It is the most important historical statistic that remains almost entirely unknown. Like nothing else, this terrible fact guts the moral claims of those speculators who proclaim to honorably worship a noble and righteous creator/power. It has untapped potential to accelerate the already rapid decline of the illusion that is theism. It is a figure that should have been calculated and published long ago, but it first appeared only in 2009 in the journal Philosophy and Theology (P&T).¹ And even since, it has gone largely ignored, even among atheists.

Here’s a figure that a fair number do know: To date, around 100 billion Homo sapiens have been born, with estimates ranging from 80-150 billion (of which half were born before that alleged Jesus fellow). A while back, it hit me that a lot of those humans would have died in childhood due to natural causes: to be specific, about half of them. Oddly, I had to think that up on my own; the horrific fact that 40–70 billion people have died as kids had strangely never been calculated and published anywhere. (If you know otherwise, please send in a letter to the editor with references.) So, as far as I know, I was the first to explain the fact in the aforementioned Philosophy and Theology paper. I further detailed how nearly all of this “Holocaust of the Innocents” has been due to the vast numbers of cruelly torturous diseases that infest the child-toxic planet on which the creator—if any such being exists—saw fit to stick us with one way or another. But the full toll is even more colossal. The human reproductive system is so inefficient and dysfunctional that three-quarters of pregnancies fail. So the number of the preborn who have died is in the hundreds of billions. Fortunately few preborn have been aware of their existence before their premature deaths.

Please note that the numbers of immature humans deliberately dispatched by adults is merely a small fraction of the natural toll. Note also: while there is not the slightest evidence any deity has lifted a divine finger to aid the kids, we humans have used modern medicine to save a few billion children.

Those theists who fantasize that learned theologians have wielded wisely crafted theodicies to explain how a loving, moral god could oversee a planet that manages to knock off most humans in their youth are either ignorant or lying. In the P&T paper, I showed that neither scripture nor the theodistic literature has come close to acknowledging the mass death of children, much less how incompatible that is with the idea of a benign creator. But wait, I just discovered that is not precisely true. In 1861, a minister gave a sermon in which he acknowledged how countless kids had died.² (Again, if you know of others, please send in that letter to the editor.) In particular, the most widely deployed apologetic strategy for why a perfect being created such an extremely imperfect planet—called free will theodicy—is entirely wrecked by the cold hard fact that most humans have had their free will aborted before they could grow up to use it.

Having managed to get this entirely original and groundbreaking data and analysis published in a mainstream religious academic journal—and having sent PDF copies to leading theologians and a succinct press release to religion reporters—I expected that my finding would soon become an item of global discussion. My previous statistical work on the societal advantages of atheism had garnered international news coverage that has helped to damage the popularity of theism.

I was young and naive.

No attention was paid to how 50 billion children died. No opinion magazine would touch it. Attempts to interest a major publisher in doing a book on it got nowhere. Of course, the theists, terrified by what would happen if their flocks learned the terrible truth, have ignored it. Even the secular community paid it perturbingly little mind, which makes no sense.

Hoping at long last to bring due attention to the (still shockingly nearly unknown) Holocaust of the Children, I have published a two-parter on the subject in the secular academic journal Essays in the Philosophy of Humanism (EPH).³ (It includes updated statistics and analysis.) The paper shows that whatever mode of creation a mythical god is supposed to have used—from recent biblical creation to intelligent design that requires God to carefully craft killer microbes, letting life evolve law-of-the-jungle style—the creator is a terrorist who committed mass juvenile homicide and stands guilty of the greatest crime against humanity. That’s true whatever happens to the souls of prematurely deceased humans. It doesn’t matter whether they’re sent to Hell because they did not seek the grace of Christ or to a more pleasant Limbo or even given a free ticket to Heaven. However you imagine eternity, the Holocaust of the Children torpedoes the core Christian premise that God wants to spend eternity with only those who chose to worship him for eternity. After all, if that is not true, why did the cosmic-nitwit deity not just put everyone in his paradise without subjecting us to earthly travails? The EPH analysis also adds an extensive look at another horror—the vast natural suffering of animals and the biologically incompetent, often callous, and sometimes bizarre efforts of theodicists to explain that all away (some of the issues are covered in my Feb/March 2018 and June/July 2018 FI op-eds).

