No Difference

It's no wonder about the timing – tragic events, such as pandemics, often cause us to question the existence of God: if there is a merciful God, why is a catastrophe like this happening?
Monica Grady "Can physics prove if God exists?" BBC Future. Tuesday, 1 March 2021

Perhaps, as someone who does not themself believe in deities, the point should be utterly irrelevant to me, but I've come to find it strange when people question the existence of their god because of an alleged failure to hold so some or other single characteristic. As a parallel, take me. While I like to drive, I have never done so competitively, and have no plans to start any time soon. But if someone were to describe me as a race car driver, it would seem strange to declare that on the basis of that fact being in error, that I didn't exist.

And so once I started thinking about it, I realized that I didn't really understand why, or how, people would become so attached to the idea that the Abrahamic god as "merciful" that calling that mercy into question would be a reason to discard the whole entity. It's an odd non-severability clause, of a sort.

Of course, as an atheist, I have a simple answer that I can fall back on; the idea that people create their deities with a certain set of characteristics, and once that set of attributes becomes the accepted form of the deity, the thought of removing one or more of them is simply anathema. But that's pat, and frankly, unsatisfying for that. As people are complex and their religions are complex, the reasoning that creates and sustains those religions is also complex. Presumably, there are thousands of years of religious evolutionary pressure that has gone into people's thinking about their gods. (And note that this holds even if the gods are real. I have yet to find a religion {as opposed to a sect or a denomination} of any size that boasts nothing in the way of splits and differences of opinion. So it stands to reason that even real deities wouldn't necessarily appear the same to all of their many adherents. But still, the ideas that managed to survive the constant competition for followers would be the ones that survived and continued.)

In the end, I don't have any answers to the question of what can a deity be and what can't one be. To me, a deity could be anything; I don't really understand why, conceptually, the concept would have specific limitations. And as a deity often characterized as omnipotent, the Abrahamic god would have no specific limits, either. If, as Professor Grady says, "God can do everything, even travel faster than light," then it stands to reason that it could also be merciless on occasion.

In the end, I suppose, deities are containers, and they hold things that people wish to be true about the world, or the universe, around them. A merciful deity, therefore, is a stand-in for the idea that, somehow, the Universe itself cars for human life, and if that idea of mercy or caring is jettisoned, then perhaps there's no real need of a deity to contain that idea.