Paul Williams, 1 Samuel 15:2-3 and God's Justice

[Nota Bene: the webmaster of the Answering Abraham blog has been kind enough to include this guest post, by Denis Giron.]

In November of 2012, Paul Bilal Williams posted a video to YouTube, titled "David Wood and Jay Smith refuse to answer any questions on the Bible" (no link is available, as the video has since been taken down). In that video, Mr. Williams repeatedly tried to interrupt Mr. Wood's speech, at Speaker's Corner, in London, by yelling variations of the same single question, over and over again: "why does [your] God kill babies?" Mr. Williams would go on to explain that he had in mind specifically 1 Samuel 15:2-3.

Mr. Williams also posted the video on his (now defunct) blog, as well as on FaceBook (exempli gratia: this thread). Since then, he has written about the subject on his second blog (cf. his entry titled The character of God in the Bible), and has challenged others to grapple with the subject on Twitter. For example, consider the following tweets:

@SamShamoun do you condemn your god who commands the slaughter of the innocent? http://t.co/WVu02xws3J
— Paul Williams (@bilalwilliams) June 5, 2014

@SidCordle your Bible has God ordering the genocide of innocent women and childen - read 1 Samuel 15. Time to ban the Bible Sid?
— Paul Williams (@bilalwilliams) June 9, 2014

@SamShamoun Sam why did your God command the mass slaughter of innocent women, children and infants? Its all in 1 Samuel 15?
— Paul Williams (@bilalwilliams) June 14, 2014

@SamShamoun do you condemn the slaught of babies in your holy book? If not how do you justify this genocide?
— Paul Williams (@bilalwilliams) June 14, 2014

From all that, one would think that Mr. Williams wants to engage others on the subject. Sadly, however, it has been my experience that when people try to discuss the subject deeply with him, he quickly develops a desire to avoid the topic. Interested readers can see some of the correspondences I have tried to have with Mr. Williams at the links to the relevant FaceBook post and blog entry, above. Here I will attempt to deal with some of the salient points, with the hope that this blog entry might suffice as a reply to Mr. Williams, should he raise the subject again (exempli gratia, if, in the future, he challenges someone to discuss the relevant Biblical passage, the person so challenged can simply direct Mr. Williams here). I confess, however, that much of what will be found here, will overlap with the discussion found in the aforementioned correspondences.

God's Justice vs. One Man's Cognitive Dissonance

When Mr. Williams first posted the relevant video, back in November of 2012, and I made my first attempt to correspond with him on the subject, I attempted to press two questions on him, which might be stated as follows:

1. Do you agree that God causes natural disasters which kill women and children?


2. If you do, is it your position that whether or not it is just for God to bring about their death depends on what sort of creation was employed to do so?

These questions are quite relevant, as they get to the heart of the matter. If God does cause natural disasters to kill women and children, then it would seem that we can infer from creation that God can and sometimes will bring about the death of women and children. This would mean that the Biblical depiction of God, as directing creation in such away as to cause the death of women and children, however difficult it may be for some to accept, would not be contrary to reality (unless one wishes to deny the divine foreknowledge, or even existence, of God).

In our correspondences, in late 2012, Mr. Williams assured me that there is a world of difference between God causing a natural disaster to kill children, on the one hand, and God directing a human to kill children, on the other. However, despite such insistence, Mr. Williams has not yet, to date, articulated what that difference might be. It seems to me that if we take the proposition...

"God caused X to kill children."

...what it says about God's justice does not change based on whether we instantiate "a tsunami" or "a human" in place of 'X'. Unfortunately, Mr. Williams refused to grapple with this point.

However, if I may make a bit of a relevant segue, in a correspondence with Ijaz Ahmed (in a thread on a FaceBook page of Kaleef Karim which has since been deactivated, and thus cannot be linked to, at this time), Mr. Ahmed asked me if I understood the difference between one of my loved ones dying in a natural disaster, on the one hand, and the same person being murdered by another human, on the other. It seems to me prudent to address this idea, here.

My objection is that such a question grinds close to removing God from the equation. For example, if a mere human being developed technology which could cause tsunamis, and deliberately employed said technology to kill a group of women and children, we would consider him guilty of mass murder. However, if God caused a tsunami to kill women and children, most theists would not attempt to impugn God's justice. So too, if a human acted on his own in killing a child, we can consider that murder, but if we consider murder to be specifically an illicit form of homicide, then a human carrying out God's order to kill a child would arguably be licit rather than illicit, and thus would not constitute murder. For an analogy, Jews, Christians and Muslims do not consider Abraham's intention to kill his son to be an attempted murder, though if an ordinary man, today, attempted to kill his child, we could all consider him guilty of such. In short, the question seems to side step the central subject of God's justice in employing creation to bring about the death of women and children.

