Was the Slaughter of the Canaanites an Act of “Divine Genocide”?
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ON THE PROBLEM OF EVIL
Skeptical Theism and the Problem of Evil
I wonder if we can rely too much on “skeptical theism.” To my understanding, it classically endorses these three theses:
ST1: We have no good reason for thinking that the possible goods we know of are representative of the possible goods there are.
ST2: We have no good reason for thinking that the possible evils we know of are representative of the possible evils there are.
ST3: We have no good reason for thinking that the entailment relations we know of between possible goods and the permission of possible evils are representative of the entailment relations there are between possible goods and the permission of possible evils.
But, true or false: Skeptical theism then undermines any of our judgments about how likely it is that any state of affairs obtain, as God could have reasons to bring such a state about or prevent it.
For example, do you think it’s unlikely that God would permit/cause a pink lizard to randomly materialize on top of your head tonight and then explode like a firecracker? Why do you think this is unlikely? Consider the butterfly effect and your complete inability to discern how this would change the course of history! So then, given an unmitigated skeptical theism, you should strip off any expectations you’d have about whether God will cause/permit this to happen tonight.
Blake
United States
Dr. Craig’s Response
Blake, I’ve never liked the term “skeptical theism” and don’t think I’ve ever used it to characterize my response to the problem of evil (unless, perhaps, in response to someone who used the term). I think it carries the wrong connotations. Typically, these folks have no positive natural theology to serve as a counterweight to the evidence against God posed by apparently gratuitous evil. But my robust natural theology makes my approach the antithesis of skepticism!
With respect to the apparent gratuity of evil in the world, I prefer simply to assert what seems evident on reflection, namely, that given a God endowed with middle knowledge, we’re just in no position to assert with any confidence that probably God doesn’t have a morally sufficient reason for permitting some incident of suffering which we experience.
So while you’re right that so-called skeptical theists often do affirm ST1 and ST2, these have been no part of my response to the problem of evil. In fact, I’ve named the goods that I think could justify God’s permission of moral and natural evils in the world. As for ST3, I’m not sure even skeptical theists would affirm what I take this to state; but I have never affirmed any such thing in my response to the problem of evil. I guess that means that I’m not a skeptical theist!
In any case, I don’t think your untoward consequences follow from what I’ve said or even from skeptical theism. For what one is talking about is evil or suffering in the world. The claim is that we have no basis for saying that any evil we experience is not justly permitted by God. That isn’t to say that we don’t have good non-moral grounds for thinking that certain events won’t occur. Take your pink lizard example. If someone were to object to this happening on moral grounds, then I’d agree with you. I have no reason to think that God could not be morally justified in allowing such an explosion on my head. Precisely for that reason when someone does suffer a traumatic head injury, say, on the construction site or in war, we’re not in a position to say that God lacks a morally sufficient reason for permitting it. But while we can’t exclude such a head injury on moral grounds, couldn’t we have other grounds for thinking that such an injury is unlikely to take place tonight by the magical appearance of a pink lizard on my head? It seems to me, for example, that I could have good grounds for thinking that God has created a universe that is endowed with natural laws and that miraculous interventions in it on His part are limited in nature and context. So while I wouldn’t rule it out that I might suffer from an explosion over my head, I have good reason to think that it will not be through the random materialization of a pink lizard as I lie in bed tonight.
The Problem of Evil Once More
Hello Dr. Craig,
I’m a former die-hard Christian who has spent countless hours debating agnostics and atheists using many of your arguments, as well as many of my own. Recently, my faith has been strained, to say the least.
But I wanted to follow up on your answer to questions concerning evil and pain and suffering.
First, you often say that there is no good reason to believe that God doesn’t have a significant reason for allowing pain and suffering in this world. But the burden of proof is on you to show or give a significant reason why an all loving and all powerful God would allow certain unnecessary pain and suffering? To say God “may” have a significant reason is somewhat of a cop-out, don’t you think? For instance if God did have a significant good reason to allow Hitler and his henchmen to build ovens for human disposal, then we should—what?—rejoice that they were built with God’s stamp of approval? Why should we view that act as being inhumane or necessarily evil if God had a significant reason to allow it to happen? It seems to me if God had a significant reason to allow it to happen, then we should rejoice that God’s will was done.
