I’d love to hear the elevator version of this.
I will spare you the metaphorical.
Whatever judgement morally fallible human beings have to make concerning the action God allegedly commanded be taken against the Canaanites, it certainly cannot be from a perspective of omniscience and absolute moral goodness. We simply do not have access to the kind of evidence that would be necessary to make an informed judgement concerning what would have been the “right” action. The fact that we are 3000+ years removed from the facts makes any opinion we have about the matter devoid of any force.
We might venture an opinion, but if an absolutely perfect and all-knowing God truly did command the Israelites to remove the Canaanites from the Earth, then his judgement would, by definition, have been the right one and ours simply uninformed and largely irrelevant.
The talking points in typical OT critiques are that God would not have commanded such a thing or that God is a moral monster for allowing it. However, logically speaking, it is possible that evil could have become so ingrained and so problematic that the only way to stop it was by removal. Maintaining, consistently, that an all-knowing and all-good God would not have commanded the action, then, without access to all of the morally relevant factors for deliberation, is a conclusion we are not in a position to make.
An analogue would be the authority or justification a surgeon would have to remove a cancerous tumor from a patient. We do not accuse the surgeon of being genocidal with regard to malignant cells or body parts, nor do we question a surgeon’s expertise or authority to do so just because we find the idea of removing human members distasteful.
Relative to God, the whole of humanity might be considered much like a living organism. It could be argued that he (and only he) has the right, given his role as Creator, to superintend the development and health of the body of humankind. When the future moral health and, perhaps, the continued existence of humanity is at stake, it may very well be that God has the moral authority (absolute goodness) to intercede and the purview (omniscience) necessary to decide that drastic measures are necessary.
I would argue that,
in principle, if God is omniscient and omnibenevolent it is not logically impossible for a determination to have been made by God to cull a malignant part of humanity for much the same justification that a surgeon would have to remove living tissue from a human body to ensure the survival of that body.
The problem is that we do not fully comprehend the systemic nature of evil to claim that God’s action was not warranted at the time. We are clearly lacking with regard to both knowledge and foresight, and do not have the capacity to fully grasp the far reaching impact of unfettered evil on human existence.
This “in principle” defense can be made without necessitating a commitment that every assertion about God commanding genocide must be accepted at face value simply because some bellicose group or other claims they have God’s sanction.
What it does mean is that we cannot argue from our limited moral perspective to a judgement about God’s warrant. We can doubt that God would order such a thing and question what justification would be necessary for him to do so, but we are in no position to make a definitive claim that he would or could not EVER be morally justified to do so.
To make such a judgement would require access to the kind of morally relevant information only an omniscient God would have access to: knowledge of the far-reaching repercussions of allowing a determinately evil and aggressive culture to continue to influence a nascent humanity from that point forward through all history.
It is only when a presumption that it was NOT God, or at least not an all-knowing or all-good God, or that the Jewish community was merely seeking validation for their own brutality does any critique hold. Yet, those are the very presumptions that do not prove, but rather beg the question of whether God could ever have warrant to command such a thing.
If down through the history of mankind had there been a verifiable, habitual and consistent call by God for the extermination of groups of people for no reason other than it is his will, then we would have a case against God, but since the stated justification for these acts was the overwhelming preponderance and abetting of evil by the groups in question, we ought not be so quick to cast judgement in human favor. Consider the Nazi atrocities and scores of genocides that have been perpetrated by human beings, before making a claim that the moral degeneracy of groups of human beings could never reach a point where God might decide to intervene.
Each of us as human beings has a death warrant on our heads. Each one of us will die. It is an inevitable fact of existence. If God exists, then the death of each and every member of the human race is a supreme and universal act of genocide that God has commanded.
The reality, assuming the existence of the Supreme God, is that the death sentence on the Cannanites is not an isolated and deplorable event but needs to be viewed in the context of God’s jurisdiction over all existence including human life itself, where each and every one of us human beings been found wanting by an omnibenevolent God and sentenced to death.
An atheist might deny all of this, and that may be a legitimate position. However, the move an atheist cannot make is to try to use the existence of these Old Testament narratives as a moral disproof precisely because there is no logical warrant for concluding that an omniscient and omnibenevolent God could never - in particular near the beginning of human history - have warrant to order the destruction of a corrupt culture. We are not in the privileged position required to make such a determination.
