A Profane Essay on Evil, Stewardship, and the Failure of Divine Care
By Phen Weston
Dear God: Why Are You Such a Cunt?
Referencing note:
Scholarly, media and web sources are cited in Harvard author-date style. Biblical and Qur'anic material is cited by book/surah and verse, with translations listed in the References.
Abstract
This essay reframes the problem of evil as a failure of divine stewardship. Taking the conclusion of Good Omens as its starting point, it argues that replacement cannot constitute redemption where the original world, relationships and histories have been destroyed. The essay focuses on the omniscient, omnipotent, morally perfect creator associated with the Abrahamic traditions: a deity who creates conscious life, permits suffering, claims moral authority and demands worship. Engaging with free-will defence, soul-making theodicy, divine foreknowledge and appeals to providence, it argues that these explanations fail to account adequately for natural evil, animal suffering, childhood agony and the unequal distribution of harm. Drawing upon philosophical accounts of responsibility, care and stewardship, the essay proposes that greater intelligence and power intensify rather than diminish obligation toward the vulnerable. A creator with perfect knowledge of suffering, complete power over the conditions of existence and responsibility for creating those conditions would therefore owe creation perfect care. Where theology exempts God from the moral standards applied to human rulers, parents and stewards, worship risks becoming the sanctification of unaccountable power. Against obedience, sovereignty and divine ownership, the essay advances an ethics of nearness, protection and attention to vulnerable life. Whether God exists or not, it concludes, stewardship offers a more defensible moral foundation than submission.
The Mercy of the Snow Globe
I have just finished the finale of Good Omens, and, yet again, I am left with the suspicion that its deepest theological argument is very simple: God is a cunt.
Hell is cruel, at least with honest branding. Heaven is bureaucratic, smug, and spiritually dead behind the eyes. But God’s offence is greater: for no reason beyond the fact that they can, they allow the universe to end. All of it. Every frightened, temporary creature drafted into a celestial thought experiment. Their own son too, apparently, because why not kill him twice? And then comes the part that is supposed to feel merciful.
Aziraphale and Crowley, after six thousand years of choosing humanity and one another in the margins of God’s “plan”, are robbed of the actual life they deserve. They die. Or sacrifice themselves. Or are erased with narrative tenderness, which is still erasure. And in their place, God offers us a fake universe described as godless, except, of course, God does exist, because someone had to make the godless snow globe and place the little counterfeit lovers inside it.
That is not grace. That is taxidermy. The finale compresses the theological problem into one polished little snow globe: a creator ends the actual world, manufactures a substitute, and expects replacement to read as mercy.
The question reaches beyond whether evil disproves God. What does intelligence owe to the vulnerable? Human awareness creates responsibility; divine awareness would create a responsibility beyond measure. A God who knows every wound in advance and permits the architecture of wounding has failed as a steward.
Prime Video presented the final instalment as the conclusion of the series, and the episode places Aziraphale and Crowley’s appeal for a world beyond the celestial conflict at the centre of that ending (Good Omens, 2026). The dramatic fact matters more than the publicity: God grants a replica after the originals have paid. Freedom arrives embalmed.
The God with Opinions
By “God,” I do not mean every possible divine thing anyone has ever imagined. I do not mean river spirits, household gods, trickster figures, animist presences, local gods of weather and harvest, or the vague feeling one gets when looking at the sea and briefly forgetting rent exists. I mean the human-centric deity.
The God who, supposedly, made all this for us, cares who we fuck, what we eat, what words we say, what doubts pass through our heads, and whether we spend enough of our short, panicked lives grateful for surveillance. This deity combines power, moral authority, parenthood, and judgement. That combination is the target.
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam differ profoundly, as do the people living within them. But the shared pressure point is narrower: each contains traditions of a supreme deity who knows, commands, judges, and rules. Genesis and the Qur’an both place humanity inside a charged relation to creation; Romans intensifies the asymmetry through the potter and clay (Genesis 1:26–28; Romans 9:20–21, NRSV; Qur’an 2:30; 21:23, Abdel Haleem trans., 2004). Lynn White’s ecological critique shows how readily dominion language can be recruited as permission, even though it cannot stand as a complete account of any whole tradition (White, 1967).
