[Questioner] How do you respond to those who
do charge God with the very thing that you said he can't do which is
give an immoral command when in
the message today, Paul was talking about Joshua where
they were commanded to commit genocide, basically.
Against people, well, they were commanded to wipe out everything
within the city walls of Jericho. And
the objection that I hear about this divine moral command is:
You have the Old Testament replete with
such commands where they were to slaughter every living thing - child, woman,
pet, whatever. So what is the response then
to that? [Dr Craig] if you look on our website reasonablefaith.org
I have a a couple of Questions of the Week where I wrestle with this
issue. And what I try to do there
is to defend an ethical theory that would allow God to be
perfectly good and all-powerful
and yet to issue these sorts are horrifying commands
such as to go in and and kill everyone
in the city: men, women, and children. And
I think that the theory that I've laid out here allows us to understand
that.
Because if God is the source of our moral duties
that means that God could command a person to do something
which in the absence of a divine command would have been sin,
but given the divine command it now becomes
the right thing for that person to do. So if the armies of Israel, for example,
just decided on their own
to go in there and slaughter the people that would have been
wrong. It would have been say murder or war crimes.
But given the divine command they now have a moral duty
to do that and
therefore they have the obligation to
to carry out that command.
Horrifying is it might be. So
God doesn't have the ability to command a person to sin.
But he has the ability to command a person to do an action
which, in the absence of a divine command,
would have been sin. Now the question then is:
Is it incompatible with God's nature as an all loving
compassionate being to issue such a command?
And I would say in this case no
because these Canaanite tribes
that God commanded the
armies of Israel to drive out of the land and
those who tried to remain behind and fight were to be exterminated
were incredibly wicked.
For 400 years
the Bible says God had stayed his hand of
judgment upon these Canaanite tribes. Because
he says to Abraham, "The iniquity of the Canaanites is not yet complete."
So he allowed his people Israel to languish
for four centuries in Egypt
until the iniquity of these Canaanite tribes became so
ripe for judgment that God then
used the armies of Israel as his
means of visiting judgment upon these peoples
for their wickedness. So he did nothing
unjust in commanding the extermination
of the adults, at least, in these Canaanite tribes because they were
incredibly wicked and deserving of
judgment. In the same way
that, centuries later, God would use the pagan armies of
Babylon to invade Israel
and bring judgment upon his own people for their wickedness
and evil. Now the really
difficult problem then, it seems to me, is the children. How is it
consistent with God's nature that he would command that these Canaanite
children be killed. Well here
what I would say is that God doesn't wrong
these children in taking their lives early.
God has the right to give and take life
as he sees fit. No one can say to God, "You should've let me live longer,"
that, "I have a claim on a long life."
Many people do die in infancy and it is God's peragative
when to terminate a person's life so he has the right
to take the lives of these Canaanite children whenever he wants to.
And moreover, if you believe as I do
and, I think, as Jesus did in the salvation
of small children, then
by bringing the deaths of
these children early God ensured their eternal salvation.
In other words, he conferred upon them in incommensurable
good: eternal life, knowledge of himself - whereas if these children had been
allowed to
live, especially in a Canaanite culture, they would have been
infected with the same poison as the adults and
most of them would have been lost. So
their deaths would actually mean their salvation and those children once in
heaven would be grateful
that God had issued such a command to
the Israeli armies to wipe them out. So,
it seems to me that there isn't anybody that God has wronged
in this case. The adults deserve the punishment,
the children are delivered from evil
and given salvation for an eternal life.
So that they simply - no one is wronged
in bringing about the command. So it's not inconsistent with God's
compassionate and loving nature to issue such a command.
One more thing I would like to say, why would God do this?
I think that by issuing so
horrifying a command, God
gave an object lesson to the people of Israel
about the necessity of separating themselves
from pagan
god and people in a way that they
could not have learned otherwise. The whole system
of the Old Testament law is based upon separating
things. Not
eating certain foods, some things are clean, others are unclean,
don't mix linen and wool,
other things are not supposed to be mixed, over and over again.
