This was an argument posted on Reddit. After a short intro, I will post it in full argument interspersed with a rebuttal for each section. The Redditor's argument will be in red
Introduction
A frequent objection leveled against the moral consistency of the Christian scriptures centers on the divine command in 1 Samuel 15:3 to destroy the Amalekites. The argument contends that Christianity is trapped in an intractable dilemma: either an intrinsically evil act - the killing of children and nursing infants - becomes morally good simply because God decreed it (embracing a crude voluntarism where arbitrary might dictates right), or God commanded an intrinsically evil act, thereby violating His own morally perfect nature. Skeptics argue that this command cannot be reconciled with an unchanging moral standard, drawing an analogy to biblical declarations that God cannot lie to argue that He likewise cannot command the slaughter of the innocent.
While framed with philosophical precision, this objection rests on critical category errors, anachronistic definitions of biblical law, and a misapprehension of classical Christian ethics. It conflates the sovereign, corporate execution of divine justice with the personal sin of murder, overlooks the precise covenantal and historical jurisdiction governing ancient theocratic warfare, and ignores the literary idioms of the Ancient Near East. Far from demonstrating a fatal contradiction in God's nature, a careful examination of biblical moral ontology and redemptive history demonstrates that the judgment of Amalek neither reduces morality to arbitrary whim nor compromises the holy character of God. What follows is a point-by-point refutation of the objection.
Hi! Am inquiring into Christianity, but got this objection to it while i was reading stuff on how to recouncile Old testament with a loving God, would love to hear responses and additionally please do recommend material on how to recouncile these things. -
My objection concerns the command of God in 1 Samuel 15:3 to destroy the Amalekites, explicitly including their children and infants. The central question is whether this command can be reconciled with the belief that God is perfectly good, cannot sin, and cannot act contrary to His own nature.
My objection is not simply that God takes human life. I am willing to agree that God, as Creator, possesses an authority over life and death that human beings do not possess. The problem is that, in this passage, it is not merely God who takes life: God allegedly commands human beings to kill children and infants, and their obedience is presented as a moral obligation.
This distinction is fundamental. If God were simply taking a life Himself, we would be discussing God's authority over His creation. However, in this passage, human beings are instructed to perform an action that would ordinarily be morally evil, and their failure to obey that instruction is itself treated as wrongdoing. The moral status of the human agents' actions therefore becomes unavoidable.
1. The Fundamental Dilemma: Either Divine Command Theory Is True, or God Commands Evil
The first problem is that the Bible ordinarily condemns murder as a grave moral evil. Within Christianity, sin is understood as contrary to God's goodness and as a departure from the good. Yet, in the account of Amalek, God allegedly commands an act that would otherwise be regarded as a grave sin.
Consider the implications of this command.
If killing the infants was morally good, and the only relevant difference between this instance and other instances of killing innocent children is that God commanded it, then the moral status of the action appears to depend on the divine command itself. The act is no longer morally evil but morally good because God commanded it. Conversely, obeying the command is an act of righteousness, while disobeying it, as Saul did by failing to carry it out completely, becomes moral wrongdoing.
This appears to support Divine Command Theory(DCT) - an action that would ordinarily be morally evil becomes morally good because God commands it, while refusing to perform that action becomes sinful because God has commanded it.
Alternatively, suppose that killing the infants remained morally evil despite God's command. In that case, God would have commanded human beings to commit a grave moral evil. If God is perfectly good, this would contradict His nature and make Him not a perfectly moral being.
Thus, the dilemma is as follows:If killing the infants became morally good solely because God commanded it, then the moral status of the action is determined by the divine command, supporting Divine Command Theory.
If killing the infants remained morally evil despite the command, then God allegedly commanded an action contrary to His own goodness, contradicting the belief that He is perfectly moral.
A Christian cannot simply declare the action good because God commanded it without addressing the first problem. Nor can the Christian acknowledge that the action is intrinsically evil and maintain that God commanded it without addressing the second.
The Claim: Either an intrinsically evil act becomes morally good solely because God commanded it (Divine Command Theory / DCT), or God commanded an intrinsically evil act, violating His morally perfect nature.
The Refutation: This dilemma commits the fallacy of a false dichotomy by misdefining the Christian understanding of "murder" and conflating God's ontological nature with voluntarism.
The Definition of Murder: Scripture does not forbid all killing (harag); the Sixth Commandment specifically forbids ratsach—the unlawful, unauthorized taking of human life (murder). God, as the sole Author and Sustainer of life, possesses universal jurisdiction over life and death. When God executes corporate, judicial capital punishment through designated human agents, that act is an execution of divine judgment, not murder.
