I have written about the problems of religious fatalism many times over the years. One key problem I’ve written about is providence in the face of suffering. Likely the number one reason that people leave their religious upbringing is the absurdity that they must face in the midst of suffering. God loves me, God exhibits absolute control over everything, and then God gives or allows me (meaning anybody) horrible suffering. How do you make sense of that?

Bart Ehrman, one of the world’s premier New Testament scholars, was an evangelical who left Christianity and his belief in God over this very issue (see). But divine providence has other problems, and today I want to focus on the fact that a providential God must, by definition, have impotent followers.

My writing always has an impetus, and today is no exception. I am contemplating writing another nonfiction book, simply titled Post Christian. The due diligence all good writers must do is check the market for other books that say what you want to say, and for books with identical or similar titles. The last thing you want to do is to replicate a work that is already available. In that process, I stumbled upon Gene Edwards Veith’s book with the identical title, “Post Christian.” I am now about 3/4’s of the way through his book.

While Gene and I agree on many things, he doesn’t take the same approach I intend to. In my book, I want to look, like I always do, at how we got here and then at a way forward, especially for the growing crowd disillusioned with Christianity and who would never darken the door of a traditional Sunday morning church service ever again. Dr. Veith does look at how we got here, and I felt reassured when he, as a retired Lutheran College professor, came to the exact same conclusions as me; however, he ended the story with Immanuel Kant rather than—as I did—Georg  Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. I had considered using Kant as an example. It doesn’t matter, as you can pay your money and take your choice.

I see Hegel as the last rationalist, who took the Enlightenment and reason too far and provoked Kierkegaard to leap into irrationalism in response. I think I remember the twentieth century Christian theologian and philosopher Francis Schaeffer saying he saw Kant opening the door to the subjective and irrational, but Kierkegaard walked through that door with his existentialism. Dr. Veith and I both see the resulting postmodernism that we are living in as a disaster for culture and the church.

But Veith and I diverge in some areas. He is looking at the problem today through the eyes of a Christian traditionalist. He wants us to return to the high church in practice and belief. He chooses a contemporary friend of Kant, Johann Georg Hamann (1730–1788), as his example for the church today. After a period of debauchery, Hamann converted to Lutheranism and parted from Kant’s thinking, trying to restore traditional church beliefs and practice.

I, on the other hand, look through the eyes of someone outside the church, as I once was. I brought one such person to my church this summer, her having left the church decades ago, and she said the Sunday morning worship seemed bizarre to her. Most Christians would argue that is becuase “You don’t know Jesus.” But the real reason is that our church traditions have evolved over centuries and they seem normal to us, but not to outsiders. Just like any social group. I joined a kayaking group once and found their traditions a little bizzare, such as burning incense and making an offering to the water before we went paddling.

I think that we need to learn from the deconstructive days of postmodernism (1960s-2010) and rethink the culture of Christianity entirely, simplifying it back to the teachings of Jesus and nothing else. Sure, you can keep the traditions for those who love them, but not require them for those who don’t. Of all the reasons that people give in surveys for leaving Christianity, I’ve never seen anyone say they don’t like the simple, historical teachings of Jesus of Galilee; it is always things that define the Christian culture, not the original teachings. So why are we still requiring people to follow these traditions? I was thrown out of my last conservative church when I opposed requiring everyone, including the teens, to believe in a six-thousand-year-old Earth. I’ve suggested to several churches where I served to create an alternative to the Sunday Morning Worship tradition, such as a get-together at a bar on Saturday night. Each time, I am declared to be the devil for such a horrible idea. But I digress.

The other thing I heard Veith say as a traditionalist is that a life of faith, as it should be in his view, does not overconcern itself with worldly affairs, such as climate change or politics, because we trust in God’s sovereignty. Here, my friends, is the rub.

Evidence of Impotence Among Those Who Insist God Controls Everything

There was a scene in a movie I watched once, and I think it was Out of Africa, but I’m not sure, where a river flooded almost every year, destroying the village crops and drowning the people. The white colonists (who were not superior, but in this case may have been right) wanted to dam or divert the river to stop the flooding. The village elders, however, said they could not do that because God put the river in its channel, and changing it would be an affront to God. The humans were impotent in the face of a micromanaging sovereign God.

