When readers look at my paper, "An Atheist Morality without God", the first thing seen is that I had trouble getting it passed peer review.
Submission received: 2 March 2025/Revised: 22 September 2025 / Accepted: 3 November 2025 / Published: 12 November 2025
One peer reviewer wanted to debate me about the problem of horrendous suffering in my first few paragraphs. I thought what I said was pertinent. But this reviewer was not giving an inch, some criticisms of which were ignorant. Dr. Sterba suggested he or she felt threatened by what I wrote and wasn't going to accept the paper unless I deleted that part, so I did.
Here is the contested part:
On God and Horrendous Suffering
When it comes to horrendous suffering I have written several chapters in my books on it, plus edited, God and Horrendous Suffering (2021). The force of this problem is much greater for evangelicals, who believe a perfectly good, all powerful, all knowing theistic God exists, who allegedly inspired the horrific tales in the Bible, including sending people into an eternal conscious torment in hell. That explains why evangelical apologists like William Lane Craig said, “The problem of evil is certainly the greatest obstacle to belief in the existence of God. When I ponder both the extent and depth of suffering in the world, whether due to man’s inhumanity to man or to natural disasters, then I must confess that I find it hard to believe that God exists.”1
Christian philosopher James F. Sennett echoed what Craig said: “By far the most important objection to the faith is the so-called problem of evil—the alleged incompatibility between the existence or extent of evil in the world and the existence of God. I tell my philosophy of religion students that, if they are Christians and the problem of evil does not keep them up at night, then they don’t understand it.”2 The force of this problem is perhaps the greatest for Calvinists who believe in theological determination, as opposed to non-Calvinists who believe in free will.
The force of the problem of suffering is different for pantheists, who believe everything is an illusion (or maya) but who cannot avoid suffering throughout their lives, as it is for polytheists, whose multiple gods aren’t powerful enough to decisively overcome suffering, and who are believed to cause much of it. Process theologians believe their god can’t force free-willed agents to do good. He can only persuade them to do good. But given the fact of horrendous suffering in our world, such a god is shown to be useless in the face of natural disasters, and powerless when it comes to liars, thieves, molesters, rapists, kidnappers, and killers who refuse to be persuaded. For protest theologians such as John Roth, god’s continual inaction must mean god is directly responsible for suffering in the world. He says our response should be to protest the lack of divine action, in hopes that public shaming will goad god into doing good. For deists, suffering has little force since they already admit their god is an absentee slum landlord of a world that should be condemned as unsafe for the habitation of life. For misotheists, if a theistic God allows horrendous suffering, it is our moral duty to hate him, because god ends up being a moral monster (from the Greek word miseo “to hate”). While misotheists are typically atheists, misotheism is a moral position, not a theological one. They think it’s immoral to praise and worship any ethical monster, including a divine one, real or imagined. For atheists who don’t think any god exists, the fact of horrendous suffering is not an intellectual problem at all. Suffering, even horrendous suffering, is what nonbelievers expect to find in a world that evolved by blind natural processes. It’s something we fight against. Atheism is, after all, a moral position. Many of us come to it due to the suffering allowed by, and caused by religionists.
An earlier summary of my case against a theistic God due to horrendous suffering was published in the Trinity Journal of Natural Philosophical Theology. It was also published on my page at The Secular Web, which includes a rebuttal by Don McIntosh, the editor of the journal, along with my final response.
In my reply to McIntosh, I said:
God may well have good reasons to allow for a modest amount of pain since we have physical bodies and we will all die. So we can set aside that kind of suffering as largely uninteresting in this discussion. Horrendous suffering, by contrast, should be the focus. My perspective is a “minimal facts” approach to the problem of suffering. I’m arguing that God should not allow a specific kind of suffering, horrendous suffering. Failing to focus on it is a failure to honestly search for the truth, for when horrendous suffering is our focus, the standard theodicies don’t work. 3
I dealt with the fact of horrendous suffering, and argued it rendered the existence of the traditional God of theism exceedingly improbable. I thought my case was an extremely good one, up until the point of a refutation, sure to change some minds. What I failed to consider is what Dr. Sterba does. He makes a solid case that the alleged existence of a perfectly good, omnipotent God of traditional theism is not just exceedingly improbable given horrendous suffering. It makes such a God concept logically incompatible with the degree and amount of horrendous suffering that exists in our world! Now why didn’t I think of that? Sterba has a far larger perspective, which makes his case far better. Multiplied by the numerous instances of horrendous suffering every minute of every day, week, month, year, decade, century, and millennium on earth, he has made his case. The existence of such a God is logically impossible. Such a God has been proven false. There is no God of the theistic kind, period. James Sterba has single-handedly refuted such a concept.
Sterba is not alone in attempting this, although he has succeeded at it. There are others.4 It still might be the case that other non-theistic deities provided moral guidance to human beings, like El, Yahweh, Baal, Molech, Hathor, Isis, Zeus, Aphrodite, Poseidon, Minerva, Allah, Odin, Thor, Freya, Durga, Saraswati, plus chaos gods, and demonic gods, at least five hundred of whom are dead!