Another example: my own mother recently passed away after a long bout with dementia, to the point that toward the end her mind could no longer receive signals from her body to tell her that she was starving to death. The doctors all said a feeding tube would only extend her prolonged suffering. As a recent convert to agnosticism, it’s hard to find a significant reason why an all powerful, all loving God would allow such an extended, drawn-out death. Please offer a hypothetical significant good reason. After all, the burden of proof is on you to give a good example of a significant good reason why such things would happen if such an all powerful and all loving God does exist. Again we should rejoice that God allows such pain and suffering if, in fact, He has a significantly good reason for its occurrence.
To me, it also makes the whole concept of prayer seem borderline ridiculous; because it’s hard to imagine that such an all powerful and all knowing God would look upon such pain and suffering but choose to only intervene if someone prays the right prayer. Can you really imagine that such a God could look down and say: “I see Mary is in a tremendous amount of pain, but I’m not going to intervene unless someone prays, or prays the right prayer”? Even from our perspective the answer has at least a 50 percent chance of being no, and God in His foreknowledge would already have known the answer; so, there would be no possibility of a different outcome of any given event regardless if the entire world prayed in unity. So it seems to me that the whole concept of prayer is a ridiculous concept, seeing that an all powerful or all loving God would have intervened rather than allow such pain and suffering to go on for months unnecessarily. And if there is a significant reason for God to allow such pain and suffering, then rather than feel empathy or be sorrowful, should we rejoice knowing that God allowed her to suffer for so long because He, without a doubt, had a good and significant reason to prolong her suffering?
Sorry, but that just doesn’t meld!
That brings me to my last point: Why would a Christian lose their mental faculties only to have them revived in a world hereafter? If our spirit and conscience goes on to this great beyond, certainly it would be the very mind we entertain now, otherwise if there is no conscience memory of this world in the hereafter, then we have no real good reason to look forward to a heavenly bliss any more than an atheistic view of nothingness, at least from our current perspective of reality! Why should I prefer heaven, if the mind I will have then is not the same mind I have in this world? And if that mind can be deluded or damaged beyond rational and conscience thought in this world, what hope is there that there is a rejuvenation that awaits us in the hereafter? I believe the fact that the circuitry of one’s brain “conscience” can be scrambled or deluded and damaged beyond repair despite one’s faith, or lack thereof, is evidence enough that the mind or conscience is not eternal.
David
United States
Dr. Craig’s Response
My condolences, David, on your mother’s recent death. My own father similarly passed away after being reduced to a mere shadow of himself by Parkinson’s disease, and it was painful for me to watch.
But in my work on the problem of evil, I’ve found it very helpful to distinguish between what I call the emotional problem of evil and the intellectual problem of evil.7 I can’t help but wonder if you are not struggling with the emotional problem of evil, David, since your objections, considered purely intellectually, are not very substantive but seem to be predicated on some basic misunderstandings.
First, and most fundamentally, you have a misconception of the dialectical role of the problem of evil in the dialogue between theism and atheism and, hence, of the burden of proof. The problem of evil or suffering is an argument on behalf of atheism. It is offered as a defeater of the theistic claim that “God exists.” The atheist wants to prove that statement false on the basis of the evil in the world. So it’s up to him to present an argument that the evil in the world is in some way incompatible with the truth of “God exists.”
INSIGHT
This is an important observation and insight. So often, among cultural popularizers of the problem of evil, one gets the impression that the burden is on the theist. But is it? This is not to suggest that the theist is absolved of any responsible answer to the problem. But it is important to recognize whose problem is the problem of evil.
