The soldiers BarryA mentions are evil because they performed these actions for their own enjoyment.

The Israelites in the OT were ordered to defend themselves. It would have been much easier for them to surrender and be enslaved and/or assimilated (and slowly annihilated), but this was not what God wanted.

Why not?

Because such a thing would have meant God would need to replay the entire Noah scenario all over again, except this time there might not have been a Noah.

Which is more tragic, the genocide of two nations of people or the devolution and extinction of all humanity?

This is similar to what the U.S. faced with Japan in 1945, if you remember. Destroy over 100,000 men, women, children, elderly, etc. and threaten a nation with annihilation, or waste over 1,000,000 American and Japanese lives while the atomic bombs sit languishing in a hangar. We chose the former – this no doubt makes us evil, right?

The Israelites didn’t have a nuke, so the killing was not as antiseptic. Such is life.

Also, had God magically done all of the killing for them, other tribal peoples would not be afraid to attack the Israelites, thus causing even more death (albeit more directly from the hand of God). If stories of the magical death of the Egyptian firstborn didn’t deter these nations, then obviously some Pythonesque foot-from-the-sky wasn’t going to do much good either.

But the most important thing to come from these supposed atrocities was that people who knew of God survived. When knowledge of God is in danger of vanishing from the hearts and minds of mankind is when God must interfere. This is why the Israelites experienced what they did. This is why Jesus appeared when he did and not millenia earlier or later. This is why we Christians are called upon to spread the word and tell the good news, whether it is received immediately or not.

“Someone who believes God can order baby killing and it’s okay as long as God orders it is just one small step away from hearing the voice of God in his head telling him what needs killing.”

First, the point you made here is an epistemological point (how do I know what God wants?), NOT an ethical point. However, you opened this post by asking an ethical question: how could a benevolent Deity command the slaughter of innocents? This is a different question.

OK, let’s return to your epistemological question: even if there is a good reason for God to ordain the killing of an innocent child, how do I, as a fallible human being, know that the voice I’m listening to, telling me to do that, is the voice of God?

If it were up to me, as a PRIVATE individual, then I agree it would be impossible to rationally conclude that the voice I was hearing was indeed the voice of God. We lock away people who think like that, and with good reason. But the command addressed to the Israelites was not a private but a PUBLIC one, given to a people who had witnessed NUMEROUS PUBLIC signs and miracles attesting to God’s power, His goodness, and His concern for the weak and downtrodden. You and I have never witnessed miracles like that. It is hard to put ourselves in the shoes of people who have had such an experience. However, supposing the accounts of the miracles in the book of Exodus to be true, then I cannot think of any convincing argument as to why the Israelites should NOT have listened to the voice of God. A Being who could work such wonders might reasonably claim the right to be listened to and obeyed.

But as for bayonet tossing, I wouldn’t have a bar of it, signs or no signs. If the killing of the Canaanite children was commanded by God, then it must have been quick, clean and solemn. Any Being that told me to toss an infant in the air before impaling it on my bayonet would not deserve to be listened to, no matter how many wonders he or she worked. Bayonet tossing is an act which is, by its very levity, utterly incompatible with an attitude of respect for life. A Being which told me to do that would not be a Deity, but a devil.

Then how do we know the God of the OT was not a devil? My answer: read the book of Deuteronomy – not once, but a few times. Judge for yourself.

Let me begin by saying that until a few years ago, the slaughter of the Canaanites and Amalekites was one of my principal objections to Christianity. I have a great deal of sympathy for your position.

Unlike some contributors, I do NOT think it is intellectually proud for someone to reject a religion because its holy books sanction behavior which he or she believes, with good reason, to be intrinsically immoral. Each of us has to follow his or her conscience, fallible though it is. After all, without our conscience, how can we judge right and wrong? And without conscience, how can we judge whether some alleged revelation – be it a message from above or a claim made in the scriptures of some religion – is to be trusted? God gave us the gift of reason. I’m sure God expects us to use that gift.