Modified Divine Command Theory: Classical Christian philosophy (from Augustine and Aquinas to modern formulations by Robert Adams) rejects voluntarism (the idea that God's arbitrary whim defines morality). God commands in strict alignment with His necessary, immutable, holy, and just nature. Because God owns all human life, delegating the physical execution of judgment does not transform an "evil" act into good; it removes the act entirely from the category of unauthorized killing (murder) and places it into the category of divinely ordained judicial retribution.
2. Murder Is a Grave Sin and Moral Standards Cannot Change Merely Because of Time or Place
The problem becomes even more serious when considered within theology.
Murder is a grave sin. Whether it occurs today or thousands of years ago among the Amalekites does not, by itself, change its moral status. If morality is universal, an intrinsically evil action does not become morally good merely because it occurred in a different historical period or involved a different people.
The passage concerns the Amalekites, but the historical distance does not resolve the philosophical problem. The question is not whether ancient Israel had different customs or whether ancient warfare was particularly brutal. The question is whether a morally perfect God could command an action that is intrinsically contrary to goodness.
If the deliberate killing of innocent infants is a grave moral evil, then its occurrence thousands of years ago does not automatically make it morally permissible. The fact that an action took place within a particular historical context may help explain why it happened, but explaining an action is not the same as morally justifying it.
Therefore, the claim that this was an exceptional event in ancient history does not, by itself, resolve the contradiction. If the act was intrinsically contrary to goodness, the passage's antiquity cannot transform it into goodness.
The Claim: Morality is universal and objective. If killing an infant is intrinsically evil today, historical distance cannot transform it into a morally good action thousands of years ago.
The Refutation: This objection confuses moral ontology (unchanging moral principles grounded in God's nature) with redemptive-historical jurisdiction and situational application.
Jurisdiction vs. Relativism: Objective moral duties depend fundamentally on authorization and moral role. A private citizen executing a convicted criminal in their backyard commits murder, whereas a court-appointed executioner carrying out a lawful judicial sentence does not. The moral law against unauthorized killing has never changed; what changed was the specific, non-repeatable judicial commission given to Israel as a unique, historical theocracy.
Redemptive-Historical Singularity: Israel’s theocratic mandate in the Old Testament functioned as an intrusion of the final eschatological judgment into temporal history. Under the New Covenant, the theocratic nation-state is abolished, and the Church is never commanded or authorized to wage holy war or execute corporate divine judgment. Acknowledging that God does not authorize such warfare today is not moral relativism; it reflects the cessation of a unique redemptive-historical covenant.
3. If God Cannot Lie Because Lying Contradicts His Nature, Why Would Killing Innocent Infants Not Contradict His Nature?
The Bible teaches that God cannot lie. Titus 1:2 describes God as one who cannot lie, while Numbers 23:19 contrasts God with human beings who lie. The traditional Christian understanding is that God cannot lie because lying is contrary to His nature as the God of truth.
This raises an important question: If God cannot lie because lying contradicts His nature, why would the deliberate killing of innocent infants not also contradict His nature if that action is intrinsically contrary to goodness?
The underlying principle is the same. God cannot perform an act contrary to His perfect nature. His inability to lie is not merely the result of an arbitrary prohibition that He has chosen to obey. It is connected to who He is.
But if His nature necessarily excludes lying, and if the deliberate killing of innocent infants is intrinsically evil, then His nature should also exclude commanding such an act as a morally good action.
The issue is not whether God possesses sufficient power to issue the command. It is whether the command is consistent with His perfect goodness.
If God cannot lie because lying contradicts His nature, He cannot simply make a genuinely evil action good by commanding it. Otherwise, goodness would no longer be grounded in His unchanging nature but would instead depend on whatever He happens to command.
That would make the meaning of God's goodness difficult to distinguish from the claim that His will determines what is good, regardless of the moral character of the action itself.
The Claim: If God cannot lie because lying contradicts His nature (Titus 1:2), God likewise cannot command the killing of infants without contradicting His nature.
The Refutation: This argument relies on a false equivalence between lying and taking human life.
Lying Is Intrinsically Anti-God: God is truth itself (ens realissimum). A lie is inherently deceptive, false, and contrary to the ontological reality of who God is. There is no moral agent, authority, or context in all of existence where deception can reflect divine ontological truth.
