Dawkins and Picard Win This Year’s Trotter Prize

This year’s Trotter Prize at Texas A&M University was given to two individuals: Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins, a well-known apologist for Darwinism and advocate for atheism; and MIT computer scientist Rosalind Picard, a pioneer in the field of affective computing and an evangelical Christian. The main event was a lecture by each followed by a discussion between them moderated by Texas A&M engineering professor Micah Green. The event occurred Thursday, February 13, 2025. 

Though I’ve not corresponded with Dawkins and Picard lately, I had corresponded with them in the past, going back more than two decades. I met Picard in person at a Christian faculty meeting at MIT back in 1999, in a visit where I was to give lectures at MIT and Tufts. Dawkins and I communicated by email, but I had never seen him in person. He is now 83, and though my views differ sharply from his, he has enormously influenced my thinking, so I wanted at last to be in the same room with him.

A Bit of Background

Before getting into the details of this year’s award to Dawkins and Picard, let me first give a bit of background about the prize. The Trotter Prize is given annually at Texas A&M. It is named in honor of Ide P. Trotter Sr., a former dean of the Texas A&M Graduate School. The full name of the prize is “The Trotter Prize in Information, Complexity and Inference.” As described on the Texas A&M website, it “is awarded annually for pioneering contributions to understanding the role of information, complexity and inference in illuminating the mechanisms and wonder of nature. The Trotter Lecture seeks to reveal connections between science and religion, often viewed in academia as non-overlapping, if not rival, worldviews.”

The prize is awarded annually to two people. The Trotter Lecture is therefore really a pair of lectures by two people, one a person who is sympathetic to religion and faith, the other a person who is less sympathetic to religion and faith. The very first Trotter Prize was awarded in 2002, bringing together Nobel Laureates Charlie Townes (a theist) and Francis Crick (an atheist). Other luminaries who over the years have received the prize include Francis Collins, Steven Weinberg, Roger Penrose, Simon Conway Morris, and, at the risk of immodesty, yours truly. 

Yes, I received the Trotter Prize in 2005, with my opposite number being complexity theorist Stuart Kauffman. In the Wikipedia article about the Trotter Prize, I have the distinction of being the only recipient to have the legitimacy of his award called into question (for being “a proponent of the pseudoscientific concept of intelligent design”). 

A Unique Role

The Trotter Prize includes a cash award, and even though it is not as munificent as some other prizes, it fulfills a unique role in bringing together two scientists who engage each other on science as it impacts their religious belief or lack of it, including opposition to it. The prize is therefore meant to be a vehicle for advancing the dialogue between science and religion, and it does so in a fair-minded and congenial way.

Even though it was a four-hour drive from where I live in the Dallas area to College Station, where Texas A&M is located, I didn’t want to miss this year’s Trotter Lecture. I even brought my well-worn copy of Dawkins’s The Blind Watchmaker in the hopes that I could get him to sign it. As it is, Rudder Theatre, which seats 2,500 was packed (completely full on the main level, and also full in the balcony, at least what I could see of it). As it is, the press of people in the audience who flocked around the speakers after the event was so great that the three of us who drove down from the Dallas to see Dawkins and Picard decided instead to make a quick exit (one of my colleagues on the trip also had some books by Dawkins that he wanted him to sign). My copy of The Blind Watchmaker therefore still lacks Dawkins’s signature.

It’s been twenty years since I shared the Trotter Prize with Stuart Kauffman, a theoretical biologist who is non-Darwinian. Kauffman regards self-organizational processes as needed to supplement the Darwinian mechanism of natural selection in order to explain life’s evolution. When he and I shared the prize, it was a two-day event. There was a small intimate dinner (maybe ten of us) with Kauffman that included his wife, along with key people from Texas A&M as well as Ide and Luella Trotter, who had instituted the prize in honor of his father and her father-in-law, Ide Trotter Sr. As is true of the prize today, Kauffman and I did a big lecture. But I also recall meetings with smaller groups, including an opportunity for Kauffman and me to engage with faculty.

My point in recounting these memories is that when Kauffman and I received the Trotter Prize, there was a premium on getting us to talk together and on encouraging others to listen in. I had known Kauffman previously and written about his work. We first met in 1999 at a Santa Fe symposium sponsored by the Templeton Foundation. And then around 2002 we did a debate at the University of New Mexico. 

