I’ll ask the question in purely human terms first, to see what the responses are and to see what people think about this.
Let’s suppose that my children are in my garden and unbeknownst to them, a snake is sliding closer and closer to them. It’s my garden and everything that happens in it is my responsibility. I can see the snake drawing nearer to my children and I know what it can do to them. It’s venom can cause them terrible suffering. They’ll also suffer the pain of it plunging its fangs into their flesh. They are young and innocent and have never seen a snake before, so they can’t comprehend the harm it can do them. All the comprehension and understanding of the harm it can do them lies with me - not with them. If something’s to be done to prevent them being harmed, it’s up to me. I have the understanding and knowledge of how to protect my children. I also have the means and the ability to do it. The window of opportunity for me to act and save them from harm is rapidly closing as the snake slithers towards them. I can see all of this.
But I do nothing.
The snake strikes and my children suffer terribly, their bodies wracked with pain and their suffering causing them great misery. I could have easily prevented this. It was well within my power to do so. It was also my responsibility to do so, because this is my garden. But I did nothing.
Now for the question.
By not doing anything to protect my children when I clearly could have, do I bear any responsibility for their suffering?
Thank you,
Walter.
First, I am not a lawyer, but I understand there is a principle in law that if you have knowledge and can prevent harm and don’t act responsibly, then you can be held legally liable. It has served as a basis for many civil suits. This is particularly apt if you are performing a service and the customer wants you to do something that creates a safety hazard, then you MUST do everything you can to prevent that safety hazard.
Having been in an almost identical situation when my kids were just out of toddling, playing in the garden, and disturbed a red headed mouse spider (we were in NSW) .
This can kill children. They are aggressive but not so aggressive as its kin the male funnel web. Mouse spiders unless provoked or just pissed will dry bite humans, it is still bloody painful.
It was disturbed, large and abnormally aggressive…No I did not hesitate. Under non threatening circumstances I would have trapped the bugger and released onto my neighbours property (complete a hole and no kids) . In this situation I flattened the c@%t with the shovel. It became an ex spider.
These kind of moral choice stories tend to collapse in the face of most Australian fauna. The situation is all to real.
..
There are at least two sides of this hypothetical situation:
- Legally: Depending on your local laws, by passively standing by to watch while something preventable by you happens to your kids, you will probably be held responsible. But on the other hand, if noone watched you watching them, you might walk off without any legal repercussions. Disclaimer: IANAL.
- Morally: Since there is no absolute moral, one can imagine a society with moral norms that dictate that anyone that gets bitten by a snake (the physical incarnation of the Snake Moral Guardian) and dies deserved it. Thus it would in any case be out of your hands, and one could say your inaction was morally responsible. On the other hand, the central nervous system of animals is preprogrammed to protect their offspring, so the most likely moral code would be to make you morally responsible for your inaction.
In sum: It depends. The question is ambiguous.
1 Like
I would really like to visit Australia. And I don’t mind spiders much. But keeping in mind that the most dangerous wildlife we have here are the common adder, the Greater weever, and European vespidae, the Australian varieties of venomous wildlife make me wet my pants. 
1 Like
Thank you all for your replies.
There seems to be a general consensus among you that, as the parent, I have a moral responsibility to care for my children and to proactively prevent them from being harmed. That, if I do not properly discharge this duty in the face of clear and present danger, then I am morally responsible for whatever harm befalls my children.
That being so I can now reveal that in the forum that I used to belong to, Ex-Christian.net, I put a similar question to a Christian member of that forum. He was a Texan good ole boy of the god, guts and guns variety and I knew before I asked him the question that he had children. I altered the details slightly, telling him that a rattler had come into his land through the picket fence and was sliding across the ground towards his kids.
He answered without hesitating, saying that he’d blow the thing away with his gun, there and then.
So then I sprung the trap and asked him why God didn’t protect his innocent, new-born children, Adam and Eve, from the far more dangerous threat of Satan approaching them in snake form? I made sure that he understood that while they possessed adult bodies, they were only children in mental and moral terms, with no understanding of what evil was and with no idea of the harm Satan could them.
Any guesses as to how he answered?
When you had identified the threat of the snake, and the the proximity of your children to the snake, IMHO, as a homo sapien with 200,000 years of instinct you should have felt a duty to act. It’s typically hard wired survival instinct.
But you didn’t. Before meting out blame, my question is why?
Yes, free will.
He claimed that by allowing Satan to tempt Eve and then Adam, God was testing their free will.
I replied saying that free will is only meaningful if a person understands what they are choosing between. Their understanding of Good and Evil was locked up in the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Which God had forbidden them to eat, upon pain of death.
So, that’s three things Adam and Eve didn’t and couldn’t understand when it mattered. They didn’t understand what good, evil and death were. Death was not present in Eden until later. Which means that the terms and conditions under which God was testing his children were unjust and rigged against them.
