Richard Dawkins calls the God of the Old Testament a host of names - none of them pleasant. What is Dawkins' problem with the Hebrew God?
In The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins skewers the God of the Old Testament. He writes:
The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully."
Wow. It's hard to respond to all that, but we'll give it a try here.
FIRST...by what standard does Richard Dawkins decide that the Hebrew God is so bad? In Dawkins' word...."unpleasant"? If God is "unpleasant," then Dawkins must have a conception of "pleasant." Right?
You can't call someone "unpleasant" unless you know what "pleasant" means. You can't call someone "Bad" unless you have a conception of "Good." Otherwise, you're just throwing labels around. Dawkins is judging God as the villain of Old Testament history - which Dawkins calls "fiction" - and he's doing so without any clear moral standard.
Dawkins' answer to this moral vacuum dilemma is found in Chapter Six. He writes that morality is likely a product of human evolution, much like the sexual drive. For Dawkins, the "moral sense, like our sexual desire, is...rooted deep in our Darwinian past."
If this is so, then morality is relative to the individual - since we are all "evolving." At best, it is merely a product of consensus. What objective, authoritative moral standard is there to decide that Hitler was evil?
Likewise, what objective, authoritative standard is there to decide that God is "unpleasant" or that He is all those colorful nouns and adjectives that Dawkins ascribes to Him?
SECOND...Dawkins commits the same error (deliberate, I'm sure) that most ardent atheists and critics of the Bible commit. He lifts God OUT of the pages of the Bible - and then subjects God to a critical judgment according to modern (in our case, 21st century), secular standards.
The problem with this is simple: If the God of the Old Testament is real, then what gives us the right to judge Him? Let me ask it another way: If a person commits a crime in New Zealand, does a court in France have the right to put him on trial?
If we are going to put God on trial for all the adjectives and nouns that Dawkins assigns to God, then we must try God according to the FULL context of the Bible and according to the Bible's claims concerning God's nature. Otherwise, we are being selective and dishonest.