“I Think About Her Every Day”

Unlike the 2025 Trotter event, it seemed that in 2005 there was more of an opportunity for Kauffman and me to get to know each other and engage each other’s work. It had been clear to me that he was by no means a theist. And yet it became clear at the 2005 Trotter event that he had a huge longing to recover the sacred (hence his 2008 book Reinventing the Sacred). The most poignant moment for me during the 2005 Trotter event was at the small dinner where Stu, as we called him, described how his 13-year-old daughter had been killed in a hit-and-run and remarked, “I think about her every day.”

I mention my 2005 experience in receiving the Trotter Prize to give context for what I have to say next about this year’s Trotter Prize. I have no regrets about the eight hours spent in the car getting to and from the event (the conversation with my colleagues was fun, so we had a good time whiling away the time). And given how influential Dawkins has been to my thinking, especially in providing a foil for my work on specified complexity and design-inferential reasoning, it seemed high time that I finally see him in the flesh. 

Yet it seems to me that this year’s Trotter Prize got less from its recipients than it might have. This year, there seemed little opportunity for the recipients to engage each other, thus also minimizing how much the Texas A&M community could engage with them. Other than the lecture, it seems there was only a large banquet in honor of the speakers attended by members of the Texas A&M community who had to sign up for it in advance (I hoped to attend the banquet, but I was too late signing up for it). And then following the banquet, there was the lecture itself. Indeed, the official Texas A&M announcement of the 2025 Trotter Prize only lists the lecture. 

In their Trotter Lecture, Dawkins and Picard each spoke for about thirty minutes. Dawkins spoke first, titling his talk “The Greatest Idea Anyone Ever Had?” The title clearly alluded to Dawkins’s atheist colleague, the late philosopher Daniel Dennett, who in his book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea remarked: “If I were to give an award for the single best idea anyone has ever had, I’d give it to Darwin, ahead of Newton and Einstein and everyone else. In a single stroke, the idea of evolution by natural selection unifies the realm of life, meaning, and purpose with the realm of space and time, cause and effect, mechanism and physical law.”

In Dawkins’s lecture, I heard no new ideas that I hadn’t read before in his writings. His PowerPoint presentation did present some very cool images, such as examples of biomimicry that were new to me. Yet he simply ascribed this biomimicry and his other examples to natural selection, without justification and as though needing no justification. True, he gave a very brief history of Darwin’s theory, noting that when it was first proposed, its understanding of heredity (blending inheritance) made it difficult for traits to be passed on to subsequent generations, thereby undercutting the theory. But then Dawkins invoked the neo-Darwinian synthesis, whose use of Mendelian genetics in his view decisively resolved the problem with Darwin’s earlier understanding of heredity. Neo-Darwinism, according to Dawkins, henceforward put Darwinian evolution on an unshakeable foundation. 

Some Familiar Chords

Dawkins struck some familiar chords in his lecture. These included Universal Darwinism (that the Darwinian mechanism must underlie all of life wherever and however it might have arisen in the universe), the supposed ability of the Darwinian mechanism to bring about “prodigious complexity” from “primeval simplicity” (his terms in the lecture, but a theme he has hammered on over the years, though it flies in the face of conservation of information), and the selfish gene (the highly reductive view that our genes constitute the prime biological reality and that our bodies are merely vessels for carrying and transmitting those genes). On this last point, many naturalistic evolutionists reject Dawkins’ selfish gene thesis, arguing that evolution operates at multiple levels — including genes, individuals, and groups — rather than being solely driven by gene-level selection (see, for instance the work of Denis Noble and the late Stephen Jay Gould).

In the course of his lecture, Dawkins also endorsed a thoroughgoing moral relativism, characterizing human morality as deriving from the current Zeitgeist (his term). To justify this view, he cited, at least in part, Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature as showing that our moral sensibilities are getting better and more refined over time. But what are the grounds for claiming such moral improvement? What if the current Zeitgeist, or spirit of our age, took a retrograde turn? Imagine, for instance, that our morality took a savage lurch back to less enlightened times, let’s say to the court of Caligula or Genghis Khan. Dawkins might complain about such a moral turn, but he would have no intellectual basis for doing so. 

Dawkins’s Zeitgeist-based understanding of morality is sheer moral relativism. As such, it is intellectually indefensible. In fact, Dawkins himself has personally experienced—and not just as a matter of armchair philosophical reflection — its intellectual indefensibility. At one point in his Trotter Prize lecture, Dawkins said “sex is binary,” which triggered applause from the largely non-woke audience in attendance (Texas A&M tends to be old school on social and cultural issues). But Dawkins has had less than universal acclaim for making such common sense pronouncements.