But the Texican rejected that, insisting that they should have just obeyed without understanding why. That it was their fault and no blame or fault could be attributed to God for the choice they made.
Eventually I just gave up trying to have a rational dialogue with him.
Yes indeed, cynical1!
Why didn’t I do anything to protect my innocent and vulnerable children from terrible harm?
I had the opportunity, the means and the motive to do so.
But I didn’t.
Of course, as you’ll have seen, I started framing this thread as if we were talking in solely human terms. With a human father looking out for and caring for his children. But that was just the introduction, to get you to search yourself; your mind, your heart and your conscience and put yourself in the place of that father. What would you have done?
Everyone seems to agree that any loving father would protect his children from harm. Having come to this realisation, the next question to ask in not in a human context or in human terms. It’s in scriptural and divine terms.
WHY DIDN’T GOD ACT LIKE A LOVING FATHER AND PROTECT HIS CHILDREN FROM HARM?
Or putting the question into the context of the title of this thread…
If God can prevent evil but chooses not to, is He responsible for that evil?
I wouldn’t say he was responsible for the evil. He is merely displaying the benign neglect he is famous for.
I guess a spin off question might be, if you regard this behavior as acceptable from a father, what other absurdities are you invested in?
But according to the apostle John, God is Love.
So, unless a Christian apologist can perform a linguistic somersault while jumping through the hoop of a Biblical contradiction, we are left with the notion that God allowing Satan to harm his children (and all their descendants and every animal in the world) was an act of divine love.
But it get’s worse, cynical1.
As I will show in my next post, the Bible itself has three examples of where God DID act to prevent Satan and his minions from bringing harm to the human race. In the context of this thread the big question then becomes…
Why didn’t he do it when it mattered most, in the Garden of Eden?
Specious free will arguments are their get out of jail free card.
In any case, often what they describe as free will is some contrived choiceless choice where one is only “free” to choose in a specific way prescribed by the deity.
I have (rarely) seen theists pursue a more intellectually honest position that yes in your scenario God is doing something that would be wrong for a human but God alone can do evil that ultimate good may come of it because He alone knows the end from the beginning (knows all the knock on effects and how they will play out, and what the true net benefit or harm would be). It is just special pleading due to God being omniscient and humans not being omniscient, so I still don’t buy it or really respect it, it is just relatively honest at least.
Even that position has a hidden danger, which is that it’s s short step from God doing evil because of his all-encompassing perspective, and a believer doing evil at God’s behest or with God’s blessing because “God told him to”. It is just a holy-roller version of Trump shrugging at war casualties and saying, “these things happen” or of RFK Jr’s eugenics-driven distortion of “survival of the fittest”.
Revelation 20 : 1 - 3
And I saw an angel coming down out of heaven, having the key to the Abyss and holding in his hand a great chain. **2 **He seized the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is the devil, or Satan, and bound him for a thousand years. **3 **He threw him into the Abyss, and locked and sealed it over him, to keep him from deceiving the nations anymore until the thousand years were ended. After that, he must be set free for a short time.
2 Peter 2 : 4
For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but sent them to hell, putting them in chains of darkness to be held for judgment;
Jude 6
** **And the angels who did not keep their positions of authority but abandoned their proper dwelling—these he has kept in darkness, bound with everlasting chains for judgment on the great Day.
See that?
It is was well within God’s power to bind ALL of the fallen angels (including Satan) in chains of darkness, to await Judgement Day. From the moment they sinned in heaven. There was no need for God to see Satan fall like lightning from heaven down to Earth. (Luke 10 : 18 - 20). There was no need for wicked, unclean spirits to be abroad on the Earth.
They could ALL have been locked safely away, keeping every human safe. More pertinently, keeping Adam and Eve safe. Keeping the world free from death, decay and disease - which all came into the world through one man - Adam.
So why didn’t he do it?
If he had the power to prevent evil from coming into the world - is he therefore responsible for evil being in the world?
No. Impossible.
God knows all things. He knew all things before creation. There is nothing left for him to learn.
Nor can God make a mistake, overlook something or be caught by surprise by anything.
No.
That sounds suspiciously like a press release from the current White House…
The notion that evil can be done by humans to increase good is squished by Paul in Romans 3 : 5 -8.
**5 **But if our unrighteousness brings out God’s righteousness more clearly, what shall we say? That God is unjust in bringing his wrath on us? (I am using a human argument.) **6 **Certainly not! If that were so, how could God judge the world? **7 **Someone might argue, “If my falsehood enhances God’s truthfulness and so increases his glory, why am I still condemned as a sinner?” **8 **Why not say—as some slanderously claim that we say—“Let us do evil that good may result”? Their condemnation is just!
But apparently God can allow evil to happen and even use evil spirits to do his will and this isn’t him being evil!
1 Like
Dogs have put themselves between a venomous snake and children, putting themselves in danger and sometimes getting bitten. If a dog does not respond by protecting a person, is it responsible for any harm that comes to that human?
1 Like
