Divine Responsibility

There’s one aspect of the priestly child abuse scandal that, to my knowledge, has never been discussed.

To what extent is God responsible?

I ought to rephrase that. I, and most of my friends, think there is no God, so what I really mean is:

If there were a God, how far would he be responsible?

Theologians say that evil is the fault of sinful humans, acting in spite of God, and anyway he’s so powerful that if he intervened to prevent evil it would reduce us all to the status of robots so we shouldn’t have the opportunity for character building by using our free will to resist temptation.

That may have a little superficial plausibility (but see the discussion in chapter 7 of my Philosophy notes) However at best the first argument only precludes our blaming God for everything on the grounds that he supposedly created the world; the second argument excuses him only from intervening ostentatiously at maximum power, denouncing sin in a voice of thunder and turning the unrighteous into pillars of salt. He could still have anonymously emailed a few incriminating digital photographs to police or journalists without drawing attention to his omnipotence.

The abusive priests got away with it for so long because they were perceived to be God’s agents. A Human employer aware that employees were using their jobs as a cloak for criminality would be expected to intervene. Why should God try to wriggle out of his responsibilities by hiding behind a metaphysical quibble?

Of course, if there were a God he wouldn’t, so there isn’t.