This is the best “case” for God I’ve read on Medium, and I’m arguably an atheist. It’s concise and well-constructed, and your “economy” of ideas reminds me of what I know of Spinoza. Also, I hadn’t seen any of your work for a while, and was a little worried about you, and can imagine a piece like this could take a lot of work to write.

While your piece doesn’t overcome all my doubts about God, to me it shoots down the arguments for atheism based on “if God exists, why is there evil?” and I’m excited to see that done so well, leaving no serious basis for any such argument.

For anyone still holding on to the position you argue against, I’d add that evil is a human emotional construct—we call what horrifies us evil because of how it affects us emotionally. We think we experience evil, but really, we are labeling our experiences, and at root the label “evil” just means we don’t like it. Evil is associated with causing death, and we are genetically programmed to hate and fear the thought of dying. To me, that’s basically the end of the discussion. I don’t see any real conflict between my idea of evil and yours.

A summary of your view might be: (1) an essence of God is Love, (2) one expression of that is to have given us the choice to discover Love, (3) God must hide for Love to be a discovery, (4) to turn away from Love brings Evil. My one serious doubt is about the “Love is our avenue to God” part threading through points 1 & 2, because it arrives “poof!” out of nowhere to me. On the other hand, for me it’s a thought worth further consideration having read your piece.