Life and Death Belong to God's Jurisdiction: Ending human life, by contrast, is not intrinsically contrary to God's nature. God lawfully takes every human life through physical death eventually (Deuteronomy 32:39; 1 Samuel 2:6). God is not subject to human rules of jurisdiction because all life belongs to Him. While a human cannot lawfully take an infant's life on their own authority, God has the absolute moral right to call any soul out of this earthly life at any moment and assign eternal destiny, whether via natural illness, famine, or temporal human instruments.
4. God's Superior Knowledge and Authority Do Not Automatically Resolve the Problem
One response is that God possesses knowledge and authority that human beings do not possess. I agree that God, if He exists as understood in Christianity, possesses knowledge and authority beyond ours.
However, that agreement does not resolve the contradiction.
God has also given human beings moral knowledge through His commandments and revelation. The Bible teaches that murder is wrong, and Christianity understands sin as contrary to the good and to God's nature. Yet the same biblical narrative appears to command human beings to kill infants without explaining why the action is not sinful in this particular instance.
If we are expected to understand that murder is a grave sin, but are then presented with a passage in which God allegedly commands an act that appears to fall under that prohibition, we need an explanation of the moral distinction between the two cases.
It is insufficient to reply that God knows more than we do. Greater knowledge might reveal relevant circumstances, but it does not, by itself, demonstrate that the action was morally justified. An explanation is still required of why the killing was not contrary to goodness.
The question is especially important because the command is directed towards human beings. Saul and his soldiers are not omniscient. They are being instructed to perform an act that would otherwise be regarded as gravely wrong. They are expected to understand that obedience is righteous, even though the text does not provide an explanation of why the act is not sinful.
If the moral distinction depends upon knowledge available only to God, then the question remains: how could the human agents understand the moral status of their actions, and why should obedience to the command be sufficient to establish that killing the infants was good?
Invoking God's superior knowledge identifies a possible response, but it does not supply the missing justification.
5. The Fact That This Command Does Not Justify Killing Innocent People Today Is Irrelevant to the Central Objection
I agree that this passage must not be used to justify the killing of innocent people today. A modern individual cannot simply claim that God has commanded a killing and thereby establish that the action is morally permissible.
However, this does not answer the objection.
The issue is not whether the passage provides a valid justification for killing people today. The issue is whether the action described in the passage was morally good when it allegedly occurred.
If killing innocent infants is intrinsically wrong today, and if morality is universal, then killing innocent infants thousands of years ago is not made morally good merely by the passage of time. If God truly commanded an intrinsically evil act in the past, then the fact that the same act cannot be justified in the present does nothing to resolve the alleged contradiction in God's nature.
The question is not whether Christians are permitted to imitate the action. It is whether God, being perfectly good and incapable of sin, could have commanded it in the first place.
Consequently, agreeing that the passage must not justify contemporary violence does not resolve the moral problem posed by its historical claim.
The Claim: The fact that Christians cannot imitate this command today is irrelevant to the philosophical question of whether the command was morally good when originally issued.
The Refutation: This claim targets a strawman. Classical Christian apologetics does not cite the non-applicability of the command today as its justification for the past.
Proper Covenantal Framing: The distinction between historical theocracy and modern moral application is an explanatory defense against modern misinterpretation, not an evasion of the philosophical core. The command was morally just then because God, as the righteous Judge of all the earth, lawfully pronounced judgment on a predator culture that had ambushed the weak and weary (Deuteronomy 25:17–19) and had persistently threatened the survival of God's covenant people.
It is not justified today precisely because no living human possesses the prophetic authorization, theocratic covenant, or divine mandate to execute such a sentence. The moral logic remains uniform across all eras: only God possesses the authority to decree capital judgment over communities, and finite humans may only execute it when explicitly, infallibly commissioned by Him.
6. How Can There Be Any Justification for a Sin?
A further problem arises from the very concept of sin.
If sin is contrary to God's nature, how can there be any justification for sin? If an action is genuinely sinful because it contradicts God's perfect goodness, then what could justify performing that action without contradicting that goodness?
In the biblical framework, sin is not simply a prohibited action for which a sufficiently persuasive excuse can be found. It is wrongdoing. Although human beings may have mitigating circumstances affecting their culpability, such circumstances do not turn sin itself into moral goodness.
Furthermore, the Bible does not establish a general principle that a person may commit an intrinsically sinful act and escape the moral problem simply because there was a good justification for doing it. A justification may establish that an act was not actually sinful in the circumstances, or that the person's responsibility was diminished, but that is different from establishing that a genuinely sinful act was permissible while remaining sinful.
