There is a thought experiment, older than philosophy itself, I offer for your consideration. It does not require a laboratory or a text. It requires only that you open your eyes, truly open them, and hold what you see against what you have been told. Someone, somewhere, at this very moment, is asking a version of the same question humans have asked since the first child died too soon, since the first innocent suffered without cause, since the first prayer dissolved unanswered into silence. The question is not whether God exists. The question is what kind of God could exist in the face of all this. What does this God see? And what does this God choose to do with the seeing?
You say there is a God.
Right now, forty-nine million people are living at the edge of famine. Not hunger. Not the ordinary ache of a missed meal. But famine. The body consuming itself. Children in the Sahel and the Horn of Africa whose stomachs have distended past the point of pain into a kind of terrible calm. A mother watches her daughter’s ribs emerge like topography, like something geological and patient, and there is nothing in her hands to give.
The world produces enough food to feed every human being alive. Think about that for a moment. There is no reason for famine to exist. This is not a failure of agriculture. It is a failure of will. The calories exist. They rot in silos and spoil in surplus while the children die in numbers too horrible to contemplate. Once every few seconds, according to the United Nations World Food Program. While an omnipotent God watches and does nothing. The grain wastes away, taking the children with it.
You say there is a God.
Pediatric oncology wards are among the quietest places on earth. The children who understand what is happening have gone somewhere inside themselves. The children who do not understand ask for things—a toy, a story, the smell of their own pillow—and those requests are devastating in their smallness.
Approximately 400,000 children are diagnosed with cancer each year worldwide. Their cells mutate without conscience, without logic, without any relation to what those children have done or not done. A five-year-old has no theology. She has no cosmological debt to pay. She has a stuffed rabbit and a fever and a God, you say, who numbers even the hairs on her head and who watches the cancer reduce the number minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day until there is nothing there to count and no one on whom one can count them.
You say there is a God.
War does not look like movies. It looks like a man trying to carry two children at once and dropping one. It looks like a hospital basement in Mariupol, or a school in Aleppo turned to chalk and rebar, or a trench next to a village in Vietnam, or a field in Rwanda where the bones of 800,000 people whitened in 100 days while the world debated the definition of genocide.
We have been at war somewhere on this planet every single day of recorded human history. Not intermittently. Every day. The weapons change—bronze, gunpowder, depleted uranium, drone-delivered precision—but the dying is constant. The dying is reliable. The dying is, apparently, permitted.
You say there is a God.
On any given night in the United States alone, more than half a million people sleep outside or in emergency shelters. Not wanderers by choice. Not people who refused help. People for whom the machinery of civilization, machinery built by the richest nation in the history of the world, simply did not reach.
They sleep in doorways in January. They die of exposure in cities where the buildings behind them are heated to seventy degrees. Veterans who walked through fire for a flag now beg beneath it. The invisible are not invisible to an omniscient God. They are simply not enough.
You say there is a God.
A child is abused in a locked room tonight. In every country, in every language, behind every kind of door. The CDC estimates that approximately one in four girls and one in thirteen boys in America experience sexual abuse before adulthood. These are conservative numbers. Most cases are never reported because shame travels faster than justice.
The child in that room has not yet formed the words for what is happening. But she knows it is wrong. She has moral knowledge already. That instinct for fairness and protection seems almost divine in its origins. She was given the knowledge. She was not given the protection. Yet your God is conspicuous in their absence.
You say there is a God.
Addiction does not discriminate by faith. The pews are full of people whose children are dying of fentanyl. More than 80,000 Americans died of an overdose in a single recent year. Each death was the final chapter of a story that almost always began with pain: physical pain, psychological pain, and the pain of being a person in a world that made no room for them.
They prayed. Their families prayed. The prayers were sincere. The opioids were more reliable.
You say there is a God.
Human trafficking is not a relic or an abstraction. The International Labor Organization estimates that 40 million people are currently living in conditions of modern slavery—bought, sold, coerced, or trapped. Women and girls constitute the majority. Children constitute a staggering portion. The market for human beings is global, sophisticated, and profitable.
There is no bolt of lightning. There is no pillar of fire. There is only the dark, the locked door, and the invoice.
Maybe it is time for more of us to start questioning these things. Maybe it is time to stop praying to these gods and ask them one simple question. “Where are you?”
Joe Broadmeadow
You say there is a God.
Suicide takes approximately 700,000 lives every year. Each one preceded by a private darkness that the person inside it could not see an end to, except one. The note, when there is a note, so often says the same thing: I could not go on. Not, I did not want to live. Could not. The body and the mind had reached a limit, and the limit was real. And nothing, not love, not prayer, not the existence of a caring universe, broke through it in time.
And apparently not a God paying attention.
The ones left behind spend years asking why. They address their question to the air. The air, as always, does not answer.
You say there is a God.
The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 killed sixty thousand people on All Saints’ Day, a Sunday morning, with the churches full. Voltaire wrote a poem. Leibniz’s optimism collapsed. The problem was not the earthquake. The problem was the timing, the precision, and the seemingly deliberate irony of it: the devout, assembled in worship, crushed beneath the houses of God.
Today we call them “natural disasters,” as if nature were a neutral party, as if the tectonic plates had no author. A hurricane takes the Gulf Coast. A tsunami hits the coast of Indonesia. An earthquake kills the children of Turkey in their sleep. The earth does what it does. The sky does not intervene.
These are not arguments. They are not even accusations. They are observations. The kind that has driven mystics to silence, philosophers to despair, and ordinary people to the particular loneliness of a faith that no longer fits the world it was meant to explain.
Ivan Karamazov did not deny God. He returned the ticket. The distinction matters.
You can believe in a God and still stand in front of the pediatric ward and refuse to look away. You can hold the theology in one hand and the death toll in the other and feel both. The tension does not resolve. It is not supposed to be resolved. The great traditions have always known this. Job was never given an explanation, only a theophany, only the whirlwind saying, “You cannot hold it all.” Maybe that is true. Maybe we are too small for the answer.
Or maybe the question is the prayer. The only honest one. The refusal to pretend that looking away is the same as peace.
Maybe the silence that follows the question is not absence. Maybe it is something else. Something that has no name in any living language, sitting at the exact boundary between faith and grief, where the only thing left is to keep asking.
You say there is a God.
So do I, sometimes. Or at least the concept of one that actually embraces the philosophy attributed to them. In the dark, with all of this in mind, I still find the question forming on my lips. I cannot tell you what that means. I am not sure it means anything.
But I will not stop asking.
You say there is a God.
If there is a God, I do know one thing for certain. No human has exclusive possession of this God.
Maybe it is time for more of us to start questioning these things. Maybe it is time to stop praying to this god and ask him one simple question. “Where are you?”
Joe Broadmeadow is the author of the Josh Williams and Harrison “Hawk” Bennett crime thriller series and the philosophical fiction trilogy Saving the Last Dragon. He lives in Warren, Rhode Island.