In recent years, Dawkins has faced increasing criticism from progressive atheists who reject his traditional biology-based views on sex and gender. Once a leading figure of the New Atheist movement, Dawkins is now condemned by many in the broader progressive movement for his insistence that biological sex is binary and rooted in genetics rather than social constructs. In fact, his statements rejecting gender identity as overriding biological reality sparked a backlash from activists who argue that sex and gender exist on a spectrum. Thus, in 2021, as a kind of 25th year anti-anniversary, the American Humanist Association rescinded the Humanist of the Year award they had given him back in 1996.

A Matter of Morality

In defending his understanding of morality, Dawkins might argue that he is merely asserting scientific truths and thus not engaged in specifically philosophical reflections on morality, except secondarily. But it is a matter of morality whether truths can be freely and safely uttered. What if our moral Zeitgeist demands that certain truths must be suppressed for the sake of the greater good? Moral relativism renders all truth as fair game for deconstruction. Indeed, moral relativism is a snake that eats its own tail and ultimately itself.

It’s worth here pondering where Dawkins gets his moral relativism. He gets it from his peculiar brand of atheism, namely, naturalism, a worldview that sees the whole of reality as composed of and nothing but material entities. In illuminating a moral relativism based on naturalism, C. S. Lewis is particularly helpful. In what follows, I quote his book Miracles at length because it is so insightful and so apropos of Dawkins as he at once embodies a Darwinian evolutionist, a scientific naturalist, and a moral relativist:

If the fact that men have such ideas as ought and ought not at all can be fully explained by irrational and non-moral causes, then those ideas are an illusion. The Naturalist is ready to explain how the illusion [of morality] arose. Chemical conditions produce life. Life, under the influence of natural selection, produces consciousness. Conscious organisms which behave in one way live longer than those which behave in another. Living longer, they are more likely to have offspring. Inheritance, and sometimes teaching as well, pass on their mode of behavior to their young. 

Thus in every species a pattern of behavior is built up. In the human species conscious teaching plays a larger part in building it up, and the tribe further strengthens it by killing individuals who don’t conform. They also invent gods who are said to punish departures from it. Thus, in time, there comes to exist a strong human impulse to conform. But since this impulse is often at variance with the other impulses, a mental conflict arises, and the man expresses it by saying ‘I want to do A but I ought to do B.’ 

This account may (or may not) explain why men do in fact make moral judgements. It does not explain how they could be right in making them [hence moral relativism — BD]. It excludes, indeed, the very possibility of their being right. For when men say ‘I ought’ they certainly think they are saying something, and something true, about the nature of the proposed action, and not merely about their own feelings. 

But if Naturalism is true, ‘I ought’ is the same sort of statement as ‘I itch’ or ‘I’m going to be sick.’ In real life when a man says ‘I ought’ we may reply, ‘Yes. You’re right. That is what you ought to do,’ or else, ‘No. I think you’re mistaken.’ But in a world of Naturalists (if Naturalists really remembered their philosophy out of school) the only sensible reply would be, ‘Oh, are you?’ All moral judgements would be statements about the speaker’s feelings, mistaken by him for statements about something else (the real moral quality of actions) which does not exist. 

Such a doctrine, I have admitted, is not flatly self-contradictory. The Naturalist can, if he chooses, brazen it out. He can say, ‘Yes. I quite agree that there is no such thing as wrong and right. I admit that no moral judgement can be “true” or “correct” and, consequently, that no one system of morality can be better or worse than another. All ideas of good and evil are hallucinations — shadows cast on the outer world by the impulses which we have been conditioned to feel.’ Indeed many Naturalists are delighted to say this. 

But then they must stick to it; and fortunately (though inconsistently) most real Naturalists do not. A moment after they have admitted that good and evil are illusions, you will find them exhorting us to work for posterity, to educate, revolutionize, liquidate, live and die for the good of the human race.

Nothing if Not Inconsistent

Dawkins is such an inconsistent naturalist/moral relativist. Oughts and ought nots pepper his thinking. He is constantly exhorting and scolding. Even his exhortations to embrace atheism are offered in the spirit of benefiting humanity by undoing religion, which he has compared to the scourge of smallpox: “I think a case can be made that faith is one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate.” (“Is Science a Religion?” The Humanist 57 [January/February 1997]: 26). His book The God Delusion is the logical outworking of this view. Yet all such impulses contradict that good and evil are illusions. They are, therefore, as Lewis makes clear, inconsistent with Dawkins’ naturalistically grounded moral relativism. 