Having eliminated the possibility of a nonevil creator, part two of my EPH paper gets to a core truth: Far from supernatural faith being moral, honorable, noble, and altruistic, the billions who praise and worship a child-liquidating and animal-abusing god in their search for boons earthly and beyond are being self-aggrandizing, immoral narcissists and exhibiting serious moral depravity. Not to mince words, the religious are not good people because they are pious but despite it. For practical proof of that, consider only how today’s least-religious democracies also tend to be the best off, socioeconomically speaking.

I have worked to publicize my EPH analysis, so far with familiar results. The Religion News Service actually rejected my press release. Theologians cynically continue pushing free will theodicy even though I have told them about the mass death of young innocents.

If it had long been known that many billions of children have died, then theism might not have become as popular as it has. And if the terrible truth of some 50 billion dead youths becomes a normal part of global discourse, it has the potential to do great damage to supernaturalistic faith. So, if you find yourself debating a theist, formally or personally, you can always drop in his or her lap how their allegedly righteous and virtuous god is responsible for the deaths of tens of billions of children and many times more among the preborn, to say nothing of the vast natural suffering of animals. It is not likely to make an instant atheist out of your opponent, but it should place them in a very bad moral spot. If your opponent says theologians have solved the problem, firmly request who and when and what they said, and watch your antagonist squirm. Who knows? Over time that might succeed in weakening their theism.

But just getting the word out is not enough. Atheists, humanists, and other secular people need to go on the ethical offensive and strip theists of their arrogant pretense of high morality by means of a strategy I call “The Demand.” Begin with the obligation of theists to finally directly address the death of so many of the young. Demand that they offer compelling arguments to explain how the deaths of so many children, and the natural suffering of animals, are compatible with the idea of a creator with any decency. No more illogical excuses! As an alternative, theists could finally admit that it is not possible for a creator to be wise and good and that venerating a mass child murderer and animal abuser is not ethical and does not provide sound guidance for running societies. And that it is patently absurd to proclaim that God is “pro-life.”

Even though 15,000 children currently die each day, theists continue to effusively thank and celebrate a creator. That’s depraved. So, let’s pressure believers to do the honorable, altruistic thing of demanding that their god at long last put a stop to it. Will they do it? Best not to hold one’s breath. One reason theists won’t try to push God to save the children is because deep down, many of them already know there is no such entity. But try that line on theists when they say positive things about their god delusion. The demand that theists finally own up to their corrupt waving away of the mass deaths of children will put them on the moral defensive perpetually—or at least as long as religion lasts.

Notes

1. Paul, G. S. (2007/9). Theodicy’s problem: A statistical look at the holocaust of the children, and the implications of natural evil for the Free Will and Best of All Possible Worlds hypotheses. Philosophy and Theology19: 125-149.
2. Spurgeon, C. H. (1861). Infant Mortality. Answers in Genesis, https://answersingenesis.org/education/spurgeon-sermons/411-infant-salvation.
3. The Deplorable God Scandal and the Divine Lost Cause (2020) Part 1. How the Megadisasters of the Innocents Disprove the Existence of a Benign and Moral Creator, a Decency and Science-Based Analysis. Essays in the Philosophy of Humanism 28: 5, https://americanhumanist.org/what-we-do/publications/eph/journals/volume28/paul-1. (2021) Part 2. How the Megadisasters of the Innocents Disprove the Moral Status of Religious Worshippers, a Decency and Science-Based Analysis.

Image credit: zwiebackesser – Adobe Stock