets out to obey the command.
And he nearly does obey. He has the knife raised to kill his son, when God
sends down an angel to stay his hand. God then says he is satisfied with
Abraham: “Now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld
your son, your only son, from me” (Gen. 22:12). In the end God does not
actually require the sacrifice. But he does require that Abraham demonstrate
his willingness to carry out the sacrifice.
What’s the moral of this story? I suggest it’s this: as God’s creatures, our
highest loyalty must be to God, even if this requires the sacrifice of our
deepest human loyalties; God is our Creator, our Lord, and we owe him ab-
solute obedience, no matter what he commands. And he might command
anything. There are no constraints on his will; so we might be required to do
anything. There is no predicting what he might require; and there is nothing
to say that his commands will not change from one moment to the next. At
the beginning of the story, God commands Abraham to kill Isaac; in the mid-
dle he commands Abraham not to kill Isaac.
If there is a God who is liable to command anything; and if our highest
loyalty must be to this God, there is no act save disobedience to God which
we can safely say is out of bounds, no act of a kind which simply must not be
done, even rape, to use Dr. Craig’s example. If this God exists, and we must
obey him unconditionally, then anything whatever might turn out to be per-
missible. This view is destructive of morality as we normally think of it.
So there you have my opening argument. I have offered seven objections,
seven deadly objections, I would say, to Christian theism: it is committed
to predestination, to Hell, to original sin, to justification by faith, and to ex-
clusivism; it has no good solution to the problem of evil; and it is destruc-
tive of morality as we understand it. These are only some of the objections
which make it impossible for me to believe in the Christian God. But they
are enough to make me wonder how anyone who has thought seriously
about the Christian faith can accept it.* Genesis 22:2, quoted in the New Revised Standard Version, as given in The New Oxford
Annotated Bible.97364_ch21_ptg01_449-464.indd 462 15/11/13 12:22 3M
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