When Donald Trump was elected in 2016 and again in 2024, it was due to the overwhelming support of Christians, mostly evangelicals. Not being judgmental, but just curious, I asked an evangelical friend in 2016 why she had voted for Trump, given that she was profoundly pro-family. I think she knew of the contradiction in her supporting chastity until marriage for her kids, being anti-divorce, etc. And here was Donald Trump, who spent his life as a serial adulterer, fornicater, business fraudster, sexual abuser, etc. She knew that the “pro-life” issue was not a good enough reason to vote for the man (btw, abortions have gone way up since Trump took office in 2016; there were 599,000 per year in 2016, each year rising to the present, with the count for 2025 as 1.13 million) and she responded, “It doesn’t matter who I vote for, God is in control.” We called that a “cop-out” in the 1970s.

So, back to Veith’s statement that believing that God’s providence should make us sleep well, without worry. But at that juncture, we become impotent. Climate change is here, and it will get much worse. Millions will die, coastal cities will be destroyed, areas of the Earth will become uninhabitable, and wars will start due to political pressure from the loss of resources, such as fresh water, food, etc. The sad thing is that we humans could and should have prevented it, but we didn’t. In my view, a sin. The largest group, in America at least, that doesn’t want pro-climate legislation is the Christians. Impotent Christians.

Look at history, and you will see how Christians allowed slavery to exist for 246 years because of this type of impotence. “The world is just the way God wants it, because God is sovereign.” That’s also why the church won’t change to relate better to people of the twenty-first century, because their traditions must be the way God wants it.

God’s Providence

I could add many other examples, but let me write directly about the problem of God’s absolute providence. Whenever I’ve attempted to discuss this topic in person, I am immediately accused of 1) being unbiblical and 2) having a small God. I believe my concept of God now is far, far bigger than the one I had as an evangelical, where I boxed God in on every side.

I understand that the idea of the God who has every atom hooked to a puppeteer’s string is deeply ingrained within our religious teachings, so much so that it is almost impossible to have this discussion. But that thought assumes that for God to be big enough, He must control every atom, which makes no sense. Yes, an omnipotent God should have the ability to control the course of history, but that does not enslave God to do so.

If you look at Earthly emperors, some were autocrats who tried to control every aspect of human life, and some were benevolent monarchs who gave their subjects great freedoms and some of the benevolent ones had the most power. The evidence I see in the world is that God is benevolent. Our choices count. We can change history, and we should change it for the better. Changing history is our God-given duty. You can’t seek justice without confronting society. You can be the caretaker of God’s creation without confronting those who harm creation.

Some will say, “But Mike, the Bible is clear, God controls everything.” But if you really want to look at scripture, look at Ecclesiastes 9:11 “I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.” (KJV)

Thomas Aquinas and Augustine spoke of God’s two books, canonical scriptures and nature or reality. Aquinas said that if the two books disagree, we should re-examine our interpretation of each. Reality is clear that we can make choices that change the course of not only our lives but of others too. It is also clear, to me at least, that a loving God would not be in the business of causing suffering, famine, war, cancer, murder, and the list goes on and on. To commit to a God that has total providence, you must accept the absurd that God does do those awlful things for some bizzare reason.

It is psychological comforting to believe in a controlling God. That’s why almost every religion, the montheistic ones and the pantheistic ones believe in this kind of fatalism. I’ve heard Buddhists say, “All things happen for a reason,” and a Hindu say, “All things end well… if it isn’t well, then it is not the end.” Yeah, that’s very comforting, even addicting, but tell that to a German holocaust victim on the day they are taking to the gas chamber.

I claim that it is almost impossible to hold in the same hand a good, loving, and powerful God who also intentionally gives you hell on Earth. Eventually, you will stop believing that God loves you.

The Deists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries reached a logical conclusion that they only type of God who would reign over such suffering is a clock-maker God, who created the cosmos once, and then let the laws of nature play out without His intervention. Five of our first six presidents were Deists. No, I’m not a Deist as I pray, and since having cancer, boy to I pray, hoping that God will step in and change things. Yet, if I believed God gave me cancer becase we humans demand that he controls everything… that would be a tiny God. I know the biological process of how my cancer developed, a simple genetic mutation… pure luck or lack there of. Nothing divine about it.

Respectfully,

Mike