THE LEKKI ATROCITIES AND GOD: A RESPONSE TO PASTOR IREN
Nigeria has been going through a turbulent couple of weeks with the #EndSARS protests. The youths have been on the streets fighting for their rights to exist and to be governed properly and incorruptibly by the country's leaders. The Nigerian Army have been widely reported by local media, international media, and tonnes of eyewitnesses to have opened fire on innocent unarmed protesters at several locations across the two weeks as well, the most significant being the truly tragic events of around 7 p.m. at the Lekki toll gate on Tuesday night (20th October).
A highly religious country, roughly 47% of Nigerians, predominantly in the South, believe in the Christian God of the Bible. Indeed, during the protests, people speaking in tongues at protest venues was a common sight. It is very clear that the Christian God of the Bible (simply "God" hereafter) is thought to be omniscient (all-knowing), omnipotent (all-powerful), omnibenevolent (all-loving or all-caring), perfectly free, and perfectly good by the vast majority of Christians. It is no surprise, therefore, that many have asked where he was while the whole hullabaloo of the last two weeks was happening and why he chose to watch innocent protesters, including some of those who openly prayed to him, get shot to death.
I was tagged to a thread this evening containing one of such questions and an attempt to answer it. The thread was written by Pastor Emmanuel Iren, lead pastor of Celebration Church, Lagos. A self-declared new convert, who's probably a follower of Pastor Iren's, tagged him to a tweet.
#EndSARS @pst_iren I'll still continue to ask why would God be silent at this point our people are getting killed at lekki . I'm a new Christian convert but I wonder why God shouldn't intervene
— esseh.wealth (@EssehSamuel) October 20, 2020
Pastor Iren, in true apologetic fashion, gave five key responses to the question, which I have done my best to summarise below and given dubs in parentheses after each summary:
1. God delays judgment because he wants the offender to repent. Everyone will eventually receive judgment in the afterlife, and many will even be judged here on earth. (Delayed Judgment response)
2. God was not silent. He spoke ahead to the protesters about the dangers, but they still chose to exhibit bravery and fight for their rights. (Prior Revelation response)
3. God sometimes uses unfortunate events to manifest his divine plan. (Utility response)
4. God has given humans free will. The unfortunate events were a result of the abuse of free will. (Free Will response)
5. Everyone eventually will die. The good news is, death isn't the end. An eternal life of bliss awaits after death. (Eternal Life response)
My goal in this article is to show that none of these responses succeeds without Pastor Iren having to give up one of the aforementioned "omni" attributes of God. We shall take them one after the other.
Response 1: Delayed Judgment
First, the thing Pastor Iren said about how God will punish the evildoers eventually isn't entirely scriptural. According to the Bible, the main (and, some would say, the only) thing God rewards is faith, not works, at least when the reward in question is gaining heaven (or avoiding hell). And once you gain heaven, it's not clear to me what else is of value that you'd want to gain further, since heaven is supposed to be the most valuable desire (precisely because heaven is the embodiment of God's 'physical' presence). So the idea that God will punish people like the Lekki shooters for what they do is not entirely doctrinally accurate, as far as I know. Judgment in the afterlife is more about what/whom they did [not] believe in.
Second, the questioner wasn't asking why God didn't punish those who did the atrocities at Lekki. He was asking why God allowed it to happen without intervening by, perhaps, jamming the guns of the soldiers, preventing the bullets from firing, making them have flat tires on their way to the protest grounds, etc. So Pastor Iren's response addresses a strawman of a sort.
Third, Pastor Iren's quoting of 2 Peter 3:9 was out of context. It doesn't apply to this situation. That was about a situation wherein people would ask, "If Jesus is really coming soon, why has he taken so long?" and thus were deriding Christians who said Jesus was coming soon. It has nothing to do with judgment for sin or punishment for sin.
More devastatingly, the Delayed Judgment response undermines Pastor Iren's point. If God is waiting for the shooters at Lekki to repent, that means God is actually giving them a chance not to be punished for the atrocities they committed. God is trying to avert punishment for them. In other words, he's delaying justice because he does not desire to mete out justice.
