Larry Axel Quote
"While most of the world looked on--as did, presumably, any divine beings that exist--Hitler and his Nazi force operated killing centers that gassed children by the hundreds of thousands... With perhaps unprecedented magnitude and clarity, Auschwitz brings theologians and philosophers face to face with the facts of suffering on an incredibly mass scale, with issues poignantly raised concerning the absence of divine intervention or the inadequacies of divine power or benevolence; and we are led eventually to what theologians and philosophers call the Problem of Evil or the issue of theodicy. For theists, terrible dilemmas are raised. Irving Greenburg and others have insisted that in a post-Shoah world, no theological utterance should be affirmed today that is not cerdible in the presence of the burning children of Auschwitz. Anyone who wsheds to take evidence and experience seriously, to be "empirical," must recoginze in evil (both so-called moral evil and so-called natural evil) a substantive threat to traditional forms of theism that posit a God of omnipotence, omniscience, omnibenevolence, and control. Not only have many people concluded that there is an absence of substantive evidence for traditional theism, but also that there may be evidence--in the widespread presence of natural and moral evil in the world--against theism. There are certain things that cannot be ignored by a theological vocabulary. We can legitimately ask: should anyone who wishes to take experience seriously and who does not seek refuge in some kind of dualistic fideism, assert a theistic position after Auschwitz?"

--Larry Axel, Religious Creaturalism and a New Agenda for Theology, in God, Values and Empiricism, 1998.