The God question

The Case Against the God You Were Taught

The Church’s answers explain why choices exist. They do not explain a fawn burning in a forest, a seeker who never hears back, or why a miracle story cannot settle which church is true.

The point in one sentence

The God you were taught is all-powerful, perfectly good, and close to anyone who sincerely asks. The Church’s own answers explain why choices exist. They do not explain a world where children and animals suffer with no choice involved, where open seekers are left without an answer, and where equally sincere people are taught opposite faiths, and a miracle story, as Hume showed, cannot found a religion. That God is not the kind of God who would have made this world.

This page does not say no god of any kind could exist. It says something narrower, and that is why it cannot be waved off. The specific God described in Sunday School and in the scriptures is not the God this world shows. We take the believing answers one at a time, at their full strength, and say plainly what each one leaves unanswered.

The world these arguments came from

In 1748, in London, a Scottish philosopher named David Hume published a book with a plain title page: Philosophical Essays concerning Human Understanding. Hume asked a question that sounded polite and turned out to be hard to put down: how much evidence should it take before you believe something that goes against everything people have ever seen?

He kept writing about God for the rest of his life. He finished another book, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, in 1776, shortly before he died, and it was published in 1779 with no author’s or publisher’s name. In it three men argue over God in a conversation. Most scholars read one of them, Philo, as the voice closest to Hume’s own view. Philo repeats a very old set of questions about evil that he credits to the Greek thinker Epicurus (scholars doubt that Epicurus wrote them). You will meet those questions below.

Then, in 1955, a philosopher named J. L. Mackie wrote a paper called “Evil and Omnipotence.” Mackie argued that a believer could not hold three things at once: God is all-powerful, God is perfectly good, and evil exists. Philosophers have argued about that paper ever since. The best-known reply to it is the free-will defense you will meet below, and it worked against what Mackie claimed. What it left alone is most of this page. The arguments last because they are hard, not because they are loud.

What you were taught

If you grew up in the Church you already know the answer to the biggest of these questions, because you learned it in Primary, in seminary, or in a Sunday School lesson on Lehi’s words to his son Jacob. Why is there suffering? Because, as Lehi says, without opposition “righteousness could not be brought to pass.” Here is that answer in the scriptures’ own words.

That is a real answer, from people who thought hard. It deserves its full strength: a world with no hard choices would have no courage, no forgiveness, and no love that cost anything. Many people have found comfort in it, and nothing on this page says they were foolish to.

And the scriptures do not pretend suffering is easy. When Joseph Smith was held in Liberty Jail in 1839, he prayed the prayer in D&C 121:1-3, and the Lord answered him (121:7-8).

The exhibits

Here is each argument in its own author’s words, with the sentence before or after where it matters. One of the quotes below is from a character in a dialogue, not from Hume himself, and the exhibit says so.

The five arguments, one at a time

For each one: what you were taught, the question, the main believing replies, and what they do not answer.

1. Why do the innocent suffer?

You were taught: opposition in all things, agency, the plan of happiness, and that we lived with God before we came here (Abraham 3:22-28). Above are the Church’s answers, at full strength.

The question: a philosopher named William Rowe gave this example. A fawn is caught in a forest fire and dies slowly and in terrible pain. No one chose anything in that story. The Book of Mormon plan explains why humans must be able to choose between good and bad. It says nothing about a fawn, a toddler with leukemia, or an earthquake.

First, a concession. Mackie went further and asked why God could not have made people who freely choose the good every time. The philosopher Alvin Plantinga answered that in 1974: it is at least possible that no group of free people God could create would always choose well. Most philosophers accept that this answers Mackie’s strict claim that God and evil cannot both exist. It says nothing about the fawn.

The Latter-day Saint replies come in four parts, and each deserves its full weight.

We agreed to the plan. Abraham 3 shows God laying out a plan before the earth was made. What it does not answer: a person who agreed to a plan before birth did not agree to be a fawn, and a toddler who dies has not yet been able to agree to anything. Consent to a plan is not consent to every cost in it. (That last step is this page’s own reasoning, not a quotation.)

God did not make our intelligence. D&C 93:29-30 says it “was not created or made.” So God could not simply make us always choose well. What it does not answer: the Church also teaches that God has “all power” (Mosiah 4:9). A God who did not make our wills still made a world of fire, disease and famine, and set it up with this much suffering in it. Our wills do not make an earthquake.

Children are saved, and the Son of Man suffered more. D&C 137:10 says “all children who die before they arrive at the years of accountability are saved in the celestial kingdom of heaven,” and D&C 122:8 says Christ “hath descended below them all.” Believers do not say a child’s suffering is pointless. They say it ends and is made right. What it does not answer: none of this says why it was allowed.

