God willfully called falsehood into existence and deliberately
involved us in unnecessary error. It follows once again that God cannot
be benevolent.

"If we regard pain and evil as due to the wickedness of man and not as
the creation of God, we are constrained to remember that man himself is
one of God's creations (God being conceived as all creative), and
received his wickedness, or his capacity for it, from whom? If we say
that man had no wickedness to begin with but willfully generated
wickedness for himself, we have to face the double difficulty of
accounting for: (a) How man, who is an emanation from God, can will with
a will of his own which is not also a piece of God's will; and (b) how a
benevolent God could, assuming pain and evil to be a purely human
creation, deliberately allow them to be introduced into a world that
knew them not, when it was open to Him to prevent such introductions."
(_C. E. M. Joad, "Mind and Matter."_)

He had seen that crime and immorality exist now, just as they had
existed before the belief in one personal God, and just as they promise
to exist beyond our time. He had scrutinized evidence revealing the
incontestable fact that most criminals were religious, and absolutely
and proportionately, a smaller number of criminals were non-believers in
a personal deity. Judging by these alone, a belief in a benevolent,
loving, omniscient, omnipotent, and compassionate Being could not be
sustained. Furthermore, if such a God ever existed, he certainly would
have revealed his true religion to the first man, Adam. If he required
prayer to satisfy his vanity, he surely would have told Adam how, when,
why, and where to pray. Then again, once having neglected to inform his
first model about all this, since He is omnipotent, he would certainly
have instilled into the minds of men "the" true creed so that no doubt
could have ever entered into any one's mind. What a universe of
suffering He would have saved!

The Martian is aware that a great number of earthlings hold that every
event must have a cause, therefore the Universe must have had a cause,
which cause was God. Everything as it now exists in the universe is the
result of an infinite series of causes and effects. Everything that
happens is the result of something else that happened previously and so
on backwards to all eternity. Applying this reasoning that everything is
the effect of some cause, and that a cause is the effect of some other