Philosophical atheists have understood this and so have traditionally offered arguments to the effect that the evil in the world makes it either logically impossible or improbable that God exists and that, therefore, God does not exist. As the person offering the argument, the atheist is under obligation to support the premises of his argument. He cannot just assert them and then demand that the theist refute them, any more than the theist, when he offers arguments for God’s existence, can just assert them and demand that the atheist refute them. Now it is the atheist’s turn, and so it is he who has to bear the burden of proof. The theist may respond to the atheist’s argument either by trying to show that the atheist’s premises are false (a rebutting defeater-defeater) or else by trying to show that the atheist’s premises have not been shown to be true (an undercutting defeater-defeater). In the latter case, the theist doesn’t need to explain why God actually permits evil (why would he know that?); he will simply show that the atheist has not been able to exclude that God does have morally sufficient reasons for permitting evil to occur.
Now, part of my response to the argument from evil, defended in my published work, is that the atheist makes probability judgments that are simply beyond our capacity to make with any sort of confidence. So, for example, if God had prevented Hitler from coming to power, we have no idea how the course of subsequent world history might have run. Perhaps an empowered and emboldened Josef Stalin would have wrought worse atrocities (he starved 11 million Ukrainians to death to finance his Marxist state) and eventually plunged the world into war anyway. Perhaps there would have been a nuclear war by now. Who knows? Similarly, no one is in a position to know how your mother’s or my father’s agonizing deaths may affect the course of world history. Perhaps God wants man to find cures for the diseases and infirmities that afflict us rather than constantly tinker with the world with miraculous interventions to cure people, just as He wants us to develop plumbers and electricians and computer scientists rather than magically solve our problems by constant miraculous interventions in the world, which would leave us like immature children rather than mature moral agents. More specifically, God could have some providential reason for your mother’s slow decline. Perhaps He knew that it would cause you to wrestle with your faith and to emerge from this crucible a strengthened and more mature Christian. You have no idea of what God might accomplish through your mother’s death. It would be presumptuous of you to think that it was in vain.
Now, your response to this is not to deny the point—you tacitly admit that God may well have providential reasons for permitting the terrible evils in the world—but your rejoinder, then, is to say that we should rejoice that these things have happened, which in light of your pain over your mother’s death seems, of course, absurd. But your conclusion doesn’t follow, David. As you know, the Scriptures teach that we are to give thanks in all circumstances, but not necessarily for all circumstances. In particular, we don’t thank God for and rejoice at sin. We’re glad that in His providence God can bring some good out of Hitler’s sinful acts, but neither we nor God is glad at Hitler’s evil. In the case of natural evil, like our parents’ diseases, we can be relieved that God can bring some good out of what they suffered, but it doesn’t follow that we are glad that they suffered.
David, your view of prayer and providence are naïve and based upon fallacious reasoning. If God has middle knowledge, then His providence over a world already takes into account what prayers would be offered in various circumstances. Your anthropomorphic deity looking down and making last-minute decisions is a caricature. In asserting that “God in His foreknowledge would already have known the answer; so, there would be no possibility of a different outcome of any given event regardless if the entire world prayed in unity,” you have fallen into the fallacious reasoning of fatalism! It is logically fallacious to infer that because God foreknows that some event will occur, there is, therefore, no possibility that the event will not occur. All that follows is that the event will occur, not that it must occur, and were it to fail to occur, then God would have foreknown differently.8 This is one of those cases where one sees the real cash value of philosophy for the Christian life. Because of your philosophical mistakes you are led to inveigh against prayer as “ridiculous,” thereby cutting yourself off from the very source of hope and comfort that you so badly need. Of course you should feel empathy and sorrow for those who suffer, and what you rejoice in is that this suffering is not the unredeemed product of blind chance but allowed by a loving and provident God who can bring some good out of it.
Your final point, David, strikes me as very confused. Certainly there is personal identity of the person who lives on in the afterlife and the person in this life. But why should their mental condition be the same? The late Nobel Prize–winning neurologist Sir John Eckles once explained the relationship of the mind to the brain like this: the mind uses the brain as an instrument for thought. Just as a pianist cannot produce beautiful music if his piano is broken down and out of tune, even though he, himself, has the innate ability to produce such music, so the mind cannot think properly when the brain is impaired through disease or drugs. But in the afterlife, and especially in the resurrection, we are freed from such infirmities. The wonderful hope of eternal life can give us courage to endure the brief suffering of this earthly life. You ask, “What hope is there that there is a rejuvenation that awaits us in the hereafter?” Why, the resurrection of Jesus, of course! His resurrection in advance of ours is the basis of our hope for not only our, but also for your mother’s and my father’s, healing and restoration.