The inconsistency in Dawkins’s moral relativism is evident in Dawkins’s brief biosketch that accompanied the formal announcement by Texas A&M of this year’s Trotter Prize. The second paragraph reads:

Dawkins has gained notoriety for his unwavering commitment to science as an advocate for scientific literacy and rational thinking, particularly in the education of younger generations. His relentless pursuit of truth and his recognition of the beauty in life on earth has made him a revered source of wisdom and insight in response to scientific and existential inquiries like ‘What are we doing here?’ and ‘When did life begin?’

Perhaps someone other than Dawkins wrote this, but in my experience, these biosketches are typically written by the people they describe, or at best lightly edited by others on their behalf. In any case, this description of Dawkins is further confirmation of Lewis’s point that Dawkins’s moral impulses cannot be properly grounded in his atheistic naturalism.

A Dynamic Duo

I’ve been hammering on Dawkins because there’s so much on which to hammer. Yet the point of the Trotter Prize is to present a dynamic duo and not a lone ranger. So let me now bring in Rosalind Picard and her contribution to this year’s Trotter Lecture. The first thing to note is that this was not a proper debate, not even an informal one, in the sense of the focus being on one question and the effort being on how to resolve it. Dawkins’s title “The Best Idea Anyone Ever Had?” was clearly referring to Darwin and his theory, and Dawkins’ talk attempted to present a brief account and defense of Darwinian theory. 

The title of Picard’s talk for the Trotter Lecture, on the other hand, was “Are We Merely Machines?” It’s a talk that she has given in the past (see below). In the talk, she stated that although humans can be described as machines because any physical system operating in the world can be described as such, she emphasized that humans are also more than machines and that ultimately this “more” consisted of humans being made in the image of God, or imago Dei. Picard in the lecture was refreshingly unashamed to give her personal testimony of coming to faith, noting that unlike Dawkins she had started out as an atheist and only later became a Christian (Dawkins, by contrast, had been brought up accepting Christianity only later to reject it and embrace atheism). 

Picard also cited more conventional philosophical arguments against humans being reducible to machines, notably by invoking consciousness and qualia. Qualia are sensory experiences such as biting into a lemon, seeing a red object, or experiencing pain. As it is, none of these can be grasped by simply describing them in prose or even by characterizing them in precise scientific terms. For instance, a fully mature science of vision will never explain our experience of seeing a red apple. Naturalists like Dawkins must explain consciousness and qualia as a matter of neurophysiology. And yet scientists and philosophers have to date zero understanding of how complex assemblages of neurons, or computer chips, or any other material items can account for the content of mental experiences. Picard made this point in her lecture. It is a point made at length and vastly expanded upon in Michael Egnor and Denyse O’Leary’s soon-to-be-published book The Immortal Mind, which is excellent (I use this occasion to give that book a shameless plug!). 

A Lack of Clash

If I have a main complaint about this year’s Trotter Lecture, it’s the lack of clash. Clash is a widely used term in debate theory and competitive debating. It refers to the direct engagement of opposing arguments, ensuring that the debaters are actually addressing each other’s points rather than just stating their own positions in isolation. Lack of clash results in weak, unfocused debates where ideas are not truly tested against each other. On the other hand, the presence of clash ensures a meaningful exchange that tests ideas, clarifies positions, and drives the debate toward a substantive resolution.

Now it might be suggested that the point of the Trotter Lectures was not to have a debate between Dawkins and Picard, but rather a respectful conversation with different views represented. And there’s something to this suggestion. Dawkins, after all, has taken part in formal debates where the clash was evident (such as his Fixed Point Debates with John Lennox hosted by Larry Taunton). Moreover, even the very titles of Dawkins’s and Picard’s talks at the Trotter Lecture reveal that they would be talking to each other obliquely. Dawkins was defending neo-Darwinism. Picard was defending that humans are more than mere machines.

Yet, there were clear points of intersection where they might have clashed. Dawkins, for instance, objected to the word “merely” in Picard’s title. For Dawkins, yes of course, humans are machines — and more specifically survival machines. Indeed, what else could they be on naturalistic Darwinian grounds? But he then added that there can be something “dignified about machines,” and so we are “not mere machines” (these phrases are from the notes I took at the lecture). He didn’t elaborate on what it means for machines to exhibit dignity. Picard, by contrast, could locate human dignity not in that we are machines but that we are more than machines by being created in the image of God (no reasonable theology has ever held that God is a machine). 

