Richard Dawkins called the God of the Old Testament a moral monster. Laid out as an argument, the charge has three lines: a good God would not approve of cruelty or exploitation; the Old Testament shows its God approving of such things; so that God is not good. The first line is true. The argument fails at the second, because the evidence offered for it rests on assumptions the critic never states. Philosopher Paul Copan’s work exposes those assumptions one at a time.
That reply does not make every hard passage easy. It changes what a critic would have to prove.
Where the weight of the argument falls
The phrase is Dawkins’s own. “That moral monster phrase is taken from Richard Dawkins, one of the new atheists,” Copan explains. After September 11th, Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and others widened their criticism from one religion to all of them, and the God of the Old Testament became their favorite exhibit.
Christians have no reason to dispute the first premise. Scripture itself condemns cruelty and the abuse of the weak. So everything rests on the second premise, and on one word inside it: approving. What counts as evidence that God approves of something? The moral monster charge treats three different kinds of text as if they all answered that question the same way. A story reports an act. A law regulates a practice. A command speaks to one people at one moment. The argument works only if all three are read as God’s settled ideal for humanity.
A detour worth closing first
Critics often lead with a broader claim: religion causes violence. Copan’s response is that the category cannot carry the claim. The Amish are religious and not violent. A Buddhist who denies God and a Christian who worships him share the same label. Atheist regimes under Stalin and Pol Pot committed horrendous atrocities, yet he refuses to conclude that atheism naturally produces them, for the same reason he rejects the original generalization. “I think the problem really does come down to the human heart, rather than just what label you carry.”
For the moral monster argument, this exchange matters mainly for its method. Even if religion in general caused no violence, the Old Testament could still portray a God who approves of evil. The only way to test that is the method Copan recommends for religion itself: examine each case on its own terms. That means looking at the actual texts behind premise two.
First assumption: to record is to approve
Much of the case against the Old Testament is made of things people do in its stories. The argument quietly treats the narrative as a catalog of endorsed behavior. Copan puts the correction simply: “simply because someone is practicing something, that doesn’t mean that it is being condoned.” His example is deliberately stark. In Genesis 19, Lot’s daughters bear children by their own father. No reader thinks the narrator recommends incest.
Polygamy is the more revealing case, because the stories supply evidence against approval. The creation account sets the norm: “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh” (Genesis 2:24). The verse speaks of a wife, singular. Against that norm, the first man named with two wives is Lamech in Genesis 4, a violent figure. The households of Abraham and Jacob fill with rivalry. Copan’s verdict on the practice is blunt: “It’s just a bad idea.” The narratives reach the same verdict without pausing to lecture.
Israel’s kings received an explicit rule: “Neither shall he multiply wives to himself, that his heart turn not away: neither shall he greatly multiply to himself silver and gold” (Deuteronomy 17:17). The account of Solomon in 1 Kings shows him multiplying horses, wives and wealth, failing on every count of the standard he was meant to model.
The logic here is plain. A report of an act is not evidence of approval. Approval needs something more: praise, blessing, a command to imitate. In these cases the text supplies the reverse. It states the norm and then shows the damage done by breaking it.
Second assumption: to regulate is to endorse
This assumption is harder to spot because it concerns law rather than story. When a law addresses a practice, readers tend to assume the law created or blessed it. But law can also take something that already exists and fence it in. Whether a law restrains or licenses depends on what it is restraining, which is why ancient standards are part of the question rather than an excuse.
Deuteronomy 21:10-14, on a woman taken captive in war, is often cited as permission to use captive women. Copan reads it the other way. An Israelite soldier could have relations with her only through marriage, and only after she had a month to mourn her family and her old life, shaving her head and cutting her nails. He describes this as a departure from the rape common in ancient Near Eastern warfare. That comparison is his claim about the surrounding cultures, and it is the comparison that gives the law its meaning. Measured against the world as it was, the statute binds the soldier. In Copan’s broader reading, “many of these laws are actually protective measures for them, so that they will not be taken advantage of,” a pattern that matches the law’s repeated concern for the orphan, the widow and the foreigner.
On polygamy, scholars divide over whether the law forbids it. Copan reads Leviticus 18:18 as a prohibition on taking any rival wife, arguing that the Hebrew structure shifts at that verse and opens a new section. Others read it as forbidding only marriage to a wife’s sister, and so conclude polygamy was tolerated, perhaps as a way of providing for women left destitute by war. Then he makes the move that matters for the argument: on either reading, “it certainly is not ideal.” A conclusion that survives both readings of a disputed verse does not depend on winning that dispute.