David, reading your letter, I don’t get the impression that you are very familiar with either natural theology or the historical evidence for Jesus’ resurrection, despite your characterization of yourself as a “former die-hard Christian.” For the above defensive move I make against the argument from evil is only the reverse side of the coin of the powerful offensive case for the existence of God and the resurrection of Jesus. Even if we had no response to the atheistic argument from evil, I think that these positive arguments and evidence simply outweigh the argument from evil. Yet you seem to be unaware of the positive case for Christian theism.
So these arguments you give for rejecting faith in God aren’t really very good, David. I’d encourage you to work through the pain and in time begin to study more seriously, not only the problem of evil, but also the positive evidence in support of our hope.
Was the Slaughter of the Canaanites an Act of “Divine Genocide”?
In the ReasonableFaith.org forums, there have been some good questions raised on the issue of God commanding the Jews to commit “genocide” on the people in the Promised Land. As you have pointed out in some of your written work, this act does not fit with the Western concept of God being the big sugar daddy in the sky. Now, we can certainly find justification for those people coming under God’s judgment because of their sins, idolatry, sacrificing their children, etc. But a harder question is the killing of the children and infants. Children and infants are innocent of the sins that their society has committed. How do we reconcile this command of God to kill the children with the concept of his Holiness?
Also, I have heard you justify Old Testament violence on the basis that God had used the Israelite army to judge the Canaanites, and their elimination by Israelites is morally right as they were obeying God’s command (it would be wrong if they did not obey God in eliminating the Canaanites). This resembles a bit on how Muslims define morality and justify the violence of Muhammad and other morally questionable actions (Muslims define morality as doing the will of God). Do you see any difference between your justification of Old Testament violence and Islamic justification of Muhammad and violent verses of the Qur’an? Is the violence and the morally questionable actions and verses of the Qur’an, a good argument while talking to Muslims?
Thank you,
Steven
Dr. Craig’s Response
According to the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Old Testament), when God called forth His people out of slavery in Egypt and back to the land of their forefathers, He directed them to kill all the Canaanite clans who were living in the land (Deut. 7:1–2; 20:16–18). The destruction was to be complete: every man, woman, and child was to be killed. The book of Joshua tells the story of Israel’s carrying out God’s command in city after city throughout Canaan.
These stories offend our moral sensibilities. Ironically, however, our moral sensibilities in the West have been largely, and for many people unconsciously, shaped by our Judeo-Christian heritage, which has taught us the intrinsic value of human beings, the importance of dealing justly rather than capriciously, and the necessity of the punishment’s fitting the crime. The Bible itself inculcates the values that these stories seem to violate.
The command to kill all the Canaanite peoples is jarring precisely because it seems so at odds with the portrait of Yahweh, Israel’s God, which is painted in the Hebrew Scriptures. Contrary to the vituperative rhetoric of someone like Richard Dawkins, the God of the Hebrew Bible is a God of justice, long-suffering, and compassion.
You can’t read the Old Testament prophets without a sense of God’s profound care for the poor, the oppressed, the downtrodden, the orphaned, and so on. God demands just laws and just rulers. He literally pleads with people to repent of their unjust ways that He might not judge them. “As I live, says the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live” (Ezek. 33:11 RSV).
He sends a prophet even to the pagan city of Nineveh because of His pity for its inhabitants, “who do not know their right hand from their left” (Jonah 4:11 RSV). The Pentateuch itself contains the Ten Commandments, one of the greatest of ancient moral codes, which has shaped Western society. Even the stricture “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” was not a prescription of vengeance but a check on excessive punishment for any crime, serving to moderate violence.
