.
Of course, many people will respond that, indeed, it is not the Holocaust alone that causes them not to believe in God. They may single out the Holocaust because of its awesome horror and its proximity to our time, but all these horrendous evils argue against God’s existence.
Do they really?
Only if one believes that, by definition, God must stop all evil. But that is not the Jewish (or any other mainstream religious) understanding of God. The God of biblical monotheism allows people to commit evil. God permitted Nazis to murder six million Jews because it is a fundamental tenet of Judaism that God gives people moral freedom. Human beings are as free to build gas chambers as they are to build hospitals.
That may leave us emotionally unsatisfied, but the only alternative is that God would prevent any bad act from ever taking place. Would we really want to live in a world where people had no moral freedom?
If God should have stopped the Nazis from murdering Jews, should He not also stop the murders on America’s streets? And what about rapes and child abuse? Would we really prefer to live in a world where all evil was impossible? Is being a good automaton preferable to being a free human being? Would we rather be loved by freely choosing people or by love-robots?
God constructed a world in which people choose to do good or evil. To construct one in which people could do only good, God would have to destroy the world in which we now live and create something entirely different…
We live in a world in which people can do unbelievably beautiful or unbelievably horrible things to other people. And if those horrible acts argue against the existence of God, then the beautiful acts must argue for God’s existence.
If one is to abandon faith in anything after the Holocaust, it would be far more rational to abandon faith in the inherent goodness of mankind. To abandon faith in God while retaining faith in humanity may be emotionally satisfying, but it is not logically compelling. God never built a gas chamber, and He has told us not to. Humans who loathed this God built the gas chambers — to destroy the people who revealed this God to mankind.
Dennis Prager
Chapter 39, “Can I Believe in God After the Holocaust?”
Think a Second Time
