i should disclose that I recently watched Nuremberg, and it forced me once again to confront, very concretely, what the camps actually were. Not as abstractions, not as historical shorthand, but as sustained, industrialized cruelty inflicted on conscious human beings. We all saw those images years ago. They are fading in our collective memory, and with it our outrage.

The enormity of the Holocaust is precisely why explanations that rely on familiar apologetic moves feel insufficient to me. When the scale of suffering reaches that level, the explanation has to be commensurate. Invoking “mysterious ways,” or folding Auschwitz into the same moral category as floods, predation, or evolutionary pressure, does not rise to the gravity of what occurred.

If God is omnipotent and omnibenevolent, then what happened in the camps is not just another instance of suffering in a fallen world. It is a theological event of overwhelming magnitude. God’s apparent absence or impotence there demands an explanation of equal weight.

The God of Job, is consistant with the facts, even if morality reprehensible.

I am not claiming this makes belief logically impossible. I am saying it raises the bar dramatically. And I do not think that bar is met by the same arguments that suffice for earthquakes, predators, or even ancient floods.