Personal Reflection: Why Me, God? III

If you have been following my last two posts in the category, you know that after a few months of research and contemplation I was back to square one on the "Why Me, God?" question. Since I wasn't having much luck at convincing myself that there was a need for God to exist in order to explain the universe, or even that God could exist even in the absence of some definite reason, I decided to try another approach.

Could I deduce that God must exist by turning the old "Why is there evil" argument around? Could I indirectly prove the reality of God by first proving the existence of the Devil/Satan/Lucifer/Mammon/ Beelzebub/et al?

My logic would be almost identical to my earlier proposed approach to God's existence:

1. The physical world exists

2. There are events in the physical world that are "not good"

3. Over the long run, "not good" events would decrease because people would avoid copying/repeating any action that did not produce some reward or personal gain

4. "Not good" events must therefore arise de novo

5. Since nothing can create itself de novo, "not good" must be created

6. The creator of "not good" is Satan

7. Since Satan could not create himself, he must have had a creator

8. That creator is God

At first glance, the above would appear a reasonably rational approach: prove Satan = God post facto. But, to make this objective, I must "level the playing field" by using the same criterion I had previously set for God's presence to demonstrate Satan: there must be something "not good" that could only be explained by a direct act of Satan.

Needless to say, my well-thought-out argument for "God proved by default from Satan" came crashing down when I tried to find a single act of "not good," "bad," or "evil" that was so horrible that it could not be explained by random chance or by its conscious creation in the mind, and at the hand, of mankind.

It would certainly easier to explain the deaths of a quarter-million people if Satan had deliberately caused an earthquake and tsunami, but that event can easily be explained as a random occurrence brought about be plate tectonics. The sinking of the Titanic would be easier to understand if Satan had placed an iceberg in the ship's path rather than as the result of a series of misjudgments by its crew. But, you might ask, how could you explain evil on so a horrendous a scale that the human mind is incapable of grasping its magnitude? How can you explain something as terrible as the Holocaust unless it was an act of Satan?

I would acknowledge that I did don't have the words to explain evil and man's inhumanity on such an almost metaphysical scale. I would, however, share a quote from Karen Armstrong's A History of God.

Armstrong paraphrases a scene from Elie Wiesel's Night, in which he describes the hanging of a child in Auschwitz:

"It took the child half an hour to die, while the prisoners were forced to look him in the face. The same man asked again: 'Where is God now?' And Wiesel heard a voice within him make this answer: 'Where is He? Here He is-He is hanging here on this gallows.'"

Not even Satan could create such a nightmare of human existence.

It seems that all the troubles of mankind are self-inflicted; that the Final Solution, and the Gulag and every other atrocity in human history are nothing but attempts to put a bullet through our collective heads. And once again, I have failed: I cannot convince myself that God exists.

I don't accept defeat gracefully, but that story must come on another day. Until then, shalom.