Matt McCormick, Philosophy professor at California State University, Sacramento, states the obvious, that “There is a huge burden of proof to be met by anyone claiming that some supernatural or spiritual entity is real in the light of all of these similar claims that have turned out to be mistaken. And all of these cases make it reasonable to conclude that no such beings, forces, or phenomena are real.”5 Just consider the case Jaco Gericke make against one of these gods. He earned PhD’s both in the Old Testament and philosophy of religion. He argued quite powerfully that if the henotheistic god Yahweh doesn’t exist, then neither does God.6 Regardless, it seems theists just don’t give them any credence, so we’ll accept their judgment. Just as human beings invented other deities, they have also died whenever their cultures died. This is a key indicator, all by itself, that polytheistic gods and goddesses, henothetistic gods and goddessess, and other finite gods of other specific cultures, were invented by humans.
There is a reason I stress these things. For if a God or gods don’t exist then deities are not the sources of morality. So we already have a morality without a God. It’s the only morality, and it’s a secular one. It’s been here all along from the time we became self-aware and developed into tribes. If we want to search for a fact based morality, or some kind of objective ethics, we need to leave a God, gods, and goddesses out of it. What do they add to morality or ethics? Nothing we don’t already have. In fact, adding a God into our morality keeps us from developing an ethics that benefits us.7
Let me preemptively say in response to the standard apologetical retorts, that a perfectly good God is not going to accommodate himself to human beings with a revelation couched in barbaric morality. That makes no sense. Why not teach human beings the truth from the get-go, unless the specific gods were invented by the myth-makers to reflect their barbaric moralities. As they learned the world was bigger, they needed a bigger world-wide God. So it’s much more likely that the myth-makers gradually made a polytheistic god morph into a henotheistic god then a monotheistic god.
Now you know the rest of the story.
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[Note: James Sterba wrote a chapter on the logical problem of evil for my revised book, God and Horrendous Suffering (2026). LINK ]
1 Craig, William Lane. “The Problem of Evil.” Reasonable Faith (blog). Accessed May 13, 2021. https://www.reasonablefaith.org/writings/popularwritings/existence-nature-of-god/the-problem-of-evil/.
2 James Sennett, This Much I Know: A Postmodern Apologetic, an unpublished manuscript.
3. See my Secular Web Page, at https://infidels.org/author/john-w-loftus/
4. There are those written by Quentin Smith, “A Sound Logical Argument From Evil;” Hugh LaFollette, “Plantinga on the Free Will Defense;” Richard La Croix, “Unjustified Evil and God’s Choice” all to be found in The Impossibility of God, eds. Michael Martin and Ricki Monnier (Prometheus Books, 2003)]. See also Richard Gale’s On the Nature and Existence of God (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 98-178, and Graham Oppy’s book, Arguing About Gods (Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 262-268. Oppy, argues at length for the thesis that Plantinga’s treatment of the logical problem of evil is inconsistent in several respects. See also A.M. Weisberger’s critique of Plantinga’s free will defense in her book, Suffering Belief (Peter Lang, 1999), pp. 163-184. Just because J.L.Mackie admitted Plantinga’s counter-argument succeeded didn’t mean all others have been answered, or that others agreed with Mackie’s admission.
David Kyle Johnson, has also argued the existence of Demons are impossible”, (2017), at https://www.academia.edu/21642443/Justified_Belief_in_the_Existence_of_Demons_is_Impossible. Without demons it becomes much harder to believe God is all-good, or to expect him to answer prayers, or to explain away naturally caused disasters the way Alvin Plantinga does, by punting to a mythical being called Satan. Johnson has also argue that justified belief in miracles is impossible, in “Justified Belief in Miracles is Impossible” (2015). at Science, Religion and Culture: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/281424006_Justified_Belief_in_Miracles_is_Impossible. Without miracles it becomes harder to believe there is a deity whom we can depend on when facing horrendous suffering.
5. See Matt McCormick, “500 Dead Gods Plus 1”, direct link:
http://www.provingthenegative.com/2008/12/500-dead-gods-plus-1.html?m=0.
6, See, Jaco Gericke, “Can ‘God’ exist if Yahweh Doesn't?" in my anthology The End of Christianity.
7. For a forty one thousand worded online essay on ethics by a premier ethicist, see Peter Singer, “Ethics, Definition, History, Examples, Types, Philosophy, & Facts” Britannica, Last Updated: Dec 18, 2024. https://www.britannica.com/topic/ethics-philosophy. To see a comprehensive and eye-opening one-volume history of Christian ethics that surveys major thinkers, movements, and issues from the early church to the present, there is no better resource than J. Philip Wogaman’s Christian Ethics: A Historical Introduction, 2nd edition (Westminster John Knox Press, 2010).
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