Nor am I treating believers as morally identical to the God they inherit, defend, fear, love, reinterpret, or survive. This is an argument with a theological structure, not a licence to flatten the people living under, against, or inside it.
That is the God I am talking about. This matters because the accusation depends on the claims the traditions themselves make. A merely finite God, a local spirit, or a metaphor for wonder would not bear the same burden. The argument only bites if God is said to know, command, judge, create and rule while remaining morally good. The scented-candle versions—“mystery,” “energy,” “the universe experiencing itself”—can sit this one out.
I mean the God with opinions. The God with commandments. The God who is said to love us, know us, watch us, judge us, forgive us, test us, punish us, save us, and occasionally drown us. The God who could intervene and does not, or does intervene and somehow makes things worse. The God whose defenders insist is good, while standing ankle-deep in the evidence to the contrary.
And my question is not whether such a God is impressive. Power is impressive. Hurricanes are impressive. Cancer is impressive, in its way. My question is whether such a God is good.
Because if a being creates conscious life, centres that life in a moral universe, demands obedience from it, allows it to suffer grotesquely, and then reserves the right to judge it afterwards, I do not think “mysterious” is the first word that comes to mind. The word I keep coming back to is cunt.
The Architecture of Evil
Evil itself is banal. Stupid, often. A boot, a locked door, a hand around a throat, a child learning too early that adults can be monsters. Evil exists; we have built museums to it. The deeper problem is the architecture that made all this possible under a supposedly good creator.
Philosophers call the collision between divine power, goodness, and suffering the problem of evil. Mackie ran the strict logical version more than half a century ago: the traditional attributes do not cohere with evil unless further claims are bolted on (Mackie, 1955). The bolts are where the moral argument begins to sweat. God changes the case.
In a random universe, evil would be tragic and unsurprising. Matter owes us no tenderness. Evolution offers no justice; weather signs no mercy clause. God is supposed to be will—the mind behind the structure. Once intention enters the picture, the structure becomes evidence.
Plantinga’s free-will defence successfully weakens the claim of strict logical contradiction: it may be possible that significant freedom entails the risk of moral evil (Plantinga, 1974). That is a real achievement, and also a limited one. It says little about earthquakes, childhood cancer, animal agony, or why freedom requires horrors so unevenly distributed.
Hick’s soul-making theodicy offers a larger answer: danger and difficulty create conditions for courage, compassion, and growth (Hick, 1966). Yet actual victims pay the price, and many are crushed rather than formed. A theory that produces saints by spending children merely describes the transaction. The moral debt remains.
To be fair, the free-will defence is not childish. At its best, it argues that a world containing genuine moral agents must include real possibility, not merely programmed harmlessness: love, courage, mercy and forgiveness would be hollow if no creature could ever refuse them, wound another, or face a meaningful moral risk. Soul-making theodicy adds that certain virtues may only become possible in a world where fear, loss, danger and dependence are real, and that finite creatures cannot judge the whole shape of a reality they see only from inside it.
That is the best version of the answer, and it deserves to be taken seriously. But it still does not save God. It may explain why some risk belongs to freedom; it does not explain why freedom requires the scale, duration and distribution of actual horror. It still makes victims into ingredients. It still treats suffering as material for someone else’s meaning. It still asks the broken creature to trust the architect of breakability.
If God can imagine heaven, then God can imagine freedom without evil. Natural evil, animal agony and horrendous suffering press past every appeal to human agency and ask why the architecture of pain exists at all.
If God cannot imagine that, God is not all-knowing. If God can imagine it but cannot make it, God is not all-powerful. If God can imagine it, can make it, and chooses not to, then we are back to the title of this essay.
That is the blade. God, by definition, had the option of making reality otherwise and apparently preferred this.
The Plan and the Blame
And then there is the plan. There is always, apparently, a plan. When free will is needed, we are free. When suffering needs explaining, God has a plan. When atrocity happens, it is human choice. When atrocity leads somewhere useful, it is providence. When we sin, we are responsible. When God benefits from the consequences, it was destiny all along.