God knew us before we were born. The Church’s Foreordination page quotes Jeremiah 1:5: “Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee.” Set it beside childhood acute lymphoblastic leukemia. A research review says one early step, a gene fusion called ETV6-RUNX1, “predominantly, maybe even always, arises in utero,” and that it is not enough alone: “secondary postnatal mutations are necessary,” which is why most carriers stay healthy. Believers answer, fairly, that the verse was spoken to Jeremiah and that knowing is not causing. What that does not answer: a God with all power who knew the child before birth knew what had already begun in the womb, and the child had no part in it.

A world of steady laws is the only world where choices mean anything. The same laws that grow crops also burn forests. That explains why there is fire. It does not explain why so much of it falls on the young and the innocent.

2. Why would a loving God be hard to find?

You were taught: Moroni 10:4-5.

The question: a philosopher named J. L. Schellenberg asks about people who are open to God, want to know, and never come to believe. If a parent wanted a relationship with a child, the parent would make sure the child could tell the parent was there. This is harder than the question of evil, because the usual reply, human sin, does not fit people who are not resisting. Believers answer that only God can see whether someone is truly open, and the philosophers who reject Schellenberg’s starting claim say so (the Stanford Encyclopedia lists their replies).

The best reply: God stays hidden on purpose so that faith means something. The scriptures say “ye receive no witness until after the trial of your faith” (Ether 12:6) and “faith is not to have a perfect knowledge of things” (Alma 32:21). What it does not answer: a person can be sure their parents exist and still freely choose whether to love them. Being sure someone exists does not take away your choice about the relationship. The reply protects a freedom that was never at risk.

3. Why were so many sincere people taught opposite things?

You were taught: the First Vision.

The question: a child born in Salt Lake City is taught the restored gospel. A child born in Riyadh, in Rome, in Varanasi is taught something else, and loves it just as sincerely. Hume saw that every religion’s miracle claims count against all the others (the exhibit above). They cannot all be right.

Here is how that looks in the scriptures themselves. Each is presented by its tradition as God’s own word (Qur’an quotes are the Sahih International translation).

The people who hold each row pray sincerely and report real answers. The rows cannot all be true, and a feeling from prayer does not tell you which one is.

The best reply: no one is lost for being born in the wrong place. Those who die without hearing the gospel will hear it in the spirit world, and baptisms for the dead let each one accept or refuse it (D&C 137:7-9). The Church says “the Lord does not damn those people who, through no fault of their own, never had the opportunity for baptism.” What it does not answer: this fixes the penalty, not the unevenness. It still does not say why birthplace decides who hears first, in a life where what you are taught shapes whom you love, or why a God who wants all his children to know leaves it to where a child is born. And the Church’s own scripture says the Spirit of Christ is given to every man (Moroni 7:16), so people everywhere already know what goodness is, with or without the Church.

4. Is it good because God says so?

You were taught: obey the commandments.

The question, from Plato: if an act is right because God commands it, then any act would be right if God commanded it. If God commands it because it is already right, then right and wrong are a standard God did not make, and he is only following it.

The best reply: God does not command by whim. His commands come from his nature, which is perfectly good. The scriptures say God cannot lie (Hebrews 6:18, KJV), and believers take that to mean his word and his character always agree. What it does not answer: if “good” just means “what God is like,” then the question “Is this command good?” is empty. We can ask it, and it feels like a real question, because we already have an idea of good to measure God’s commands against. Moroni 7:15-16 says you do. Then Nephi’s order to kill Laban and the command to Saul can be held up against it.

5. Should we believe a miracle?

You were taught: miracles are how God shows his hand.

The question: Hume’s test is not that miracles cannot happen. It is that the testimony has to be stronger than the likelihood that the witness is mistaken. You probably already use it on miracle stories from other religions.

The strongest objection to Hume is that his phrase “firm and unalterable experience” seems to assume miracles never happen before he starts. Philosophers still argue about whether he avoids that circle (the Stanford Encyclopedia lists critics such as John Earman and defenders such as Peter Millican). Hume himself did not call miracles impossible. He wrote that a miracle “can never be proved, so as to be the foundation of a system of religion” (E 10.36). That is the claim that matters for a church, because a church is a system of religion built on miracle stories.

Taking the miracle as real would not settle which religion is true, because the Bible says a wonder can come from the wrong side. Deuteronomy 13:1-3 says that if a prophet gives “a sign or a wonder” and it “come to pass,” but tells you to follow other gods, “Thou shalt not hearken unto the words of that prophet.” Jesus said “false Christs, and false prophets” will “shew great signs and wonders,” so that “if it were possible, they shall deceive the very elect” (Matthew 24:24, KJV). Believers take that to mean the elect will see through it. Either way, the Bible’s own rule is that a sign alone does not prove who sent it.