These ritual laws in the Old Testament
emphasize not mixing things but
but separating them. These were meant to be
object lessons to the people of Israel to
that they were shut apart for God as a peculiar people
holy and dedicated to himself
and as such they were not to mingle
or compromise with the pagan peoples
of Israel's neighbors. And I think that this horrifying command
to go in and drive out these Canaanite tribes and to exterminate any that tried
to stay behind was
an object lesson that God gave them
about the importance of being this
separated people, holy and
and dedicated and set apart to the Lord.
And we know that even this lesson in the end,
wasn't infallible. That in fact they
fell with tiresome repetitiveness
into the error of absorbing the worship of the gods of
their pagan neighbors and intermarrying with
Canaanites and other peoples. So even this lesson
didn't infallibly produce its result but it does seem to me that that would give
God
a good reason to issue such a command.
So that would be my defense of these commands it seems to me
that there's nothing here that is
incompatible with God's being all-powerful and all-loving
and moreover that it fits in with the divine command theory of ethics
where whatever God commands you to do
becomes your moral duty to do. Do you want to follow up on that? I
know that was a mouthful but the question was a big one and important.
[Questioner] How does that, though, absolve God from the
actual - the acts - of the Israelis when
I could say, and you could say, and
people have said throughout the centuries, "I'm commanded by God
to enslave these people or to kill these people."
[Dr Craig] I would say that it doesn't absolve God
from what the Israeli army's did, on the contrary, they were his
instrument. They were God's doing these things by the
instrumentality of these armies. They were his means have judgment.
Just as in the Count of Monte Cristo when Edmund Dantès
seeks vengeance upon the three men who
sent him into prison unjustly,
he doesn't think about doing this out of personal
animus or vengeance but he sees himself
as the tool of God - the instrument of God to bring about
God's justice on these three men for their wickedness. In the same way
the armies of Israel are God's instrument by which he brings judgment
on these people
in the same way that the pagan armies a Babylon
centuries later were the instrument by which God judged
his own people. Now the question you ask is one that people always ask, well what
about
a jihadist? Right? Muslim terrorists who say
God has given us this command to
kill innocent men, women and children in the name of Allah. What about that?
Doesn't this justify that? Not at all!
Why? Not because the Muslim has the wrong moral theory.
But because he's got the wrong god.
Right? God hasn't issued those commands.
He's worshiping a false god. A god whose character
is vastly different from the God described in the New Testament.
So I actually think that the Muslim moral
theory is correct so long as it's a divine command theory that's rooted in God's
nature and not in his will.
Islam tends to be very volunteerist, i think.
In Islam, Allah could act even contrary to his own
nature. His omnipotence trumps everything but
in so far as the theory i've described is a divine command theory
that's not where I find fault with the jihadist
it's that he's got the wrong God. And of course this underlines
all the more emphatically the importance that we're sure
that we're worshiping and serving the right God.
Because if you're not you could be led into all manner of wickedness and
terrible evil.
[Questioner] One problem with the analysis
is we're told in several places in scripture that God is
not a respect for persons, that God is not partial
toward one person or another. So you've got two six-month-old
children, one Israeli, one Canaanite.
Why would God treat them differently? And then my second point is
what do you think, Bill, about the argument some people have made that
the description to the genocide of the Canaanites... [Dr Craig] Okay well let me just interrupt.
Because both you and Kurt have used the word "genocide" and
that is a pejorative label that
opponents of the biblical view
put on this. This is not genocide it is not like what Adolph Hitler tried to do
in the second world war, exterminating a people. The
command to the Israeli armies was too drive the Canaanite tribes
out of the land. What he was doing was destroying these
kingdoms as nation-states by
devesting them of the land and giving it to Israel.
It was now their land.
And this is what so important to these Middle Eastern people.
It's the land - even today when you go to Israel.
Jews talk about going to "the land." That's what they refer to Israel as.
So what was important here was that these tribes were now being divested of
the the land,
they were being destroyed as nation-states by being driven out
and it was only those that remained behind
to fight, that were to be killed and exterminated.
There was no command to pursue these people and
chase after them and wipe them all out. On the contrary,
those who fled weren't hunted down. They appear later on
in the scripture. So this isn't 'genocide.' This is a command
to drive the people out of the land and then
only to kill those who remained
behind in the land.