Picard, however, did not directly refute Dawkins’ claim that we are machines, except in the general terms already discussed. If we are machines and nothing but machines (forget about the word “merely”), then all that we are is a consequence of the motions and modifications of the material entities that compose our physical being. Where is free will and responsibility in all this? How can we freely make decisions and thus be responsible, in any meaningful sense, for what we do? Responsibility is, by definition, the ability to respond, and do so meaningfully with understanding. But machines don’t so much respond as react. They are input-output mechanisms: apply this input, and out comes that output. 

Dawkins’s Smug Complacency

I would have liked to see a more trenchant challenge from Picard to Dawkins’s claim that humans are machines. In particular, I would have liked to see her challenge Dawkins’s smug complacency in regarding a mechanistic view of humanity as unproblematic. It is deeply problematic. In this respect, I urge readers of this article to read Robert Marks’ book Non-Computable You, which develops fully the points about humanity’s non-machinelike characteristics that Picard was beginning to make in her lecture but did not follow through on. 

There are two particular places where I would have liked to see Picard hold Dawkins’s feet to the fire. The first would have been for her to challenge Dawkins’s neo-Darwinism on its own terms. Thus I would have liked to see her argue that neo-Darwinism fails as a totalizing account of biological origins and development. She could have done this by citing non-Darwinian naturalistic evolutionists such as Denis Noble and James Shapiro of The Third Way of Evolution. 

But for a thorough-going refutation of the power of natural selection as a creative force, the strongest arguments are on the side of intelligent design, which demonstrate that natural selection is very limited in what it can do to advance biological evolution. Yet Picard was unwilling to cite intelligent design as a counterblast to Darwinism or even to offer specific challenges to the scientific sufficiency of neo-Darwinism in accounting for biological evolution. On neo-Darwinism, Picard gave Dawkins a free pass. 

Based on this year’s Trotter Lecture, it was unclear to me where Picard stood on (neo-)Darwinism. Back about 20 years ago, she signed a document titled “A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism.” The signatories to this document agreed with the following statement: “We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged.” 

Where Picard Stands

Yet at Duke University ten years ago, Picard revealed a bit more about where she stands on Darwinian evolution. Speaking at a Veritas Forum at Duke, she gave a talk with the same title as her Trotter lecture, namely, “Are We Merely Machines?” At that talk during the Q&A she was asked about her signature on this document. I’ve cued up the YouTube video so that you can hear the question and her answer. 

In her answer, Picard expresses doubts about the philosophical superstructure that scientists like Dawkins have built atop Darwinian evolution. Moreover, she allows that legitimate scientific concerns exist about the sufficiency of Darwinism as a complete account of evolution (though she doesn’t elaborate on these concerns). Consequently, at Duke, as in her Trotter Lecture at A&M, she offers no scientific rebuttal to Darwinian evolution, leaving Dawkins to celebrate the triumph of Darwinism uncontested.

Refreshing to See

The other place where I would have liked to see Picard hold Dawkins’s feet to the fire was in Dawkins’s blithe trampling of Picard’s Christian faith. Picard in her Trotter lecture was forthright about her Christian faith. It was refreshing to see. Her forthrightness reminded me of the apostle Paul in Romans 1:16 (NIV): “I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes: first to the Jew, then to the Gentile.” So good to her for being unashamed of her faith. 

Dawkins, however, was unwilling to let her testimony to faith stand unchallenged. And so he went reflexively to his favorite passages in the Old Testament where God is seen as commanding the Israelites to destroy other people groups in Canaan. Picard didn’t respond to Dawkins’s challenge. Perhaps she had a ready response and chose not to use it. Perhaps she saw it as opening a can of worms that would take her too far afield from the main point of her Trotter lecture about humans not being mere machines. 

In my own debates, I try to focus on the question at hand. And so, if the question is about scientific or philosophical matters, I’m unlikely to talk at length about my Christian faith. It may come up in passing, but it won’t be a central concern for me in the debate. Moreover, if my interlocutor then tries to discredit me for being a Christian, I can simply note that the point of the debate is not my faith but the question at hand. 

Yet Picard did put her faith at the center of her Trotter lecture, both in her testimony and in citing the imago Dei as central to humans not being mere machines. Certainly, she was in her rights to do so. In the words of the Trotter Prize committee, as already quoted in this article, “The Trotter Endowed Lecture Series aims to bridge the perceived divide between science and religion, fostering a dialogue that highlights their interconnectedness and mutual enrichment.” My point is that once Picard focused on her faith, it was fair game for Dawkins to challenge her. Consequently, it would have been good, in helping the audience to appreciate the credibility of her faith, if she had a ready response to Dawkins’s Old Testament challenge. She didn’t, or at least didn’t offer it, and so let Dawkins off the hook. 