This response, therefore, misapplies the doctrine of salvation, addresses a strawman, misapplies Bible passages, and is incompatible with God's omnibenevolence.
Response 2: Prior Revelation
First of all, this is not at all obvious. There is no clear evidence that this happened. But even if it did, it still misses the point. The point was not whether God warned the protesters ahead of the perils. In fact, the protesters did not need God's prior warning of perils, since people are already well aware of the use of brute force by the government upon citizens. The point was, why did God allow it to happen without intervening? This Prior Revelation response, therefore, does nothing to explain why God did not prevent the Lekki atrocities if he is truly who he is believed to be.
Response 3: Utility
This response, at best, suggests either a God who is not powerful enough to bring about a plan which does not involve causing suffering and pain to humans or a God who is not empathetic (i.e., benevolent) enough to care about avoiding the phenomenon of suffering and pain in humans while executing such plans. So this response also lowers confidence in the belief that God has all these "omni" attributes.
Response 4: Free Will
There is never a complete Christian response to any version of the problem of evil (which is what the original tweet is) without a mention of free will. It's a constant go-to response for the faithful. This is so because free will easily shifts the blame for culpable actions from God to humans. According to the standard Free Will defence, the ability or capacity to do evil is an inevitable consequence of having free will. Therefore, since some evil actions are a matter of human free will, it wasn't God causing them to happen; and since God cannot interfere with human choices for them to be truly free, God does nothing morally wrong in allowing humans to do evil by their free will.
There are a number of problems with the Free Will response. First, anyone who knows philosophy or neuroscience knows that libertarian free will is highly disfavoured among scientists and philosophers. Scientists tend to go with determinism, and philosophers tend to go with compatibilism. While I'm not trying to make an appeal to authority or popularity here, it is obvious that, if expert knowledge is anything to go by, then libertarian free will most likely does not exist.
But even if it were true that we have libertarian free will, this fact would not in any way absolve God of culpability. Showing this will take a very long discussion which time would not permit me to lay out here and thus deserves its own separate article. For now, I will simply link an article that explains precisely how the Free Will defence (or at least Alvin Plantinga's version of it) does not work in theodicies. On a more fundamental level, the Free Will defence is incompatible with divine perfection; for if it is the case that free will entails the capacity to do evil, and it is the case that God has perfect free will, then it logically follows that God is capable of doing evil. But this implies that God is not perfectly good, for perfect goodness implies the inability to do evil.
The Free Will response, therefore, gives us reasons to doubt God's omniscience, perfect freedom, or perfect goodness.
Response 5: Eternal Life
The problem with this view is, aside from the fact that it seems to trivialise our current earth life, it is also very possible that many of those who got shot and died either were not Christians at all or are some version of Christianity that Pastor Iren might not be confident are going to heaven, such as Jehovah's Witnesses. (To be fair, I do not know Pastor Iren's theological view on salvation, and I do not know if he holds to strict exclusivism. So this is a long shot.) We have no idea whether these people went to heaven or hell. But suppose at least one protester was a Muslim, which is highly likely given the demographics of Nigeria. On pastor Iren's view, he would have gone to hell. This means that God, who could have done something to prolong this person's life and increase his chances of eventually hearing the gospel, getting saved, and gaining heaven, did nothing to prevent this person from ending up in eternal damnation. How is God not partly culpable, then, for this person's going to hell? And if God is even partly culpable, how can he be perfectly good? And if he is not perfect, how could he be God? This response, therefore, gives us reasons to doubt God's perfect goodness.
My conclusion, therefore, is that none of the five reasons that Pastor Iren gives for why God would not intervene in the Lekki atrocities gives us a justifiable reason to believe in God as the Christians claim him to be. But since the Christian conception of God appears incompatible with our experience of what happened at Lekki, and our experience is virtually undeniable, it is more justifiable, given the facts of the case and arguments I've presented, to deny that the Christian God exists.
Consider this an argument for relative atheism.
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