Site Extras / Comparing God With Human Parents

Believers commonly describe their God as though he were a human parent, using this analogy to reach conclusions about God and his relationship to humanity. As old and worn as this analogy is, however, it’s quite invalid.

The Problem of Omnipotence

Analogies are valid only if they compare two things which are, in some way, alike, and whose nature is reflective of each other. This presents a problem though, because God and human parents are qualitatively different: God is believed to be omnipotent, while human beings are not.

We’ve all heard the canard that God doesn’t alleviate suffering because that’s how we learn; the analogy I’ve seen most often is a child and a hot stove. “How can a child learn not to touch the hot burners of the stove, except by letting the child get burned once?” is one way it’s put.

There are some problems with this, however: Most obviously, you’d have to be a heartless and sadistic parent to stand by, calmly, and watch while your own child burns him/herself on a stove. I’m sorry, but I cannot see myself allowing this, nor could I see most of the people who use this analogy, standing for it either. This scenario is simply ridiculous, since most of us would leap to prevent the burn anyway. There is no way that any rational and compassionate parent possibly could do otherwise.

More importantly, however, there’s a major difference between human parents and God, which is not reflected in the analogy. And that is this: Human beings do not create human nature. Even if it is true that sometimes, children do have to learn things “the hard way” (i.e. to avoid hot burners by being burned), this psychological trait is not under the human parent’s control. Human parents do not design their children to work that wayp; they do not, in fact, design them at all! They simply give birth to them; those children then grow according to the workings of human nature. Parents can do except allow human nature to work as it does, in their children.

God, however, according to believers, not only made us, he made “human nature.” That is, he is responsible not only for our existence, but also for the specific way in which our minds and bodies work; he “designed” human nature as it is.

Where The Analogy Fails

This is the “soft white underbelly” of this analogy: While a human parent has no choice but to live with his/her own, and his/her child’s own, “human nature” as it is, God is not so limited. He made “human nature,” and can change it if he wants to, whenever he wants to, in whatever way he wants to. Being omnipotent, he is never forced to live within its constraints, as human parents are.

Put another way, the human-parent analogy fails, because it does not explain God fully. It does not explain why human beings are the way they are; it does not account for the fact that, for God, human nature is not fixed (whereas for human parents, it is).

Believers’ Discomfort

Most believers were raised to think of God as a human parent. A common term for him, in fact, is “Father.” This analogy is embedded deep within Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition. But that it’s an old and familiar analogy, does not make it valid! Only the rigors of logic make an analogy valid ... and in this case, logic doesn’t hold it up at all.

Unfortunately most believers are so attached to this analogy, that its illogic and fallacious nature never reaches them. They refuse to dispense with it, in spite of the fact that it’s illogical and fallacious. But that’s really how it all boils down, folks: God and human parents cannot logically be analogized ... ever ... because no human/divine analogue can ever account for God’s omnipotence.

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