A Response as I Might Have Given It

In closing, let me offer a response as I might have given it had I been debating Dawkins and needed to confront his Old Testament challenge. The following passage is taken from section 22.4 in my book The End of Christianity: Finding a Good God in an Evil World. I’m not offering this passage as a comprehensive response to the problem of Old Testament evil. I’m not even saying I got everything here right or have adequately addressed the problem even to my own satisfaction. These are simply some thoughts I’ve had about a difficult and troubling matter. I offer them with the hope that they may benefit the readers of this article:

In Texts of Terror, feminist theologian Phyllis Trible examines four Old Testament women who experienced terrible abuse: Hagar, Tamar, the unnamed dismembered woman in Judges 19, and the daughter of Jephthah. Trible’s study is quite moving and leads one to ponder why the Old Testament is so filled with violence, some of it evidently sanctioned by God. God commands whole towns to be destroyed, killing everything that’s alive in them — both human and animal (Joshua 6:21). On other occasions, God commands that the entire male population of a town be destroyed and only the virgins be kept alive as slaves (Numbers 31:17–18). When Korah, Dathan, and Abiram rebel against Moses, God has the earth, in judgment, swallow and kill not only them but also their entire families, including small children (Numbers 16:23–33). And yet, in Ezekiel 18:20, we read that children are not liable for their parents’ sins.

Atheists use texts of terror to portray the God of the Old Testament as a monster. I’m not sure there’s any way to put an entirely positive spin on these texts, but when reading them several considerations must be borne in mind:

1. We need to distinguish clearly between God’s acts and acts that the text does not suggest were ordered or approved by God.
2. In the ancient Near East, where all these Old Testament narratives take place, if you were not in a covenant relationship with someone, you were a zero — you had no claims on anyone’s mercy (for instance, see Joshua 9, which depicts the desperation of the Gibeonites to establish a covenant with Israel).
3. In John 1:17 we read “the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ.” The new covenant in Christ fundamentally transforms God’s relationship with humanity from one of wrath because God’s law has been violated to one of mercy because Christ has sacrificed himself for our sins.
4. The violence described in the Old Testament was endemic to the ancient Near East and remains endemic to much of the world today. Although our refined Western sensibilities recoil from these violent passages, in fact the Old Testament is to be credited for presenting the human condition in all its starkness (cf. the imprecatory Psalms).
5. God has to deal with a sin-ridden world and all the messiness that entails. There are no neat solutions for dealing with a fallen world. Even God faces difficult decisions.

To say that God faces difficult decisions is not to question his omnipotence. God has no problem in understanding the full range of decisions before him or in executing any of them. The problem is that in a fallen world, no decision, when executed, has perfect consequences. A fallen world is a world of costs and benefits. It is a world of tradeoffs and compromise. The challenge for God is to pick the best compromise among competing objectives that procures the greatest good. The cosmic calculus by which God forms such decisions will, most likely, forever elude us. Nevertheless, human experience gives some glimpse into the magnitude of the difficulties that God faces.

In 1945, the American government faced a difficult decision. Unlike Germany, Japan was not just going to realize it was beaten and surrender. For cultural reasons, Japanese civilians were prepared to fight to the death or commit mass suicide—and that had already happened. In some cases, they were incited by false tales of Allied atrocities. Now, the Americans, as it happened, had developed a way to force Japan’s surrender, and they used it at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. To this day, the conventional cant is that they did it because they were evil and vicious. In fact, their express purpose was to reduce the number of casualties by forcing the Japanese high command to tell the people it was all over and they should stop resisting. In a fallen world, God faces similar choices. It is easy to portray the evil that is done or permitted, less easy to portray the one averted. The one thing we know as Christians is that God, through the Cross of Christ, did not hesitate to take evil upon himself.

In any case, readers who fault God for the violence of the Old Testament are unlikely to embrace my proposal that God introduces natural evil in anticipation of the Fall [this is the main thesis of The End of Christianity]. Both will seem like bitter pills to swallow. And yet, alternatives that play down the suffering of our age or God’s role in it introduce problems of their own, both exegetically and theologically. Ultimately, we should want the truth. If the truth hurts, so be it. The promise of the Christian faith is that this life presages a glorious new life that will make present pains seem negligible: “I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us.” (Romans 8:18)

Cross-posted at Bill Dembski on Substack.