God’s judgment is anything but capricious. When the Lord announces His intention to judge Sodom and Gomorrah for their sins, Abraham boldly asks,
Will you indeed sweep away the righteous with the wicked? Suppose there are fifty righteous within the city. Will you then sweep away the place and not spare it for the fifty righteous who are in it? Far be it from you to do such a thing, to put the righteous to death with the wicked, so that the righteous fare as the wicked! Far be that from you! Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just? (Gen. 18:23–25 ESV)
Like a Middle Eastern merchant haggling for a bargain, Abraham continually lowers his price, and each time God meets it without hesitation, assuring Abraham that if there are even ten righteous persons in the city, He will not destroy it for their sake.
So then what is Yahweh doing in commanding Israel’s armies to exterminate the Canaanite peoples? It is precisely because we have come to expect Yahweh to act justly and with compassion that we find these stories so difficult to understand. How can He command soldiers to slaughter children?
Now, before attempting to say something by way of answer to this difficult question, we should do well first to pause and ask ourselves what is at stake here. Suppose we agree that if God (who is perfectly good) exists, He could not have issued such a command. What follows? That Jesus didn’t rise from the dead? That God does not exist? Hardly! So what is the problem supposed to be?
I’ve often heard popularizers raise this issue as a refutation of the moral argument for God’s existence. But that’s plainly incorrect. The claim that God could not have issued such a command doesn’t falsify or undercut either of the two premises in the moral argument as I have defended it:
1. If God does not exist, objective moral values do not exist.
2. Objective moral values do exist.
3. Therefore, God exists.
In fact, insofar as the atheist thinks that God did something morally wrong in commanding the extermination of the Canaanites, he affirms premise (2). So what is the problem supposed to be?
The problem, it seems to me, is that if God could not have issued such a command, then the biblical stories must be false. Either the incidents never really happened but are just Israeli folklore; or else, if they did, then Israel, carried away in a fit of nationalistic fervor, thinking that God was on their side, claimed that God had commanded them to commit these atrocities, when in fact He had not. In other words, this problem is really an objection to biblical inerrancy.
In fact, ironically, many Old Testament critics are skeptical that the events of the conquest of Canaan ever occurred. They take these stories to be part of the legends of the founding of Israel, akin to the myths of Romulus and Remus and the founding of Rome. For such critics the problem of God’s issuing such a command evaporates.
Now, that puts the issue in quite a different perspective! The question of biblical inerrancy is an important one, but it’s not like the existence of God or the deity of Christ! If we Christians can’t find a good answer to the question before us and are, moreover, persuaded that such a command is inconsistent with God’s nature, then we’ll have to give up biblical inerrancy. But we shouldn’t let the unbeliever raising this question get away with thinking that it implies more than it does.
I think that a good start at this problem is to enunciate our ethical theory that underlies our moral judgments. According to the version of divine command ethics that I’ve defended, our moral duties are constituted by the commands of a holy and loving God. Since God doesn’t issue commands to Himself, He has no moral duties to fulfill. He is certainly not subject to the same moral obligations and prohibitions that we are. For example, I have no right to take an innocent life. For me to do so would be murder. But God has no such prohibition. He can give and take life as He chooses. We all recognize this when we accuse some authority who presumes to take life as “playing God.” Human authorities arrogate to themselves rights that belong only to God. God is under no obligation whatsoever to extend my life for another second. If He wanted to strike me dead right now, that’s His prerogative. What that implies is that God has the right to take the lives of the Canaanites when He sees fit. How long they live and when they die is up to Him.
But did God, in fact, command the Israelis to exterminate the Canaanites? Or rather was His command primarily a command to drive them out of the land? What do we know of God’s intention here?
EXTERMINATE THE CANAANITES?
Suppose that God did issue a command to exterminate the Canaanites. What is the problem here? The problem, as we have seen, isn’t simply that God ended the Canaanites’ lives. The problem is that He commanded the Israeli soldiers to end them. Now, isn’t that like commanding someone to commit murder? No, it’s not. Rather, since our moral duties are determined by God’s commands, it is commanding someone to do something which, in the absence of a divine command, would have been murder. The act was morally obligatory for the Israeli soldiers in virtue of God’s command, even though, had they undertaken it on their own initiative, it would have been wrong.
