The Problem of Evil - Common Sense Atheism

150 The Hiddenness of God
intellectually, emotionally, or spiritually inferior to men’’? If God had
done any of these things, he’d have vastly changed the course of human
history. There would have been no sexism, no male domination, no
clitoral circumcision, no prostitution, no sexual slavery, no foot-binding
or purdah or suttee. So why hasn’t God ‘‘provided us with more
evidence’’? Part of the answer, I think, is that he has already given us all
the evidence we need or should ever have needed to be convinced—to
know—that women are not the intellectual, emotional, or spiritual
inferiors of men. And this is, simply, the evidence that is provided
by normal human social interaction. Another part of the answer is
that it would be useless for him to do this if his purpose were a real
transformation of the attitude of fallen male humanity toward women.
The best that such ‘‘external’’ evidence could produce would be a sort of
sullen compliance with someone else’s opinion—even if that ‘‘someone
else’’ were God. (If you doubt this, consider how a present-day radical
feminist would be likely to respond if it suddenly came to pass that
male babies began to be born with scientifically inexplicable birthmarks
that spelled out ‘‘The superior sex’’ and female babies began to be
born with scientifically inexplicable birthmarks that spelled out ‘‘The
inferior sex’’.) What is really needed to eliminate sexism is not sullen
compliance forced on one by evidence that has no natural connection
with life in the human social world. What is needed is natural conviction
that proceeds from our normal cognitive apparatus operating on the
normal data of the senses. Sexism will be really eliminated (as opposed
to repressed) only when everyone, using his normal cognitive capacities,
applying them to the data of everyday social interaction, believes in the
intellectual, emotional, and spiritual equality of the sexes in the same
way in which everyone now believes in the equality of the auditory
and visual capacities of the sexes. And might it not be that miraculous
evidence for the equality of the sexes would actually interfere with our
capacity to come to a belief in the equality of the sexes in the right
way? If most men at most times (and perhaps most women, too) have
believed that men were superior to women—and they have—they have
managed to do this in a world in which they were positively swimming
in evidence to the contrary. Something, therefore, must have been
wrong with their ability to process the data of everyday experience. They
must have been epistemically defective (and not innocently so like the
natural philosophers who believed that heavy bodies fell faster than light
ones, 14 but culpably epistemically defective, like Holocaust deniers).
Might it not be that external, miraculous evidence for the equality of