Theology becomes a shell game here: freedom carries the blame, while providence collects the winnings.
A meaningful divine plan absorbs our choices into an outcome God intends. We may still choose, but the author has selected the stage, the cast, the known consequences, and the ending. Freedom inside that design begins to feel like culpability rented from the playwright. And if God cannot be surprised, then what exactly are we choosing?
Classical accounts separate foreknowledge from causation: knowing an act does not force it. Boethius worked this out in a cell, waiting to be executed, which earns the argument some respect: divine knowledge sits outside time altogether, seeing rather than predicting (Boethius, [c.524] 2001). It is a genuinely elegant move, and it protects logical freedom. It does nothing for the moral unease, because the creator still chooses to actualise a world whose wounds are completely known. That is culpability without authorship.
And it is morally monstrous, because it lets God keep control while outsourcing guilt. God gets the plan. We get the blame.
If Judas betrays Jesus because he is wicked, then the Crucifixion is human evil. If Judas must betray Jesus so salvation can happen, then Judas is a tool (Matthew 26:24; John 13:18-27, NRSV). If Pharaoh hardens his heart, he is a tyrant. If God hardens Pharaoh’s heart, then the plagues are theatre (Exodus 9:12; Romans 9:17-18, NRSV). If suffering is meaningless, God is negligent. If suffering is meaningful, God is using us. There is no clean way out.
The believer may say that divine foreknowledge does not force our choices. Fair enough. The moral problem lies in selection. God knows this world and chooses it from the possible worlds: this Judas, this Pharaoh, this child, this grave, this war, this ending. That is enough.
A God who knows all outcomes, selects the world in which those outcomes occur, and creates anyway has done more than foresee them. God has consented to the architecture that makes them real.
And if the answer is “but God had a reason,” then we are no longer defending free will. We are defending sacrifice. We are saying the suffering was necessary for the design. The victims were ingredients. The dead were structural. The cruelty had a function. Which is precisely the accusation.
In this arrangement, God permits the wound, makes it useful, and calls the result love.
What Intelligence Owes
What does intelligence owe to the vulnerable?
Stewardship After Eden begins from the pressure Jonas identifies: once technology enlarges the reach of action, responsibility must stretch toward consequences that are distant, cumulative, and easy to ignore (Jonas, 1984). His principle is useful because it denies power the alibi of scale. It also remains too impersonal on its own. Responsibility becomes care only when the vulnerable cease to be an abstract future and become lives with claims on us now.
A fox owes the rabbit no philosophical defence. A parasite has no ethics committee. A storm never lies awake regretting the village. Nature can be brutal without becoming a moral brute because it cannot stand outside itself, imagine restraint, and choose cruelty as policy. We do.
Human intelligence changes the moral equation. Once we know an animal can suffer, forests breathe, rivers sicken, ecosystems collapse, and living creatures experience fear, cleverness puts care on the bill. Dominion has no claim to be the prize.
Awareness creates duty. And this is exactly why God is impossible to excuse.
Any God worthy of the name would see further than we do, without the excuses of an animal body, a frightened culture, a damaged history, or a brain evolved for hunger and tribalism. Perfect awareness leaves nowhere to hide: no instinct to blame, no ignorance to plead, no failure of imagination to confess.
God is perfect intelligence. Which means God is perfect responsibility. Divine intelligence should therefore issue in divine stewardship: restraint, protection, and care. Ownership, punishment, apocalypse, and a replacement universe with the corpses politely swept out of frame belong to another moral vocabulary.
Care.
Restraint.
Protection of the vulnerable because vulnerability is visible.
But that is not the God we are given.
The human-centric God embodies the cosmic version of a familiar human mistake: intelligence confused with entitlement. Capacity becomes permission; making becomes ownership; a higher perspective becomes licence to fold suffering into meaning without consent. Stewardship After Eden rejects that logic as domination.
