Mark asked:

Is it still possible to believe in God after the Holocaust?

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Certainly it is — plenty of people do, so as a matter of fact, it must be possible. But your question is a
particular example of a broader philosophical question: is it reasonable or rational to still believe in
god in the face of evil in the world? In other word, does the Argument from Evil prove that god doesn't
exist. In my view, it does work to rule out a god with certain characteristics — omniscience (knowing
everything), omnipotence (all-powerful) and all good. See my answer to Robb Answers 13.

Tim Sprod

Yes, of course it is. Millions of people do.

Your question is an expression of the so-called 'Problem of Evil' — basically, the thought that if there
is a good God up there controlling things, why does he allow good people to get hurt? You can read
more about the way different religions have addressed this problem at:

" www.comparativereligion.com/evil.html"

Katharine Hunt

It is possibleto believe that the Earth is flat. The evidence for this is that there are persons (one of
them was a student of mine, but that's another story) who do believe that the Earth is flat. However,
when someone asks the question, 'Isit possible to believe the Earth is flat?' what they mean is, In
view of the evidence, is it possible to rationally defendthe view that the Earth is flat. The answer to
this is, No, it is not possible to rationally defend the view that the Earth is flat. The same holds for the
question about the existence of God. What the questioner is asking is, Is the evidence of the
Holocaust sufficient to show that it is not possible to rationally defend belief in the existence of God?

Geoffrey Klempner

"The real question is, can one speak of an absolute commandment after Auschwitz? Can we speak of
morality after the failure of morality?"

Emmanuel Levinas The Paradox of Morality

The question of the Holocaust has been troubling me recently. By way of trying to answer your
question let me give an account of the thinking of one of the most important philosophers to think
what the Holocaust means: Emmanuel Levinas.

Levinas begins with a consideration of another philosopher: Heidegger. Heidegger was concerned
throughout his philosophy with the question of the meaning of Being, Being as it is, with what it
means TO BE. Levinas, however saw this priority to Ontology as unethical and leading to violence. In
fact Levinas saw Heidegger as the culmination of a philosophy (a philosophy that defines itself with
the quest TO KNOW, to seek the Truth) that was directly responsible for the conditions that gave rise
to the "trauma" of the Holocaust. A philosophy concerned with Being and the comprehension of being
would see ethics as one more way to comprehend that being. People would be just one thing among
the things in the world. The comprehension of being would lead to the loss of subjectivity. It would be
the beginnings of the dehumanisation of people. Even if we built ethical considerations into our
philosophy as a necessary feature. e.g. a respect for being in all its forms, this respect is at the
service of and suppliant to the comprehension of being and so Levinas sees it as insufficiently
respectful and always containing the potential for violence. Philosophy then in Levinas's view was not
only helpless to prevent the Holocaust but may have even underwritten and partially caused it.

"This is the century that in thirty years has known two world wars, the totalitarianisms of the right and
left, Hitlerism and Stalinism, Hiroshima, the Gulag, and the genocides of Auschwitz and Cambodia.
This is a century that is drawing to a close in the obsessive fear of the return of everything these
barbaric names stood for: suffering and evil inflicted deliberately, but in a manner no reason has set
limits to, in the exasperation of a reason became political and detached from all ethics.

Among these events the Holocaust of the Jewish people under the reign of Hitler seems to me to be
the paradigm of gratuitous human suffering, in which evil appears in its diabolical horror. This is
perhaps not a subjective feeling. The disproportion between suffering and every theodicy was shown
at Auschwitz with a glaring obvious clarity ... Did not Nietzsche's saying about the death of God take
on in the extermination camps, the meaning of a quasi-empirical fact?"

Levinas "Useless Suffering" in Entre Nous thinking-of-the-other

If Levinas is right we need urgently to ask: How is it possible to think through and after the Holocaust?
What philosophy can be done after Shoah?

Can we even then think of the Holocaust? What can we say? What was the Shoah? Was it just
another event in history, or was it unique "something we must not forget". To even think about it in
these terms would seem to be a return to the philosophical thinking that Levinas thinks caused the
issue, it is to treat the Holocaust as part of Being: something to be understood, something that has
meaning, yet in the quote above Levinas tells us it was completely devoid of meaning, of significance.
It was useless, so we cannot 'think' think about it. And yet not to think about it seems somehow to
avoid our responsibility to the other, when we think about the Holocaust we need to think differently:
thinking-of-the-Other; thinking ethically. Levinas as we have seen before says we need to give priority
to ethics rather than ontology or epistemology, to recognise the Good as more important than and
sovereign over the search for knowledge.

This also applies to God. God as conceived by the philosophical/ theistic tradition is understood as
the supreme Being, who does stuff (creates and takes part in the history of the world) and as
possessing certain qualities (all powerful, loving). And yet at the Holocaust God let the Nazis do what
they wanted. Attempts to reconcile these two facts are called 'theodicies' our attempts to make
meaningful and bearable human suffering. Explanations that have been given include ones in terms
of Gods will, or divine punishment or a test of faith. (You can get background to the problem of evil by
doing a search of the PhiloSophos Knowledge Base.)

However, the sheer excessiveness of evil during the period of the Holocaust seems to stop us in our
tracks. The Holocaust is the end of theodicy. The suffering here exceeds any and every attempts to
make it meaningful. Levinas suggests therefore that we need to think about God outside of the realm
of ontology and faith. We need a different kind of thinking about God after the Holocaust One that
does not privilege the traditional philosophical concepts. Levinas argues this is an ethical thinking,
where I exist for the other. Then God is conceived in ethical terms through the face of the person
suffering (for Levinas ethics occurs strictly between two people talking to each other). After the
Holocaust we can no longer talk of God as acting in the world but must rather place God beyond
Being, what's left in the world is the 'Trace of God', God as never having been present in the world.
This trace is tied up with Levinas's theory of time, which is another question.

The point is that the Holocaust is the greatest challenge to philosophy. If we agree with Levinas it
forces us to rethink entirely what it means to exist, what belief in God amounts to.

I realise this is no answer to your question. At most it is the first formulation the real problem you have
hit on. At the worse, it is just my ramblings. Either way, I hope what I have pointed towards is useful.

Brian Tee