The gold plates also end where Joseph Smith ends their story: “I delivered them up to him; and he has them in his charge until this day, being the second day of May, one thousand eight hundred and thirty-eight” (Joseph Smith-History 1:60, written in 1838). What is left for us to weigh is the testimony about them, and the book itself, which Moroni 10:4 invites you to test. Testimony is exactly what Hume’s test is for. (The separate page on the witnesses covers who they were and what they said.)

What the replies do not answer

Here is the same ground in a single table.

What is true on the other side

Three things on the believing side are strong.

First, the argument that God and evil cannot both exist is now widely seen as answered. The philosopher Alvin Plantinga’s free-will defense (1974) did it. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy sums it up: “Mackie was wrong to think that it is logically impossible for both” to be true. That is why this page does not rest on it. What is still argued is the other question: how much suffering there is, of what kind, with no visible point. The same encyclopedia says Rowe’s argument on that question “has a strongly resilient character.”

Second, Mosiah 4:9 is right that a person cannot see the whole picture, and philosophers have turned that into a serious position (skeptical theism). There are good-faith limits on what anyone can know about God’s reasons.

Third, a believer who has read all of this can still say: I trust. That is a real position.

Where the famous modern writers fit

Three writers, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris, are often named together. For many members those names sound like an attack. This page does not rely on anyone’s tone. The useful part of each is a single argument you can weigh yourself.

• Dawkins argues that explaining a complex world by a designer raises the question of who designed the designer, because a being able to design a universe would be at least as improbable as the world it explains. The standard believing reply is that God is not complex at all, but simple: Christian philosophers say God has no parts, so there is nothing in him to explain. Latter-day Saints teach that the Father “has a body of flesh and bones as tangible as man’s” (D&C 130:22) and that intelligence was not created (D&C 93:29), so that reply is not theirs to give in the same way.
• Hitchens called the idea of vicarious redemption repulsive and said he would not want his sins carried by someone else (Letters to a Young Contrarian, 2001). The believing reply is that the gift is offered by God himself and takes effect on repentance. Alma 42:15 says: “God himself atoneth for the sins of the world, to bring about the plan of mercy, to appease the demands of justice.” Both sides are on the table.
• Harris argued that beliefs held on faith are, by definition, not held because of evidence, so evidence cannot correct them (The End of Faith, 2004).

The common rebuttals

“We just cannot understand God’s ways. He sees the whole plan.”

This is Mosiah 4:9 used as a final word, and it is the main philosophical reply to Rowe (philosophers call it skeptical theism). It deserves its full strength: we cannot expect to see every good a wise being might be aiming at. But look at what it asks. It asks you to treat the lack of any visible reason as very weak evidence, however much suffering there is. The plan of salvation does give reasons (the fall, death in Alma 42:8, opposition), and the reasons it gives do not reach the cases above. Critics add a cost: if we cannot judge whether a horror could be justified, we lose our grip on what a good God would do. Defenders reply that what God ought to do and what we ought to do are different questions. Both sides are in the Stanford Encyclopedia.

“Without the bad, there could be no good. That is the whole point of 2 Nephi 2.”

Some goods do need hard things. Courage needs danger. It does not follow that every bad thing is needed, and no one chose a toddler’s cancer. The Church’s own Adversity page says some trials “are simply a natural part of life and may come at times when people are living righteously.” Believers add that steady natural laws are the only kind of world where choices mean anything, and point 1 above shows what that leaves unanswered.

“I prayed, and I got my answer. That is better than any argument.”

That is a real experience, and nothing here says it was not. People in other faiths report real answers to prayer too, and what each of you was told contradicts what the other was told. Hume made the same point about miracle stories (E 10.24, above). A feeling that comes in answer to prayer cannot, by itself, separate the true one from the others. The separate page on testimony takes this up directly.

What this means

You were taught that God is all-powerful, that he is perfectly good, that he is near to anyone who asks, and that his true church is on the earth. Then you read the strongest arguments against that, in their authors’ words, next to the main replies from your own scriptures.

The replies are good answers to why choices exist. They are not answers to suffering nobody chose, to people who seek and never find, to a world that teaches opposite religions to equally sincere children, or to a goodness that has to be recognized before it can be obeyed.

Every part of that is checkable. The verses are in your own scriptures, and the arguments are in books you can find in a library. The standard replies have been on the table for generations, and each one still leaves the gap described above. The question the evidence leaves is not whether God has a reason. It is whether the God who was described to you is the one who would have made this world.