It's a Cop-Out to Blame God for Human Irresponsibility

I have been slowly going through Dave Earley’s book called 21 Reasons Bad Things Happen to Good People, and today I re-read his original premise for the book that he states as “The Reason No One Wants to Hear”, which basically covers original sin in the human condition.

Ultimately God gave Adam and Eve a choice to follow evil or good, and they chose evil, resulting in a blood line of sin for all of humanity. Yet we still continually ask the same question, just phrased in a million different ways, “why does God ‘allow’ this or that bad thing to happen”? As Earley puts it, what we really should be asking if we are honest with ourselves is “why do so many good things happen to bad people”. Even Jesus made the statement in Luke 18:19 (and Mark 10:18), “Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone”.  Clearly we are not God, but many of us still strive to better understand God’s will, and that includes questions about evil, suffering, and sin.

Earley quoted Knechtle’s Give Me an Answer, on the matter of evil and human nature, who stated:

How can you blame God for starving babies in Ethiopia when the best-selling books in the United States are on dieting, on how to take the extra fat off? It is not God’s fault people are starving today. The earth produces enough right now to give every person 3,000 calories a day. The problem is that some of us hoard so others go to bed hungry. It is a cop-out to blame God for human irresponsibility. If a person gets drunk, drives his car across the median, and sends your friend to an early grave, will you blame God? Do you blame God for Hitler’s seven million murders?  That would be escapism. The vast majority of human and evil suffering is the direct result of human irresponsibility.

I haven’t made it all the way through yet but I’m working on it, and I’m grateful to a fellow brother who mailed it to me a month or so ago, thanks Hershel.