The same structure answers the charge of misogyny. The Bible begins with equal dignity: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them” (Genesis 1:27). The word for the woman as helper in Genesis 2 is used most often of God as Israel’s helper, a source of strength, not a junior assistant. When critics note that the tenth commandment lists a neighbor’s wife alongside his donkey, Copan points a few verses earlier, to the command to honor father and mother (Exodus 20:12), and adds that the law set the same penalty for adultery for both sexes. He concedes “a holdover of patriarchy” in Israel’s households. That concession sharpens the question. The issue is not whether ancient Israel was patriarchal. It is whether the text presents patriarchy’s harshest forms as God’s ideal, or keeps pressing against them.
Third assumption: the law is the final standard
Grant everything so far, and the strongest objection remains. Why would a good God soften a cruel practice instead of abolishing it? If the law is better than its neighbors, why is it not simply good?
Copan’s answer begins with a claim about the law itself: “God’s ideals are not always articulated in the law of Moses.” The law addressed real people inside fallen, patriarchal structures that assumed warfare, and “God meets people where they are.” Jesus draws the same distinction: “Moses because of the hardness of your hearts suffered you to put away your wives: but from the beginning it was not so” (Matthew 19:8). The gap between permission and intention is not a modern defense. It is in the Gospels.
The law also moved. Copan notes the change from altars of uncut stone to altars overlaid with gold as one sign that the law was not static. He borrows N. T. Wright’s image of the law as a booster rocket: it served Israel for a time, preparing the way for the Messiah, and then falls away. In Christ, Copan argues, the shadows of the law reach their substance. “He is the one who is the full expression of God’s character.” Christians do not repudiate the Old Testament on this view; they read it while “recognizing that it had its place for a time.” If the law is a stage, then quoting a single statute as God’s timeless ideal mistakes the stage for the destination.
Copan illustrates gradual change with a modern case: try bringing democracy to a place like Saudi Arabia, where a whole mindset must shift before institutions can. Here the objector has a sharper reply. A human reformer is limited. An all-powerful God is not. Why not simply change Israel’s hearts overnight?
The analogy cannot answer that by itself, and it should not be asked to. What it shows is that incremental reform is not incoherent; a good lawgiver can wisely choose stages over a decree the people cannot receive. What it does not show is that God lacked the power to do otherwise. The real limit in view is not power but persons. Remaking a people’s moral vision by fiat would be a different kind of act than teaching a people over generations, and Scripture presents God doing the second. Whether that choice was the best one is a genuine question, close to the larger problem of why God permits evil at all. But notice what has changed. The objection is no longer a contradiction showing God is a monster. It has become a question about God’s reasons, and the critic now needs to show that no good reason could justify working through a people’s slow change.
Where the argument still bites
The commands to make war on the Canaanites are the hardest test. Here the distinction between recording and approving does not help, because the text presents these as commands. Copan’s distinction between normative and occasional texts settles one question: whether they give later believers any warrant for violence. They were given to national Israel at a particular point in God’s saving purposes. “We don’t have the signs and wonders that accompany these sorts of commands,” he says. He also admits the sorting of normative from occasional is not always clean: “Sometimes it can get a little tricky.”
That answer closes off any use of these texts to justify violence today. It does not, on its own, establish that the commands were just in their own setting. That is a separate question, and a fair reader should name the gap rather than pretend it away. The war texts remain where the moral monster charge presses hardest.
What the critic now has to prove
The charge looked simple: the text shows God approving evil, so God is evil. Once the hidden assumptions are named, the critic owes three further arguments. A recorded act has to be shown to be commended. A regulation has to be shown to be the ideal rather than a restraint on something worse. A temporary law has to be shown to be God’s final word, against Jesus’s own statement that some laws were concessions to hard hearts.
Some passages may still stand as real difficulties after that test. The argument here does not deny it. What it establishes is narrower and more durable: much of the evidence offered for the moral monster charge is not evidence for it at all.
That leaves the reader with a way of reading more than a verdict. Before deciding what a hard passage says about God, ask what the passage is doing. Is it reporting, restraining or commanding? Is it addressed to everyone, or to one moment in Israel’s story? And where is the whole story going? Those questions will not make the Old Testament comfortable. They make it possible to judge it fairly.