It distresses me greatly that many of the Christian contributors to this post who have defended the slaughter of the Canaanites and Amalekites in the Old Testament have used bad arguments to justify their position. I do not disagree with their conclusion; it is their premises that I object to. I list the following posts as examples of this mistaken way of thinking:

As the Creator of life, God has the right to take it. (Jonathan Sarfati.)

God absolutely has the right to kill if He so wishes. (Brent)

If God is the creator of life, he can do with that life what he wills. If he wants to take that life he can do so… God, as creator, has prerogatives that his creatures do not. It is comparable to parents and children.
(Jasondulle)

I’ll start with Jason first. The comparison with parents and children does not hold. Parents do NOT have the right to dispose of their children merely because they created them. On the contrary, the law (rightly) decrees that parents bear a unique responsibility for their children’s welfare, precisely because in choosing to bring these children into existence, they accepted full responsibility for their future well-being, until such time as they can take care of themselves. The killing of a child is a wicked deed; but it becomes even more wicked, not less, when done by a parent. Christians believe God is our Father. That makes God a Parent. He was a Parent of the Canaanite children too. Therefore He had a duty of care towards those children.

Someone is sure to jump in with the objection that human parents are merely procreators and not Creators of their children, and that God, as God, has special privileges. However, this disanalogy does not help; indeed, it makes matters worse for those wishing to deny that God had any responsibilities towards the children of the Canaanites.

First, on purely logical grounds: it does not follow from the premise:

(1) A created B;

that

(2) A is morally justified in doing whatever he or she wants with B.

Brent’s contention that “God absolutely has the right to kill if He wishes” is therefore a non sequitur. Ditto Jonathan Sarfati’s claim that “As the Creator of life, God has the right to take it.”

I should add that the argument proves too much. Ask yourselves this. Would God have the right to not only kill but also annihilate a newborn baby, if He so wished, simply because He is the Creator of the universe? Let’s go one step further. Would God have the right to roast a baby in flames for a while, before annihilating the baby, if He wished to do so? Let’s push the argument to the limit. Would God have the right to roast the baby forever, if He wished?

I know that Christian readers will want to object: “But God could never wish such a thing. God is by nature perfect, and He could never want to do that, in the first place.” Agreed! But my point is that regardless of whether God could want to do that or not, it would be wrong anyway. We all know that.

And yet the argument that a creator has the right to do whatever he or she wants with his or her creation exerts a strong sway over a large number of people. I have to ask myself: why do so many people continue to accept such an argument, even though it is logically invalid? I suspect that it is because the argument seems intuitively plausible in one special case: where B is an artifact. An artist is free to destroy her creation if she so wishes. But as we move up the Hierarchy of Being, the conclusion becomes less and less plausible. We do not have the right to do as we will with genetically engineered organisms, for instance – especially if they are animals. Rather, we are morally bound to take their welfare into account. Why, then, should God have the right to do anything He wishes to people, simply because He created them? Surely God, too, is bound to take our welfare into account.

I should add that whereas human parents sometimes fail to fulfil their responsibilities because of circumstances beyond their control (e.g. a food shortage which makes it impossible for them to feed their children), God, as Creator of the cosmos, can never fail to do anything He is obligated to do. As Creator with a capital C, God has no “out” when it comes to meeting His responsibilities to His children – Canaanites included.

Here is my position on the slaughter of the Canaanite children. I maintain that IF God decrees the killing of innocent children, it can ONLY be because He (being omniscient and loving) knows for a certainty that an even worse fate would befall them if they were NOT killed. In the case of the Canaanites, the worse fate would have included child abuse, and growing up in a depraved culture where they themselves would have become abusers. God knew for a certitude that this would happen. It is no mystery that God, as a Parent, would have wished to spare His children that fate.