This distinction returns us to the Amalekite command.
If killing the infants was genuinely sinful, then it cannot be justified as a sin without undermining the very meaning of sin as a departure from goodness. If it was not sinful in this particular instance, then the Christian must explain why it was not sinful and what morally relevant distinction separates it from otherwise comparable killings.
Simply asserting that God commanded it is not an adequate explanation, because that assertion risks making the divine command itself the sole criterion by which the act's moral status is determined.
God cannot sin by His very nature if sin is contrary to His nature. Therefore, if the command requires human beings to commit an act that is genuinely sinful, the command would appear incompatible with God's perfect goodness.
The Claim: Sin is a departure from goodness and contrary to God's nature. If an act is intrinsically sinful, no justification can make it permissible while remaining sinful; therefore, calling the act "justified" is logically incoherent.
The Refutation: This objection commits a category mistake by presuming the conclusion (begging the question).
Execution of Judgment Is Not Sin: The argument defines the physical act of killing under divine command as "sin" beforehand, and then asks how sin can be justified. The Christian claim is not that God provided a "justification for sin"; the claim is that the action was never a sin in the first place.
Actus Reus vs. Moral Essence: An act is defined morally by its authority, intent, and covenantal context, not merely by the physical movement of a blade. A judge sentencing a guilty murderer to capital punishment is not "committing a justified sin of murder"; the judge is executing lawful justice. Because 1 Samuel 15 is the execution of a divine judicial decree against an unrepentant, hostile nation, the physical killing of Amalekites was an act of covenantal justice, entirely distinct from the category of sin.
7. The Conclusion: God's Perfect Goodness Cannot Be Reconciled With an Intrinsically Evil Command Merely by Appealing to His Authority
My objection can ultimately be stated in the following way:
- Christianity teaches that God is perfectly good and cannot sin because sin is contrary to His nature.
- God cannot lie because lying contradicts His nature as the God of truth.
- Murder is a grave sin, and the deliberate killing of innocent infants appears to be an instance of grave moral wrongdoing.
- Whether such an act occurs today or thousands of years ago does not, merely by virtue of the historical period, change its intrinsic moral status.
- In 1 Samuel 15, God allegedly commands human beings to kill the Amalekites, explicitly including infants, and Saul is condemned for failing to carry out the command completely.
- Therefore, the passage appears to present an act that is ordinarily regarded as gravely evil as an act of obedience to God, with disobedience itself becoming sinful.
- If the killing became morally good solely because God commanded it, then the moral status of the action appears to depend upon the divine command, supporting Divine Command Theory.
- If the killing remained intrinsically evil despite the command, then God allegedly commanded human beings to perform an act contrary to His perfect goodness.
- An appeal to God's authority, superior knowledge, or the historical circumstances does not, by itself, establish that the act was consistent with His nature.
- Nor does the fact that the passage must not justify killing innocent people today resolve whether the killing was morally justified in the original account.
The Claim: Appealing to God's authority fails because either the divine command turns evil into good, or God commanded an intrinsically evil act.
The Refutation: The syllogism collapses because Premises 3, 6, 7, and 8 depend on a faulty definition of "intrinsic evil":
Physical death is not an intrinsic moral evil; it is a physical event under the total, sovereign authority of the Creator.
Murder (ratsach) is an intrinsic moral evil because it represents the unlawful, unauthorized taking of human life by an unauthorized agent.
Because God has absolute moral right over all life, a divinely mandated execution of judgment cannot be categorized as murder.
Consequently, God never commanded an "intrinsically evil act," nor does moral truth rest on arbitrary whim. God acted in accordance with His absolute justice, holding nations accountable for their generational atrocities, while preserving the physical line through which redemption would enter the world.
Conclusion
When stripped of rhetorical framing, the argument fails because it forces an unbiblical conflation between the execution of lawful divine judgment and the moral evil of murder. A judge who authorizes capital punishment is not "justifying murder"; they are enforcing justice through a recognized jurisdictional role. Because God possesses sole, ultimate authority over human existence, delegating the physical execution of corporate covenantal judgment does not transform an evil act into good—it means the act was never an unauthorized killing in the first place.
Far from supporting an arbitrary voluntarism, the narrative reflects an immutable God enacting temporal judgment against generational atrocities while securing the covenant lineage necessary for future redemption. The syllogism breaks down because taking life under infallible, divinely revealed authority is distinct in category, intent, and jurisdiction from the sin of murder.
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