God becomes human arrogance made infinite. Natural suffering cuts deeper because violence is already present before human choice enters the scene. Flesh is tearable before anyone sins. Fear is wired in before anyone disobeys. Rowe’s example is a fawn, burned in a forest fire started by lightning, dying slowly over days, seen by no one (Rowe, 1979). The case is built to resist every human-centred defence: no freedom is protected, no soul is formed, no witness learns anything. It cannot prove that no hidden reason exists. It does make the appeal to hidden reasons look morally cheap.
A human steward, seeing that, should respond with horror and care: how do we reduce this, protect what can feel, and stop turning lesser power into permission?
But God looked at the same wound before it existed and said: yes.
That is the accusation, and it is worse than negligence: God fails the standard our own intelligence has forced upon us.
If we are morally obliged to become stewards because we can understand suffering, then God is infinitely obliged. And if God refuses that obligation, if God treats creation as property, theatre, test, sacrifice, or disposable draft, then God is not mysterious.
God becomes the original failure of stewardship.
Power Without Accountability
This is where the whole thing becomes less a mystery and more a protection racket.
Because the moment we try to apply ordinary moral reasoning to God, the rules change. A human being who allows preventable suffering is negligent. A ruler who sacrifices the innocent for a plan is monstrous. A parent who hurts a child to teach them obedience is abusive. A creator who designs vulnerability, permits agony, demands gratitude, and refuses explanation is not good by any standard we would accept anywhere else.
But call that creator God, and suddenly accountability evaporates.
In Job, a ruined man asks for an account and receives a tour of creation’s scale. Carol Newsom reads the book as a contest between moral imaginations rather than a single tidy theodicy; the divine speeches displace Job’s demand without quite answering it (Newsom, 2003). ‘Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?’ may inspire awe. To the person in ashes, it can also sound like architecture offered as an alibi (Job 38:4, NRSV).
And this is supposed to be holy.
The Qur’an states the asymmetry with startling economy: ‘He is not questioned about what He does, but they will be questioned’ (Qur’an 21:23, Abdel Haleem trans., 2004). Action rises; accountability falls. God creates the conditions, and the creature answers for surviving them badly.
Christian scripture has its own version of this in Romans: “Who indeed are you, a human, to argue with God?” Paul asks, before comparing us to clay in the hands of a potter: “Has the potter no right over the clay?” (Romans 9:20-21, NRSV).
And no. No, actually. Not if the clay can scream.
That is the entire moral difference. Clay does not suffer. Clay does not grieve. Clay does not wake in terror, bury its children, doubt its own worth, beg for mercy, or spend six thousand years trying to carve out one small corner of existence where love might be safe. Living things are not clay. Conscious beings are not objects. Sentience changes the contract.
This is exactly what stewardship means.
The more aware a being is, the less entitled it is to treat other beings as material. Intelligence should make domination less acceptable, not more. Power should increase duty, not erase it. A human who says “I made this, therefore I may destroy it” is not a steward. They are an owner. A tyrant. A child pulling wings from flies because the flies are smaller.
So why does God get away with it?
Why does the divine version of domination become majesty? Why does the refusal to answer become mystery? Why does the right to destroy become sovereignty? Why are humans commanded to become humble, compassionate, patient, merciful, and accountable, while God remains enthroned above the consequences of God’s own design?
At cosmic scale, morality has been suspended exactly where accountability would become inconvenient.
And that is where the title stops being a provocation and becomes a conclusion. If God possesses perfect intelligence, perfect foresight, and perfect power, then God owes creation perfect stewardship. Not theatre. Not tests. Not apocalypse. Not “trust the plan.” Not replacement universes after the originals have been murdered.
Care.
A God who refuses perfect stewardship becomes morality’s highest exemption.
The Worship of Unaccountable Power
And then, after all this, comes worship.
Belief merely acknowledges existence. Worship goes further and asks for adoration.
That is where the whole thing becomes obscene.
Because worship is not morally neutral. It shapes the worshipper, training the body where to bow and the mind where to stop. Religious practice forms desire, discipline and moral imagination; it has never merely expressed private belief. If the God being worshipped creates suffering, permits evil, demands obedience, refuses accountability, and folds horror into “the plan,” worship becomes moral damage.
It teaches us to admire domination.
