Morality doesn’t point to God
I want to challenge the core reasons theism exists: love, morality, reason, consciousness, and argue that these don't point to God, but rather to a universe that is completely indifferent, and humans who simply cannot tolerate that.
The following is a argument I came across, along with the theist response to it:
A toddler is raped and killed by grown men, how could God allow this?
Theist says, remove God entirely and the world is still exactly this sick, cruel, and capable of the same atrocity. The darkness doesn't need God to exist. Then that's not God. That's what humans do with freedom when they turn it toward evil. It's terrible. A child dying that way is not something anyone should have to reason their way around. You want to hand God the creation for every atrocity but not the credit for a single breath, a single moment that made life feel worth it.
This is where it stops making sense for me.
So, we cannot know god, like we are on another dimension, meaning we wouldn't be able to perceive what his motivations feelings are. Because god operates on a different sense of morality than we do.
The universe just is. Atrocity just happens. And people are unable to tolerate meaninglessness layer onto it. Because if the universe were purely ugly and brutal, indifference would be clean and easy to accept. But it's not. It gives you a beautiful night sky and a raped toddler in the same timeline.
They are the cost of existing in a physical world where matter is indifferent, biology is imperfect, and humans have genuine capacity for evil with nothing stopping them. If there was one that cares about us and made us in his image we'd all intrinsically know this god like we know how to breathe, rather than having to understand atrocity in groups (multiple differnet ones) and having our perceptions rehammered into our heads.
I'm not removing God from the question. But if God were self evident, religion itself would never have needed to be there.
And there is a reason for that, this pain is not wasted, justice will come, you will see your child again and those answers function. To build communities around shared grief and shared hope because the pain is real. Same reason we connect love and reason and morality. The answer religion provides was constructed by people who couldn't tolerate the wound being unanswered. People want society to live by their own rules and moral code so they invoke a superior deity to command obedience. Which then is tied into: humans create real meaning, love, and justice that actually matter and make a difference, even if the universe itself stays completely indifferent.
And animals do rape, Infanticide, parasitic consumption of hosts alive, kill their own. The difference is that we know it's wrong. A parasite has no malice. A dolphin has no guilt.
Give a subjective example here:
Humans play for no reason at all, purely because joy exists. If God created a world where joy for its own sake is unique to one species, why did only we get it. If music points to a divine creator, why is the entire rest of creation completely deaf to it. We are the only species that buries its dead with ceremony. If God made us in his image, why are we the only ones who couldn't just walk away.
So if God created a world where rape and infanticide are natural mechanics of life for most species, and only one species developed the moral complexity to call it wrong, then morality didn't come from God, it came from us. We invented the standard. We are the ones who decided atrocity was unacceptable. God gets no credit for that.
Then we argue, do we want a universe where nothing recognizes its own suffering? We don't actually know what that unknown place is. We do know suffering and atrocity is bad.
Most of us are not the raped toddler. Most of us have good lives. Problems and pain. Sometimes even beautiful and there are select people of history whose entire existence from start to finish was suffering and torture.
And if god were in the question, god built a creature sophisticated enough to recognize its own suffering as wrong, but not sophisticated enough to stop it.
We are the least indifferent animal precisely because we're the only one that asks why. Every other creature just lives it. We live it and then stay up trying to understand it.
Flip the question I say, God didn't prevent such sickness, but we DO know as we human lives we tried.
Because humans decided collectively that some things are unacceptable and built systems to fight against indifference. Humans have also built hospitals, laws against rape, child protection systems, justice systems, imperfect, failing constantly, but real attempts to push back against the indifference.. Does the toddler still die? Yes. Can any amount of justice fix that? No and no system we've built has ever fully answered for that.
I think that if there is a current god, it's one that didn't create us. While being preferable that religion wouldn't need to exist to explain him.
We are the only creature that couldn't just live with being tortured, humiliated, and killed. We are the least indifferent animal (in our own way). We're the only ones that ask why. The fact we even think about so, makes us that.