In a lovely, heartfelt post on this website on 10 February, responding to the ongoing crisis in Israel/Palestine, with the three great monotheistic religions — Judaism, Islam and Christianity — once again seemingly in collision, Eric Hunter gave voice to the question on everyone’s lips: why does God seem to sit back and do nothing to stop all the murder and mayhem?

God’s apparent inaction in the face of the violence and injustice that seems to flourish in the world generally is surely, in fact, the single major cause of the widespread loss of faith in God, any god, in the modern world.

Loss of faith, belief in God: yes, a remarkable situation has arisen in recent years, unprecedented in human history, in which many or even most people, certainly in the contemporary West, have decided that the God of historical religion, invariably seen as the omnipotent, creator of all things, simply doesn’t exist. In his post, Hunter rehearsed the two obvious, decisive reasons.

Firstly, we live in an evolving universe, not one that was created in a once-off miraculous act. Perhaps there is a God who gave birth (so to speak) to the universe in the Big Bang, a sort of divine, cosmic parent, but there certainly isn’t one who created it.

Secondly, as we noted, terrible things have always happened in the world, and continue to occur, with no obvious sign of intervention by an omnipotent creator to stop them. Yes, there’s many a theological tome that has been written on the topic of theodicy, attempting to vindicate God’s providence in the face of the existence of evil, but none of that seems to have touched people’s growing disillusionment. The usual explanation offered — that God allows bad things to happen in the world as some sort of punishment or corrective for human sin — only serves to harden our determination not to believe it!

If we accept, therefore, the creator God of historical religion — the one whom both sides in Palestine/Israel claim as guarantor of their rightful ownership of the land — does that leave us with no God at all we can look to in our hour of need? Certainly not! There has been a different conception of God — a different God, in fact — all along, a real God who exists, alongside the old creator God, who, all along, never actually existed.

It’s the God whom Jesus of Nazareth was very intent on presenting to us all those years ago, a loving father — a divine parent, yes — of everyone and everything. There’s no better description of this God than the one Jesus presents in the famous parable of the prodigal son, a wonderful story which would be more accurately titled “the parable of the prodigal father”. Why? Because the word “prodigal” has two very different but related meanings. On one hand, there is a reference to recklessly and wastefully squandering money and resources — the son in the parable — but on the other hand the word refers to having or giving something on a lavish scale – the father in this case.

Another mistitle is “the parable of the forgiving father”, so that when the son returns home and begs his father to take him back, not as his son but as a hired hand, the father seems to just ignore that entreaty, and immediately starts planning a big celebration of the return of the son he thought was lost to him! It is the change that disaster has wrought in the son’s character — no longer a self-centred youth wanting what he wants, now a humble, self-effacing grown-up ready to serve others — that the father senses and wants to celebrate bigtime. The son doesn’t need to seek his father’s forgiveness because his father didn’t judge him in the first place!

The old creator God is the worst sort of parent — controlling, narcissistic, negligent — but the real God who Jesus presents to us, is, by contrast, the best sort of parent – respectful, solicitous about giving us our freedom, aware of the danger we are to ourselves with our reckless self-centredness, always staying in touch, and ready, yes, to help us in our hour of need.

Our hour of need: what we always most urgently need is just that, help to overcome our destructive, natural self-centredness. That’s what faith in the divine parent God Jesus presents to us delivers in spades – faith, you might say, in a source of selfless love beyond ourselves, beyond religion, beyond all humanity. Something that changes individual lives and transforms cultures.

If there is no such divine parent God, just the old, non-existent creator God still hanging around, then it’s impossible to see any hope for Israel/Palestine, with both sides clinging onto their historical claims, locked in never-ending conflict with no possible winners. But there is, so there’s hope – real hope. What it will take is for all parties to let go of their historic claims, open themselves up to real cultural change, and, with the help of the international community, work towards a way of living together in the land peacefully. Let’s keep believing they can do it.

See Fergus McGinley, _The God who doesn’t Exist_, Adelaide, ATF Press, 2025