Worship can train people to read silence as love, tests as care, and a softened ending as mercy. Authority ceases to owe an explanation. Submission settles into the body until terror begins to feel like awe.
Stewardship points the other way.
It directs attention toward the vulnerable. Worship too often redirects that attention upward: away from the body under the boot, the animal in the trap, the child in the hospital, the person begging into heaven’s dead air, and toward the throne. Care begins from dependency, vulnerability, and concrete relationship rather than rank (Held, 2006).
That inversion matters.
Because if intelligence creates responsibility, the most intelligent being should serve most deeply. The highest being should be the most accountable. The greatest power should bend lowest toward the fragile. A good God would not need worship from frightened animals, confuse love with submission, or create beings capable of agony and then make their highest duty praise.
What does God need praise for?
For making us?
So do abusive parents. Creation is not absolution.
For loving us?
Then love us better.
For saving us?
From what? The conditions God created? The punishments God permits? The hells God either built or allows? There is something deeply suspect about a rescuer who also designed the danger, a judge who wrote the law, a parent who made the child breakable, then demands gratitude for the bandage.
They Are Holy Because They Care
And this is where Good Omens becomes useful again.
Aziraphale and Crowley become good through disobedience. Their love stops treating authority as a synonym for goodness, and the show’s emotional truth lives in the spaces where divine and infernal systems fail.
They are holy because they care, disobedience and all.
Their stewardship is messy: attention, attachment, refusal, protection, and the willingness to risk themselves for a world they could easily despise. No clean halos. Thank God for that—figuratively, obviously.
Then God lets that world end, replaces it, and hands over a universe where God “doesn’t exist,” still possible only because God grants the absence. We are meant, perhaps, to find that beautiful. I find it disgusting. It is the same pattern again: destroy the actual, sanctify the substitute, and call the replica mercy. If persons are lived continuities of relation, memory and embodied history, replacement cannot simply count as redemption.
That is ownership with good lighting.
Why the Title Stays Ugly
The word ‘cunt’ stays because polite vocabulary keeps laundering the violence. Sovereignty. Mystery. Providence. Glory. Judgement. Plan. Worship. Those nouns hang like expensive curtains; behind them sits power with no accountability and an appetite for praise.
People will object to the title before they object to the suffering. They will say “cunt” is too much, as though language has crossed a line that cancer, famine, stillbirth, genocide, animal terror, divine silence, and eternal punishment politely respected.
Say God is mysterious, and people nod. Say God is sovereign, and people bow. Say God permits agony for reasons beyond our understanding, and people call that faith. Say God is a cunt, and suddenly everyone remembers morality. If a child screams and heaven is silent, the scandal is not the person who swears at heaven. The scandal is the silence.
That is why I refuse a polite title. “The Problem of Evil,” “Divine Hiddenness,” and “Theodicy” are useful terms. They are also padded rooms, allowing us to discuss horror without sounding horrified.
The word has to bruise a little. It has to carry the moral disgust of the thing itself. This is not a seminar question floating above the bodies. It rises from hospital beds, mass graves, slaughterhouses, extinction events, bedrooms where people beg not to wake up, and every creature that has ever suffered without understanding why.
Anger here is thought refusing anaesthetic. It looks upward, finds the highest power in existence doing nothing, and allows suffering to matter as suffering—free of symbolism, tests, or dark threads in divine embroidery.
Audre Lorde treats anger as information and energy, a response to something real, carrying knowledge that politeness has been trained to swallow; she wrote that from inside oppressions that demanded silence or sweetness from her specifically (Lorde, 1984). She also knew that anger distorts. It does. Some days mine swings wide, and I catch myself furious at believers whose only crime was finding comfort in the dark, which is its own small cruelty, and not one I am proud of. The task here still needs the heat. It refuses to discuss horror in a voice that sounds untouched by it.
So yes, the title is ugly. Good. It should be ugly. It is aimed at an ugly thing: the worship of unaccountable power, the sanctification of cruelty, the demand that we call abandonment love because the abandoner is divine.
The word “cunt” earns its place by ending the pretence.