On divine command theory, then, God has the right to command an act, which, in the absence of a divine command, would have been sin, but which is now morally obligatory in virtue of that command.
All right; but isn’t such a command contrary to God’s nature? Well, let’s look at the case more closely. It is perhaps significant that the story of Yahweh’s destruction of Sodom—along with his solemn assurances to Abraham that were there as many as ten righteous persons in Sodom, the city would not have been destroyed—forms part of the background to the conquest of Canaan and Yahweh’s command to destroy the cities there. The implication is that the Canaanites are not righteous people but have come under God’s judgment.
In fact, prior to Israel’s bondage in Egypt, God tells Abraham:
Know for certain that your offspring will be sojourners in a land that is not theirs and will be servants there, and they will be afflicted for four hundred years…. And they shall come back here in the fourth generation, for the iniquity of the Amorites [one of the Canaanite clans] is not yet complete. (Gen. 15:13, 16 ESV)
Think of it! God stays His judgment of the Canaanite clans 400 years because their wickedness had not reached the point of intolerability! This is the long-suffering God we know in the Hebrew Scriptures. He even allows His own chosen people to languish in slavery for four centuries before determining that the Canaanite peoples are ripe for judgment and calling His people forth from Egypt.
By the time of their destruction, Canaanite culture was, in fact, debauched and cruel, embracing such practices as ritual prostitution and even child sacrifice. The Canaanites are to be destroyed “that they may not teach you to do according to all their abominable practices that they have done for their gods, and so you sin against the Lord your God” (Deut. 20:18 ESV). God had morally sufficient reasons for His judgment upon Canaan, and Israel was merely the instrument of His justice, just as centuries later God would use the pagan nations of Assyria and Babylon to judge Israel.
But why take the lives of innocent children? The terrible totality of the destruction was undoubtedly related to the prohibition of assimilation to pagan nations on Israel’s part. In commanding complete destruction of the Canaanites, the Lord says, “You shall not intermarry with them, giving your daughters to their sons or taking their daughters for your sons, for they would turn away your sons from following me, to serve other gods” (Deut. 7:3–4 ESV). This command is part and parcel of the whole fabric of complex Jewish ritual law distinguishing clean and unclean practices. To the contemporary Western mind many of the regulations in Old Testament law seem absolutely bizarre and pointless: not to mix linen with wool, drawing fine lines of distinction between clean and unclean, etc. The overriding thrust of these regulations is to prohibit various kinds of mixing. Clear lines of distinction are being drawn: this and not that. These serve as daily, tangible reminders that Israel is a special people set apart for God Himself.
I spoke once with an Indian missionary who told me that the Eastern mind has an inveterate tendency toward amalgamation. He said Hindus upon hearing the gospel would smile and say, “Sub ehki eh, sahib, sub ehki eh!” (“All is One, sahib, All is One!” [Hindustani speakers, forgive my transliteration!]). It made it almost impossible to reach them because even logical contradictions were subsumed in the whole. He said that he thought the reason God gave Israel so many seemingly arbitrary commands about clean and unclean was to teach them the Law of Contradiction!
By setting such strong, harsh dichotomies God taught Israel that any assimilation to pagan idolatry is intolerable. It was His way of preserving Israel’s spiritual health and posterity. God knew that if these Canaanite children were allowed to live, they would spell the undoing of Israel. The killing of the Canaanite children not only served to prevent assimilation to Canaanite identity but also served as a shattering, tangible illustration of Israel’s being set exclusively apart for God.
Moreover, if we believe, as I do, that God’s grace is extended to those who die in infancy or as small children, the death of these children was actually their salvation. We are so wedded to an earthly, naturalistic perspective that we forget that those who die are happy to quit this earth for heaven’s incomparable joy. Therefore, God does these children no wrong in taking their lives.
