People say that if God existed, He wouldn’t allow such tragedies to happen. He wouldn’t stand by and watch such terrible things happen to innocent children. Therefore, they conclude, God either doesn’t exist or, if He does, is merely a non-personal entity like cosmic energy.
However, if we consider the root causes of worldly tragedies and who commits the terrible acts against innocent children, we realize that they are all human actions. It is always people who cause tragedies through shoddy construction for profit, and it is people who, blinded by greed and resentment, cause others to die.
Some might retort, “We know that, but if God existed, He should intervene and make things better.” They might suggest that God should paralyze the limbs of those who intend to harm others, blind those who intend to steal, seal the mouths of swindlers who try to defraud the vulnerable, and force those who are about to tell harmful lies to speak the truth instead. Would people then gratefully praise and adore God? Or would more people complain that the punishments are too harsh, call God a dictator, and question why He even gave free will in the first place if He were going to impose such a strict, military-like oppression? Would they not be more likely to grumble, scoff, and harbor resentment? Would God not know this? He is God, after all.
Nations deploy police to patrol, enforce laws, and use civil servants to investigate and compile statistics because without such measures, the nation would know nothing. Nations forcibly imprison criminals not only as punishment for committed crimes but also based on the general assumption that if someone is not punished for an action, they will inevitably repeat the same or worse. In other words, this is because they cannot know the unconscious and conscious mind, intentions, and will of criminals.
Nations do not know. The civil servants who control nations are also human, not God, and humans cannot read each other’s minds. Humans cannot foresee the future. Therefore, nations can only act based on events that have already occurred, on revealed phenomena. Even when they act, they do not act in a perfectly just manner but only according to laws and rules created with good intentions by elected representatives. This is the best humans can do, and that is why minor and terrible tragedies continue to occur in the human world.
But God knows everything. (If there were limits to His knowledge, He would not be God.) He knows all of everyone’s thoughts, even their actions in dreams. Above all, He knows what the most fair and just judgment (trial) is. God may have determined that the most fair judgment is to let each person live their life freely and then evaluate them afterward. Above all, if He is God, He has the power to restore all the tragedies that occurred in this life, no matter how terrible, as if they never happened. If spilled water can be picked up and perfectly restored to its original state, there is no need to fear spilling it. He can let people spill it as they please and then clean it up all at once later. If that is the case, if He is going to allow the freedom to spill, there is no need to reveal His existence. Humans would perceive God’s mere revelation of His existence as “coercion by hierarchy.” This is because humans would be full of complaints even if police were simply watching them 24 hours a day, treating even law-abiding citizens as “potential criminals.” Therefore, it is understandable why God does not reveal His existence, acting as if He does not exist, and why He only reveals His existence to a few people whom He has already judged. Since no one would believe it anyway, it doesn’t matter if He slightly reveals His existence to a few people. He can simply do so if He wishes.
As such, with a little thought, we can see how one-dimensional—a logic that judges God’s existence without considering His attributes—it is to say that God does not exist or to resent Him simply because there are so many tragedies on Earth. The existence of evil does not prove God’s non-existence; the existence of evil only proves that the being who commits it is evil. Even if someone is full of evil in their heart, they cannot prove their evil if they are not allowed freedom of action. Free will is the fairest and most efficient device that allows evil people to prove their own evil and good people to prove their own goodness. He grants free will, and God can remain silent. For now. If I were God—even according to my limited thinking—I think I would have done the same.
For free will to function fully, it is crucial that premature divine retribution does not occur. For example, if money were to appear every time someone performed a good deed and disappear every time they performed an evil deed, there would be no truly pure good people in this world. We would not be able to tell who is doing good deeds for money and who is doing them from the heart, regardless of money. Rather, even those who initially performed good deeds with a pure heart might soon become addicted to money and do good deeds with greedy eyes. A world where everyone does good deeds for money would probably be harsher, more chaotic, and more tedious than the current world with many evil people and a few pure good people. Perhaps that is why God is silently watching today, waiting for the predetermined day when He will gather all the water spilled by humans.
P.S.
What if the government were to develop a device that could read everyone’s thoughts? For example, if they injected some device into each citizen’s body and connected it to a quantum computer, they could not only read all thoughts but also remotely paralyze, blind, stop the hearts of, or even control specific thoughts and actions of individuals? (World-renowned scholar Yuval Harari has mentioned in public lectures that such technology already exists.) Government officials might say that individual privacy is perfectly protected by the quantum computer’s security system, but could we believe them? After all, a computer is a machine controlled by someone, so believing in a computer ultimately means believing in the person who controls it. Could we trust them?
Regardless of whether we can trust them or not, no one would accept the fact that humans can pry into other people’s thoughts and remotely control them. People who would complain that there is no freedom if God did so, and who therefore made God remain silent, would never readily accept that a few powerful people could sit in a bunker somewhere and scrutinize their thoughts and remotely control their thoughts and actions.
Moreover, if the system is such that the person being remotely controlled cannot even perceive that their thoughts are being invaded and manipulated, then the very introduction of such a system should be considered the end of humanity. The moment it is introduced, the person(s) who control the computer become God, and all other humans become slaves. There is no possibility that the person who holds the control of the computer can resist various temptations. Therefore, no matter how much technology develops, humans cannot make the world better. Rather, the more technology develops, the closer we get to the end. The only thing humans can do is to contemplate and cleanse their own inner selves and live, or rather survive, with pure hearts and pure missions. Only that can resonate with and draw out the pure hearts of others.
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