The Smaller and Better Thing
And this is where I part ways with the whole divine arrangement. I still want goodness: mercy, wonder, forgiveness, devotion, humility, awe. Human beings remain a catastrophe with language, and religion hardly owns our failures. My quarrel is with the divine arrangement that turns those goods into reasons to kneel before unaccountable power.
But if God is the source of morality, then morality has a serious problem.
Because the morality attributed to God is too often indistinguishable from power protecting itself. Obey. Submit. Trust. Worship. Do not question. Do not look too long at the wound. Do not ask why the wound was built into the body. Do not call the plan cruel. Do not call the planner cruel. Kneel.
No.
That is obedience training.
Morality begins somewhere else. Lower down. Closer to the ground. Closer to the creature that can suffer.
It begins when the vulnerable become real to us. When the animal stops being meat with eyes. When the stranger stops being an obstacle. When the child stops being property. When the Earth stops being scenery. When intelligence stops congratulating itself and starts asking what it owes.
That, to me, is stewardship after Eden.
Innocence is gone. We know too much: bodies hurt, animals fear, ecosystems collapse, power corrupts the imagination of the powerful, and suffering gains no holiness from somebody stronger finding it useful. We have eaten from the tree, named the animals, built the machines, split the atom, warmed the planet, industrialised death, and taught ourselves a thousand ways to look away. That knowledge is responsibility.
It is also the standard by which God fails.
Because God, if God exists, knows infinitely more than we do and cares, apparently, infinitely less than God should. God sees every wound and still permits the architecture of wounding. God watches creation groan and demands worship from the groaning.
So I do not want to be more like God.
That may be the real heresy.
I do not want divine sovereignty, holy dominion, or the right to destroy what I have made. I do not want love that looks like surveillance, mercy that arrives after the massacre, or freedom granted inside a universe whose exits were designed by the same being who built the cage.
I want something smaller and better.
I want care.
I want the morality of Aziraphale and Crowley at their best: attachment, protection, and choosing this world because it is packed with fragile, ridiculous, temporary things that can be hurt. Cosmic worthiness never enters the calculation. Lunch does.
That is enough.
Maybe it should always have been enough.
A truly moral intelligence asks, “Who will be harmed if I use my power?”
A true steward does not look at life and see property. They see dependence. They see vulnerability. They see a claim being made upon them by the mere fact that something can suffer and they can help.
That is where goodness lives.
Goodness lives beyond Heaven’s plan, in the refusal to become powerful, distant, adored, and unaccountable.
So if God exists, and God is good, then God owes creation an explanation.
And if God exists, and God is not good, then God deserves no worship.
And if God does not exist at all, then the responsibility was always ours anyway.
Either way, stewardship answers better than obedience.
Replacement Is Not Redemption
And this is why the ending of Good Omens feels so cruel to me. Not merely sad. Not bittersweet. Cruel.
Because Aziraphale and Crowley are, for six thousand years, doing the one thing God does not seem able to do: they care for the world from inside it. They do not love Earth abstractly, as “creation,” “the project,” or “the plan.” They love it specifically. Restaurants. Bookshops. Music. Weather. Wine. Human foolishness. The texture of existence. That specificity is what care ethics keeps insisting on: moral life begins with relation, dependence and attention to actual lives, not only principles viewed from above.
Stewardship requires nearness. Aziraphale and Crowley become moral through attachment; Heaven and Hell float above it, while God, if present at all, remains attached in the abstract. Abstract love is cheap at the grave.
When God permits the universe to end and manufactures a substitute where God ‘doesn’t exist’, the mercy curdles. Six thousand years of lived history have been replaced, not saved.
Replacement is not redemption. A copy cannot deliver justice to the thing destroyed, and a recreated lover does not erase the death of the person whose history ended. Parfit’s account of identity may loosen the metaphysics without turning annihilation into kindness: a copy can console the survivor, but it does not acquit the destroyer (Parfit, 1984).
But distance is the problem. From far enough away, anything can look meaningful: war becomes history, a mass grave becomes a statistic, suffering becomes nature, a destroyed universe becomes sacrifice.
Stewardship refuses that distance. It says: come closer. Look at what was lost. Look at who paid. Look at the life that cannot be replaced simply because power can make another version.
