“The fool,” the Psalmist says, “Hath said in his heart, there is no God.” It was no surprise last week, then, to find out that Kemi Badenoch is an atheist. In an interview with the BBC—s Amol Rajan, Badenoch disclosed that she lost her faith in 2008 after reading into the case of Josef Friztl and his daughter Elizabeth. Her disclosure and account of this has provoked significant criticism in certain parts of the press and on X. Her reasons for loss of faith are as rubbish as her leadership of the Conservative Party. Typical Badenoch. An intellectual lightweight. An idiot. A fool.
Undoubtedly bad though her leadership has been, and as deserving as she is of criticism for this, on her loss of faith I am more sympathetic.
As Badenoch tells it, she was a rather pious and serious Christian. She grew up in the church. Found meaning in her faith. Prayed. Engaged in Christian apologetics. But when she read about the Fritzl case “it was like someone blew out a candle”. For those unaware of the Fritzl case, there is plenty of material online to read but by way of harrowing summary, Josef Fritzl imprisoned his daughter for twenty-four years in the basement of his house, repeatedly raped her, fathered children to her, and murdered (by neglect) one of the children.
As Badenoch read more about the case, she read of Elizabeth praying repeatedly over those long twenty-four years of abuse for God to intervene, but he never did. Why does God answer some prayers and not others? Why does God answer Badenoch’s prayers but not Elizabeth’s? Why does God answer frivolous prayers, when the imprisoned and abused cry out for deliverance but there is only silence?
The problem of evil or suffering is, of course, not a new one. Indeed, it and the coherence of theism, to which it is related, are the two oldest and greatest objections to the existence of the classical god. It being so old and so significant, it has generated a vast, complex and technical literature, both within the domains of philosophy and of theology. To speak of the “problem of evil” now can also be somewhat misleading. Anglophone philosophy of religion, as is its wont, has complicated the picture to such an extent that it might be better to speak of the “problems of evil”.
Yet despite this attention, the problem has not in any meaningful sense been answered in theism’s favour. Theists have developed theodicies, to be sure — some better than others. There have also been theistic advances — for instance some versions of the logical problem of evil are generally no longer taken to be sound. The old Epicurean argument has been considerably blunted. But the Lord gives, and the Lord takes away. Newer frontiers on, say, the slaughter bench of evolutionary history and a belated interest in animal suffering more broadly revive logical problems. To say, there are arguments there that might help answer why a good, all-powerful, all-knowing God might allow evil and suffering to occur, but they are by no means decisive and there are well-informed, well-meaning people who are not convinced by them in the least.
The weight of expectation theists should put on this literature then should be limited. Arguments are one thing but the evil and suffering experienced that they attempt to address is quite another. The afflicted do not cry out for a theodicy. This existential issue is a problem of evil unto itself.
We see the loss of faith regularly with personal tragedy — the death of a child, abuse, neglect, illness, families devasted by loss. We might see that as understandable as people try to deal with what has happened to them but there’s no reason why it should be limited to personal tragedy alone.
There is a complacency and indifference about evil in the world when it is not experienced directly and personally. In a sense, how could there not be? We couldn’t live otherwise. It is the background to our existence. We get accustomed to it. The daily news cycle fills our minds with stories of death and suffering. We may acknowledge it as awful, we may even do more than acknowledge it, but we swiftly move on to the demands of our day. Sometimes, though, people are confronted by the evil and suffering in the world in a peculiar and forceful way. Perhaps it is particularly gratuitous or egregious, perhaps there are personal resonances, circumstances in one’s life at the time but for whatever reason or cause, it grabs the attention and cannot be ignored.
There was nothing necessary about Badenoch’s apostasy … but it was not an irrational response
Reading Badenoch’s account of lost faith, it seemed entirely plausible to me that someone could become an atheist over the Fritzl case. Not just the sordid horror of it but the details that personally resonated. The contrasting father-daughter relationships. The contrasting (perceived) efficacy of petitionary prayer. As a matter of psychology of belief, that you might lose your belief in God over this just doesn’t surprise. It hits you and the belief is gone. It’s not a ratiocinative process. And once it’s gone, it’s gone. As Badenoch put it ‘it was like someone blew out a candle”.
We don’t have the control over our beliefs that we like to think we have. We find ourselves believing or disbelieving things. Our evaluative frameworks, our credences, our intuitions are opaque even to ourselves. There was nothing necessary about Badenoch’s apostasy — no point of logic demanding atheism — but it was not an irrational response. It would be different if there were a compelling answer to evil but there isn’t. There were and are other options, of course. There are the theodicies, yes. There are also other views of God. You can fiddle with the omni attributes or even do something more radical. There are even some who find these options persuasive and consoling. It would be trite to think that any of this should suffice. At best, God and evil is a mystery to us.
