“Then if he is all-powerful, Cornelius, why does he permit it? You say he doesn’t will it. Then why does he allow it?”
Cornelius looked across the deck to the shore line on the starboard side and for a long moment silently considered his friend’s question. “I cannot say, Centurion; it’s a mystery to me. Could it be, though, that the answer, if there be any answer, lies in this god’s determination to give man his freedom? Could it be that even though he is hurt when man abuses the freedom given him, he feels that his children must be free, nevertheless, to work out their destinies? Maybe some such reasoning might explain it. I don’t know.” He shook his head sadly. “What do you think?”
“I disagree, Cornelius. You say that this one god would not order an infant thrown into the river. I agree, but that is not enough. A good god would not permit it.” His grim expression relaxed, but he was still serious. “No, when one sees the condition in which countless men live, the utter unfairness of things, one cannot logically believe in the existence of such a god as you have described. Indeed, it is more logical to believe in our Roman gods than in the god of your old tutor or the Yahweh of the Jews, in our good ones contending with the evil ones”—he shrugged—“with the evil ones usually winning. But it is even more logical, Cornelius, to believe in no gods at all.”
“You have a good argument, Longinus. But it seems to me that we invariably come back to what I said when we started this gods discussion. If there is no higher intelligence, no supreme power, then how did all this”—he swept his arm in a wide arc—“how did we, the world, the sun and moon and stars, everything, how did it all come into existence in the first place? By accident? Bah! And if not by accident, how? Answer me that, Longinus.”
“I can’t answer you. But why should I? What difference does it make? If this good god does exist but does not rule, if he does not enforce a good way of living among men, if he does not protect helpless babies or captured peoples—and obviously he doesn’t—is the world any better off than if no gods existed in the first place?” He smiled complacently. “But, Cornelius, I have no quarrel with your attachment to your tutor’s strangely Yahweh-like god. Some day when I visit you in Capernaum I may go with you to the synagogue or even the Temple at Jerusalem. I may even,” he added with a grin, “offer a brace of doves for the sacrifices. Or would your Yahweh insist on my offering a young lamb?”