If there is a God, why are there wars?

Judaism

“I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day, that I have set before thee life and death, the blessing and the curse; therefore choose life, that thou mayest live, thou and thy seed.”

Deuteronomy 30:19 · JPS 1917

Jewish teaching says every person has two impulses: the yetzer tov, the inclination to good, and the yetzer hara, the inclination to harm. Neither is in charge unless we let it be. When Cain kills Abel, God does not ask “Why did I allow this?” He asks Cain, “What hast thou done?” (Genesis 4:10). Responsibility sits with the one who acts.

The Mishnah explains why God began humanity with one person. It was “for the sake of peace among people, so that no one could say to another, ‘My father is greater than your father’” (Sanhedrin 4:5). Every war is a fight between cousins. The Torah limits even lawful war: an army may not cut down a besieged city's fruit trees, “for is the tree of the field man, that it should be besieged of thee?” (Deuteronomy 20:19).

Christianity

“Where do wars and fightings amongst you come from? Don't they come from your pleasures that war in your members?”

James 4:1 · World English Bible (British Edition), public domain

Augustine of Hippo, writing in North Africa around 400, said evil is not a thing God made. It is good gone missing, as a wound is health gone missing. War, he wrote, is not evil because people die, since everyone dies. It is evil because of what drives it: “love of violence, revengeful cruelty, fierce and implacable enmity, wild resistance, and the lust of power” (Against Faustus 22.74).

The letter of James puts it in one line, quoted below. C. S. Lewis, who fought in the trenches in 1918, argued that free will makes evil possible, and that it is also the only thing that makes love worth having. Christians believe God answered human violence not from a distance but by suffering it: Jesus was arrested, beaten and executed, and told his followers to put away the sword.

Islam

“Corruption doth appear on land and sea because of (the evil) which men's hands have done, that He may make them taste a part of that which they have done, in order that they may return.”

Qur'an 30:41 · Pickthall (1930)

The Qur'an places the blame for war plainly on human hands. Islam allows fighting in self-defence and against oppression, and then hedges it with limits: “Fight in the way of Allah against those who fight against you, but begin not hostilities. Lo! Allah loveth not aggressors.” (2:190, Pickthall). The first caliph, Abu Bakr, is reported to have told his army not to kill women, children or the old, and not to cut down fruit trees (Muwatta Malik). The rule echoes the Torah's.

Classical scholars such as Ibn al-Qayyim (died 1350) wrote at length about the wisdom behind trials. God permits things He does not love, they argued, because a world with real choice, repentance, patience and courage holds goods that a world without them could not. In the angels' story the last word is God's, and so is the hope: those trusted with the earth can still be its caretakers.

Without religion

“Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed.”

Constitution of UNESCO, 1945 · original English

For many non-religious people, war is the clearest sign that nobody is steering. The answer to it, they say, must come from us: diplomacy, law, education and the courage to refuse. After the Second World War, UNESCO's founding constitution of 1945 began with the line quoted below. In 1955 Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein, neither of them a believer in a personal God, issued a manifesto against nuclear war. It ended: “Remember your humanity, and forget the rest.”

Sikhi

“Such slaughter, such cries of pain: did You feel no pity?”

Guru Granth Sahib, ang 360 (Guru Nanak, Babarvani) · our rendering

Guru Nanak saw war with his own eyes. When the army of Babur sacked the town of Saidpur in the 1520s, he wrote verses known as the Babarvani, and in one of them he speaks straight to God in grief and protest. Sikhs believe everything happens within the hukam, God's order. Yet they also teach that haumai, ego, drives people to cruelty, and that each person answers for what they do.

The tenth Guru, Guru Gobind Singh, wrote to the Mughal emperor in his Zafarnama that when every other means has failed, it is right to take up the sword. Sikhs call this dharam yudh, a war of conscience: only in defence, never for land or loot. The Sikh water-carrier Bhai Kanhaiya gave water to the wounded of both armies. When he was accused of helping the enemy, Guru Gobind Singh praised him and gave him ointment to treat them too.

Hindu traditions

The Bhagavad Gita opens on a battlefield. The prince Arjuna sees his cousins and teachers in the opposing army, drops his bow and refuses to fight. Krishna's reply about duty has been read in many ways. Mahatma Gandhi read the battle as an allegory of the war inside every human heart. The great epic it belongs to, the Mahabharata, ends with the victors weeping over the dead, and it praises ahimsa, not harming, as the highest duty.

Beyond the Abrahamic faiths

“For hatred does not cease by hatred at any time: hatred ceases by love, this is an old rule.”

Dhammapada 5 · F. Max Müller (1881), public domain

The Buddha taught that war begins in the mind, in craving, hatred and delusion, and ends there too. Around 260 BCE the Indian emperor Ashoka conquered Kalinga. His own inscription says 100,000 people were killed and 150,000 carried away, and that he was filled with remorse. He turned to the Buddha's teaching and carved his regret into stone for everyone to read. The Jain tradition goes furthest of all and refuses to harm any living being.