Who are you to judge God?

This seems like the type of question that any atheist blogger should be prepared to answer, so I figured I’d just get it out of the way now. In my experience, when this question is asked, it usually arises from the mindset that the reality of God’s existence is just obvious, and so atheists are really trying to say that God is evil, not that God isn’t real.

Even thinking about it from that perspective (of God being real, and just criticizing what kind of job he’s doing), the question still doesn’t make sense to me. Imagine it’s time for a presidential election, but unlike the current 2016 race, there’s an incumbent who’s running for reelection. Imagine how nonsensical it would seem if you told someone that you were voting against the incumbent, and that person said, “who are you to judge him [or her, potentially]? He’s the president of the whole freaking United States, the leader of the free world, and you have the unmitigated gall to pass judgment on whether he’s doing his job well or not?”

That would seem completely ridiculous, wouldn’t it? The fact that a person (or entity) has a higher position of power or status than us shouldn’t prevent us from making our own best judgments about whether they really are acting in accordance with the high standard of their office. To say that such judgments are acceptable for the president, but not for God, just seems like special pleading to me.

But remember, that’s responding to the perspective that God actually does exist. I wanted to show how, even if we start from the perspective that theists seem to have when they ask this question, it still doesn’t make sense to me. But don’t lose sight of the fact that atheists don’t actually hold that perspective themselves. I can’t speak for anyone else, but for myself, when I appear to be “judging God,” what I’m really doing is attempting (to the best of my ability) to assess the likelihood that the type of God described by the Abrahamic religions actually does exist, given a specific set of factors.

For example, if I point out contradictions in the Bible, that doesn’t mean I’m criticizing God’s editorial skills. I’m not saying “God should’ve done this better,” I’m saying, “this makes it seem less likely that all these books really were inspired by one all-knowing God.” If I go further and point out all the genocide ordered by God, and the barbaric laws (shrimp is an abomination, but slavery is not), I’m not saying “God (who totally exists) doesn’t seem as loving as he claims to be.” What I’m saying is, “it seems more probable to me that this stuff was just written by some primitive human beings, who were projecting their own socio-cultural perspective onto their perception of what a god might be like, than that an all-knowing and all-loving god (who allegedly never changes his mind, even though there are plenty of times in the Bible when he does) would have actually thought these things were good ideas.”

As often happens with religious arguments, it may be that the best way to illustrate the problem is to turn the question back on the Christian. If I asked a Christian, “who are you to judge Allah, or Vishnu, or Ahura Mazda?” The Christian would probably think that question was ridiculous, because they aren’t judging those gods, they simply don’t believe in them. In the same way, atheists aren’t judging the Christian God, but we are (or, at least, I am) trying to persistently assess whether any given set of data makes it seem more or less likely that such a god actually exists.