The Atheist Test

[failure_artist]

I was at the library today getting more books than I can read when I saw Penn Jillette's God, No!. The cover declared the book had a test to see if one was an atheist. I opened the book and it was prefaced by this thought exercise: if god came to you and told you to kill a child, would you? If you say no, you value morality and love more than god and are hence an atheist. This is supposed to be a gotcha but I can think of many responses:

1. God is the embodiment of morality and love. It is impossible for God to tell anyone to kill a child. If an entity claiming to be god says that, the entity is lying.
2. God is a force of nature that can't "speak" like a living thing can.
3. Believing in god's existence doesn't obligate one to do whatever god asks. I believe in Donald Trump's existence but I wouldn't do whatever he asks.
4. From a Jewish perspective, I could say what's important is the Torah and since G-d said in the covenant (the Torah) that we are not allowed to murder then G-d should respect that.
5. There are many gods and if one told me to kill a child I'd start worshiping a better god.

There's probably lots more.

Comments

[rc88]

(Chel here, this is my really old blog.) I can think of more; if an omniscient omnibenevolent being tells you to kill a child, there's probably a reason behind that. If it's a reference to the Isaac sacrifice story, Isaac according to tradition of the time was twenty-five, Abraham was smart enough to figure out that God probably wasn't really going to let him go through with killing the kid it had been repeatedly hammered into him by this point was going to be his heir, and even if Isaac was younger he was noted to be the one who carried all the wood up the mountain and Abraham was ancient at the time so Isaac was more than capable of getting away.

[failure_artist]

Good points about the Issac story. But I'm talking about the ways one could say "no" to the question and still be a theist (or a non-atheist). There's many different conceptions of divinity and how one should interact with it. Jillette's is just a tyrant in the sky.

[rc88]

True. I sometimes wonder with guys like that if they're imagining God to be the way THEY would run a universe...

ETA: More. 1) God wouldn't ask in the first place because an omnipotent being is more than capable of killing anyone they wish without a middle-man. 2) At no point in either the hypothetical scenario or in any religion I know was it specified that God forbade asking "why?"