So who does God wrong in commanding the destruction of the Canaanites? Not the Canaanite adults, for they were corrupt and deserving of judgment. Not the children, for they inherit eternal life. So who is wronged? Ironically, I think the most difficult part of this whole debate is the apparent wrong done to the Israeli soldiers themselves. Can you imagine what it would be like to have to break into some house and kill a terrified woman and her children? The brutalizing effect on these Israeli soldiers is disturbing.
But then, again, we’re thinking of this from a Christianized, Western standpoint. For people in the ancient world, life was already brutal. Violence and war were a fact of life for people living in the ancient Near East. Evidence of this fact is that the people who told these stories apparently thought nothing of what the Israeli soldiers were commanded to do (especially if these are founding legends of the nation). No one was wringing his hands over the soldiers’ having to kill the Canaanites; those who did so were national heroes.
Moreover, my point above returns. Nothing could so illustrate to the Israelis the seriousness of their calling as a people set apart for God alone. Yahweh is not to be trifled with. He means business, and if Israel apostasizes, the same could happen to her. As C. S. Lewis puts it in Narnia, Aslan is not a tame lion.
DRIVE THE CANAANITES OUT OF THE LAND?
So I think that God had the right to command the Israelis to exterminate the Canaanites. But I have come to appreciate as a result of a closer reading of the biblical text that God’s command to Israel was not primarily to exterminate the Canaanites but to drive them out of the land. It was the land that was (and remains today!) paramount in the minds of these ancient Near Eastern peoples. The Canaanite tribal kingdoms that occupied the land were to be destroyed as nation states, not as individuals. The judgment of God upon these tribal groups, which had become so incredibly debauched by that time, is that they were being divested of their land. Canaan was being given over to Israel, whom God had now brought out of Egypt. If the Canaanite tribes, seeing the armies of Israel, had simply chosen to flee, no one would have been killed at all. There was no command to pursue and hunt down the Canaanite peoples.
It is, therefore, completely misleading to characterize God’s command to Israel as a command to commit genocide. Rather it was first and foremost a command to drive the tribes out of the land and to occupy it. Only those who remained behind were to be utterly exterminated. There may have been no non-combatants killed at all. That makes sense of why there is no record of the killing of women and children, such as I had vividly imagined. Such scenes may have never taken place, since it was the soldiers who remained to fight. It is also why there were plenty of Canaanite people around after the conquest of the land, as the biblical record attests.
No one had to die in this whole affair. Of course, that fact doesn’t affect the moral question concerning the command that God gave, as explained above. But I stand by my claim that God could have commanded the killing of any Canaanites who attempted to remain behind in the land.
Now, how does all this relate to Islamic jihad? Islam sees violence as a means of propagating the Muslim faith. Islam divides the world into two camps: the dar al-Islam (House of Submission) and the dar al-harb (House of War). The former are those lands that have been brought into submission to Islam; the latter are those nations that have not yet been brought into submission. This is how Islam actually views the world!
By contrast, the conquest of Canaan represented God’s just judgment upon those peoples. The purpose was not at all to get them to convert to Judaism! War was not being used as an instrument of propagating the Jewish faith. Moreover, the slaughter of the Canaanites represented an unusual historical circumstance, not a regular means of behavior.
The problem with Islam, then, is not that it has got the wrong moral theory; it’s that it has got the wrong God. If the Muslim thinks that our moral duties are constituted by God’s commands, then I agree with him. But Muslims and Christians differ radically over God’s nature. Christians believe that God is all-loving, while Muslims believe that God loves only Muslims. Allah has no love for unbelievers and sinners. Therefore, they can be killed indiscriminately. Moreover, in Islam, God’s omnipotence trumps everything, even His own nature. He is, therefore, utterly arbitrary in His dealing with mankind. By contrast, Christians hold that God’s holy and loving nature determines what He commands.
The question, then, is not whose moral theory is correct, but which is the true God?
7. For more on this, see J. P. Moreland and William Lane Craig, Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview, chapter 27.
8. Readers may also be interested in Dr. Craig’s The Only Wise God (repr., Eugene, Oreg.: Wipf & Stock, 2000) for more on fatalism and foreknowledge.