By Crispin Sartwell

If there were a God, the only decent position with regard to Him would be rebellion.

First, power always calls for rebellion. In the face of power, whether state, religion, corporation, institution, you must achieve freedom by rejection or defiance. Otherwise your existence is sheer redundancy: any other little slavish minion would do as well.

And this is all the more true in the face of omnipotence. You are nothing before omnipotence (as many religious thinkers have actually asserted). Then it is actually your job to become something through acts of sheer impossible defiance.

Look around you at this world, and seriously think about it as a world created by an omnipotent being. This world is filled to the brim with arbitrary, undeserved suffering.

Some of this is created by human free choice, if there is such a thing, but much of it is absolutely the normal operation of the universe: droughts, famines, monsoons, whatever. "Acts of God." Well, if God made this world, and could have made it in any way he wished, he is deeply cruel, deeply evil.

Of course there is beauty and order and pleasure and knowledge in this world too, and I am not denying that. But if you give Him credit for the good stuff, you had better blame him for the unconscionable suffering.

Leibniz understood the problem extremely well and concluded that this is the best of all possible, worlds, a position ridiculed by Voltaire. But if this world is created by an omnipotent and perfectly good being, then it is entailed, strictly. So I ask you to look around you honestly, to really understand what people and other creatures are enduring or failing to endure, the good people who are descending into addiction or suicide, the children who are starving slowly to death. If you can face that square and still assert that this is the best of all possible worlds, you have earned your faith. But you are also hallucinating.

A God who created this world has earned extreme anger.

One possible retreat is this: our morality is not God's morality. He works in mysterious etc. So you are actually retreating from the idea that God is good, or saying that his goodness is beyond our puny comprehension. A couple of problems: let me ask you this: what the hell are you worshipping and why? You've got no conception of God's goodness; God is beyond good and evil. What distinguishes him, then, from Satan? And if you really think that God has a conception of morality according to which torturing children slowly to death turns out to be good on some larger conception of good, then I say you have betrayed yourself and your own values. Then I say attack rather than worship this being.

Of course, rebelling against omnipotence would be the height of folly. You sure ain't gonna win. But for that reason it is all the more noble; you are rebelling against infinite odds, asserting your freedom against the greatest dictator of them all.

Go outside. Shake your fist at the sky.