Aziraphale and Crowley matter because they reject the God’s-eye view. Again and again, they choose the small against the cosmic: the meal against the mission, the person against the side, the Earth against the plan. That is why their love feels more holy than Heaven, and why God looks worse by comparison.
If two damaged, frightened, compromised beings from opposing sides of a rigged cosmic war can learn care, then what is God’s excuse? If an angel and a demon can outgrow obedience, why can’t God outgrow dominion?
Even the apparently godless universe remains conditioned by God. God stands outside the frame, granting the absence of God as one final divine act. Non-existence itself becomes authorised from above.
Liberation granted after the house has been burned resembles a landlord handing over the keys to the ash.
And perhaps that is why the ending hurts so much. Aziraphale and Crowley love each other better than Heaven loves anything. They love the world better than its creator does.
The cruelty is that love is made to pay for God’s failure. They become the sacrifice that allows God to appear merciful. They become the bodies beneath the better ending. And I cannot call that beautiful without choking on it.
Where This Leaves Us
And that is where I am left.
I am left without certainty or a triumphant atheist smirk. The suffering of the world is no clever point scored in a debate. The question feels unbearable.
In a godless universe, tragedy is indifferent and ours to answer for. There is no plan, judge, author, or hidden mercy behind the wound—only life, brief and breakable, trying to care for itself in the dark. The fear remains. So does the relief of no longer having to defend cosmic cruelty as love.
An all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loving, sovereign, judging, planning, watching God would give the horror a name. The name would be God.
God.
Randomness owes us no kindness and cannot betray us. Love can. A loving God who permits cruelty and then asks for worship creates a wound chance never could.
I return to the title because elegance would lie here. Politeness would soften the accusation into another respectable essay about evil, suffering, mystery, and faith. Refusal needs the uglier word.
If intelligence creates responsibility, then God is infinitely responsible.
If power creates duty, then God is infinitely indebted to the powerless.
If stewardship means care for the vulnerable, then God has failed creation from the first wound onward.
And if God has a plan, then every victim is part of the machinery.
So no, I do not think the deepest theological problem is that evil exists.
The horror lies in the unused options. Evil could have been otherwise, and God—if God exists—chose this architecture.
If that is true, blasphemy misses the point. Restraint is the question.
Dear God: Why Are You Such a Cunt?
Connected Values
The argument made in Dear God: Why Are You Such a Cunt? grows from the ethical foundation established in Stewardship After Eden: the belief that awareness creates responsibility, and that power should deepen care rather than excuse domination.
Where Stewardship After Eden asks what human intelligence owes to vulnerable life, Dear God turns the same question upward. If humanity is answerable for the suffering it can foresee and prevent, what must an all-knowing and all-powerful creator owe to creation?
Awareness creates responsibility. No intelligence, human or divine, should be exempt.
References
Scriptural citations are given in-text by book/surah and verse. All other sources are listed below in Harvard author-date format.
Abdel Haleem, M.A.S. (trans.) (2004) The Qur’an. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Boethius ([c.524] 2001) The Consolation of Philosophy. Translated by V.E. Watts. London: Penguin.
Good Omens (2026) Season 3, episode 1, “The Finale”. Directed by Rachel Talalay. Prime Video, 13 May.
Hick, J. (1966) Evil and the God of Love. London: Macmillan.
Jonas, H. (1984) The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lorde, A. (1984) Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press.
Mackie, J.L. (1955) “Evil and omnipotence”, Mind, 64(254), pp. 200-212.
Newsom, C.A. (2003) The Book of Job: A Contest of Moral Imaginations. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Parfit, D. (1984) Reasons and Persons. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Plantinga, A. (1974) God, Freedom, and Evil. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.
Rowe, W.L. (1979) “The problem of evil and some varieties of atheism”, American Philosophical Quarterly, 16(4), pp. 335–341.
The Holy Bible, New Revised Standard Version (1989) Nashville: Thomas Nelson.
White, L. (1967) “The historical roots of our ecologic crisis”, Science, 155(3767), pp. 1203-1207.