We, on the other hand, are not omniscient, and we don’t know for a certainty what the future will bring. The answer to the question, “Would Hitler’s contemporaries have been morally justified in killing Hitler as an infant?” is “No, because they would have had no way of knowing what kind of person he would turn out to be.”

Some may ask why God couldn’t have saved the children by miraculously transporting them to an uninhabited area – e.g. the middle of the Sahara. My answer is: and then what? As a Parent, God would have to then miraculously feed these children, AND educate them in right and wrong, AND protect them while they are growing up. Too many miracles are required. Wouldn’t it be simpler for God to take their lives and then care for them in the hereafter?

What about the fear and dread the children must have experienced as they were put to the sword? Is this not a hellish thing for a benevolent God to ordain? But the Bible does not says that the children experienced any fear or dread. I would argue that if God is truly good, then He must have seen to it that they did not – e.g. by numbing their senses in their final moments, so that they experienced no anguish. Likewise, God must have seen to it that the Israelite soldiers killing these children experienced no subsequent trauma from doing so. (These “psychic interventions” would have required some special Divine acts, but at least they would have been one-off interventions, and hence not too messy.)

Finally, it may be asked why God, being all-loving, does not rescue ALL children who are being abused, by ending their lives, as He did the Canaanites. Good question. But that’s NOT the question Dave asked at the beginning of this thread, which is how a just God could command the killing of babies. That’s a different question: the problem of evil. I’m not going to attempt to answer that here. I’ll just say that David B. Hart wrote an article, entitled “Tsunami and Theodicy,” in “First Things,” (March 2005), which is about the most honest essay I’ve seen on the subject. The address of the article is: http://www.firstthings.com/art.....he=tsunami

I’d like to finish by making a philosophical point. Many contributors to this post have asserted that God has the right to do whatever He wants. I agree with this statement, so far as it goes, but I would add: God is by nature perfect. By nature, He cannot want anything bad.

As regards God’s obligations to His creatures, I would say: God does indeed have the right to do whatever He wants to His creatures, but NOT simply because He created them. Rather, it is because, being perfectly good, He cannot do anything but want what is best for His creatures. Thus it is God’s GOODNESS, and not his POWER, which gives Him the right to do as He wills to His creatures.

It is not immoral of God to command the killing of babies in order to save them from a worse fate. God is, however, obliged to kill them humanely, and then provide for them in the hereafter, as an Omnipotent, All-loving Parent should.

I’m an agnostic. That means I don’t believe there’s enough evidence to determine the nature of the creator. I believe there’s enough evidence to make a reasonable design inference for both the universe and life on earth but I don’t have the first clue about the source. It would seem a designer of universes is outside the universe so that isn’t really investigable for science. A designer of life on earth, however, seems to not need to exist outside the universe or be able to do things that violate any of the laws of physics as we currently know them. So that IS investigable by science so long as we bound the designer by the laws of physics.

I don’t care if Sarfati is the Pope. In fact he’s a 144-hour creationist and when one of those calls me the moron the results aren’t going to be pretty if I respond in kind. So I removed him from the situation before it got worse.

He’s got AiG or wherever to say what he wants. I’m not sure why he was even here in the first place.

Just wondering: what if God orders a paranoid schizophrenic to kill babies?

Yeah, that’s a problem, isn’t it?

Glad you brought it up.

Someone who believes God can order baby killing and it’s okay as long as God orders it is just one small step away from hearing the voice of God in his head telling him what needs killing.

God is totally justified to kill, just as we are if He were to tell us to carry out His will.

Just wondering: what if God orders a paranoid schizophrenic to kill babies?

God, however, can know perfectly when it is right and just to kill. Death is nothing but a door. We walk out of this life and into the next. Eternal life doesn’t mean eternal existence. Everyone has eternal existence.

When a man kills another for unrighteous causes he doesn’t snuff out the victim’s eternal existence, he snuffs out his existence in this present realm only. It’s wrong on our part because we are not superior to other men. God is.

God is totally justified to kill, just as we are if He were to tell us to carry out His will.