God and the Canaanite Destruction: Implications of an atheist’s premise
Kirk Durston
Introduction:
Could an all-powerful, all-knowing, perfectly good God ever permit, condone, or even orchestrate the large-scale death or killing of a population group? The catalyst for this question comes from accounts in the Bible of God commanding or bringing about the destruction of the ancient Canaanite society and, ultimately, most of humanity during a future time popularly known as Armageddon.
A premise advanced by atheist philosopher William Rowe is that the existence of an all-powerful, all-knowing, and perfectly good God is incompatible with gratuitous, or pointless, evil. God, therefore, must prevent any gratuitous event from happening. It follows from this that for a series of events, when that series reaches a point where further events in the series become gratuitous, then God must terminate the series. This has enormous implications for societies and human civilization. By the atheist’s own premise, he must conclude that if a society reaches the point where their net moral value is about to become gratuitous, then God must terminate that society if He is perfectly good, all powerful, and all-knowing. This raises two concerns, which are discussed in the closing sections.