Response to the Mystery Argument

It is said, for instance, that God must have a reason to be completely silent, obscure, unfriendly, and unhelpful, and to have built a dangerous, painful, limited, and flawed world for the poorly-designed creatures he is supposed to love. We can’t know what this reason is because it must be so complicated or profound that human minds could never grasp it. It’s a “mystery.”

Of course, there is no reason to believe such a mysterious reason exists, apart from its unwholesome use in preventing us from facing the fact that there is no God. Moreover, I can justify belief in the existence of hundreds of dreadful beings if I am allowed to use this excuse to explain away the complete lack of evidence for them. So clearly such an excuse is unallowable, especially to use it so arbitrarily in just the one case—that is simply hypocrisy.

But that isn’t the worst of it. For even if there were such a mysterious reason, it would entail something unacceptable about God: it would entail he was not the Supreme Being. For if there is anything that exists that is so powerful even God cannot overcome it, and so overwhelming it literally compels God to remain totally quiet and inactive against his every longing to express his boundless compassion, then God is a miserable prisoner, a slave to a far superior entity. Whatever this dreadnought was, this cosmic bogeyman, it would clearly not be created by God, for no compassionate being would create something that would so hog-tie him as to ensure the needless misery of billions of creatures and stymie his every desire to stop it. Nor could it be a part of God, since God is supposed to be perfect and all-compassionate (not to mention omnipotent and omniscient). But, as every theologian would have it, there cannot be anything that is not God and not created by God. And even if for some reason such a thing existed, and was superior to God in power—as this thing would have to be—it would be the Supreme Being, uncreated and mightiest of all, reducing God to a quivering, helpless piss-ant.

Needless to say, that is absurd.