Interestingly, in December of 2012, Mr. Williams had a bit of praise for Sadat bin Anwar's piece, Killing babies for who? Allah or Yah___/Jesus? Mr. Williams has more recently shared the piece via a tweet. In that piece, Mr. Bin Anwar makes the following rather interesting statement:

God is the Sovereign Creator, the Giver of Life. He can take that life away, either directly or through the use of His agents (the wind, water, angels, etc). That is a point that I am ready to concede. On a theological and philosophical level, were God to actually command the Jews to kill all the Amalekite children and animals, their fulfilling this command would be seen as a meritorious and virtuous act, much as we consider Abraham’s near-sacrifice of his innocent (but willing) son to be a virtuous act.

Feeling that this agreed in large part with the position I had staked out, I asked Mr. Williams if he agreed with Mr. Bin Anwar on such points. Rather than answer the question directly, Mr. Williams responded, on 15 December, 2012, "I'm not here to be cross-examined by you Mr Denis." Being that this saga began with Mr. Williams triumphantly proclaiming David Wood's unwillingness to answer questions about 1 Samuel 15:2-3, I could not help but find such a response to be humorously ironic.

Mr. Williams' apparent inability to appreciate the very sources he recommends to others did not stop there. On 31 December, 2012, he posted to his [first] blog a video titled, Islamic Theology vs. the Problem of Evil, in which Abdal Hakim Murad (A.K.A. Timothy Winter) discussed God's will and human suffering. At slightly over a minute into the video, the man, who is among Mr. Williams' favorite scholars, states that "it's an impugning and compromising of our tawHeed to suggest that what's happening in today's world is not the direct will of Allah". Such a point is highly relevant to this discussion, but it would not be easy to get Mr. Williams to grapple with its implications.

Another example, in which Mr. Williams seems to wave off or shut out anything which is inconvenient, came up on Twitter. He feigned being scandalized by the fact that there exist Christians who admit that, if they believed God wanted them to kill a child, they might attempt to do so. While I can certainly understand an atheist having a problem with such, it seems improper for a Muslim to take such a stance. Consider the following exchange:

@denis_giron i asked David Wood this question: if he felt Jesus told him to kill his neighbours child would he do it? He said "Yes"
— Paul Williams (@bilalwilliams) June 6, 2014

@bilalwilliams Interesting. Do you agree the historical Abraham /believed/ God wanted him to kill his own child and was willing to do so?
— Denis Giron (@denis_giron) June 6, 2014

@denis_giron not according to the Quran. But would you kill a baby if God told you to? Wood said Yes and he is a very devout Chriustian
— Paul Williams (@bilalwilliams) June 6, 2014

@bilalwilliams Not according to the Qur'aan? Soorat as-Saafaat 37:102 makes clear he thought he was supposed to do such and was willing.
— Denis Giron (@denis_giron) June 6, 2014 

The reason why it is awkward for a professed Muslim to express shock that someone might be willing to do the unthinkable if they believed God commanded them to do so is precisely because the Qur'an depicts Abraham, one of the most celebrated figures in the Islamic faith, as precisely that sort of a person. Mr. Williams, however, tried to deny that such was the case, and invitations for him to explain a relevant passage in the Qur'an were met with silence. Further attempts to get him to grapple with the subject he himself raised were met with personal insults.

Such unfortunate behavior reflects a sadly typical trend with Mr. Williams. He prefers to end discussions and/or employ personal attacks to ever conceding a point to "the other side". One is tempted to speculate that such tendencies are rooted in hatred (an authentic "Christophobia"), as they are not motivated by a sincere desire to come to the truth.

A Brief Comment on the Text

Anyone who has grappled with the subject of theodicy will almost certainly find Mr. Willaims' polemic less than persuasive. This is because the solution to the problem of suffering will often provide an indirect answer to the relevant charge. For example, one could easily argue that, just because we cannot understand why God would employ creation (whether it be a tsunami or a person) to kill a child, that does not mean God therefore did not have morally sufficient reason for doing so.

Relevant to this, Mr. Williams has felt that 1 Samuel 15:2 lists the precise reason why God ordered the relevant slaughter. Admitting that he does not know Hebrew, Mr. Williams sided with the NRSV, which opens with "I will punish the Amalekites for what they did...".

However, the NRSV offers a slightly less than literal translation. The PaQaD root (פקד) can give rise to verbs which mean to punish, but it can also mean to note, examine, recall, remember, et cetera, and in the relevant Biblical verse, the verb is paqadtee (פקדתי), which is perfect/completed tense (roughly "past tense"). Ergo, if we were to see it as "punish," the punishment would have already been complete ("I punished"). Therefore, it should be noted that the ESV is closer to the intention of the text being translated, in reading "I have noted..."

Even though the verse makes note of that past event, that does not mean that event suffices as all the reason God had for giving all of the precise commands that were given. For an analogy, in a war, a general might tell his troops that a coming battle is related to a specific past event, but that does not mean every detail in the battle plan is therefore just a mechanical reaction to the event which was mentioned. On the contrary, there can be all sorts of other motivations or lines of reasoning behind the various details of the attack, which are not shared with the troops carrying out the orders. Hence, 1 Samuel 15:2 does not prevent us from thinking God may have had morally sufficient reasons which we are presently unaware of.