GOD Essays on Religion he took a remarkably dispassionate look at the arguments for and against the existence of God, and at the positive and negative effects of religious belief While dismissing the ontological and causal arguments for God’s existence, Mill took seriously the argument from design, the only one based upon experience ‘In the present state of our knowledge’, he wrote, ‘the adaptations in Nature afford a large balance of probability in favour of creation by intelligence.’ He did not, however, regard the evidence as rendering even probable the existence of an omnipotent and benevolent creator An omnipotent being would have no need of the adaptation of means to ends that provides the support of the design argument; and an omnipotent being that permitted the amount of evil we find in the world could not be benevolent Still less can the God of traditional Christianity be so regarded Recalling his father, Mill wrote in his autobiography: Think (he used to say) of a being who would make a Hell—who would create the human race with the infallible foreknowledge, and therefore with the intention, that the great majority of them were to be consigned to horrible and everlasting torment The time, I believe, is drawing near when this dreadful conception of an object of worship will be no longer identified with Christianity; and when all persons, with any sense of moral good and evil, will look upon it with the same indignation with which my father regarded it (A 26) We cannot call any being good, Mill maintained, unless he possesses the attributes that constitute goodness in our fellow creatures—‘and if such a being can sentence me to hell for not so calling him, to hell I will go’ But even if the notion of hell is discarded as mythical, the amount of evil we know to exist in this world is sufficient, Mill believes, to rule out the notion of omnipotent goodness Mill was indeed an optimist in his judgement of the world we live in: ‘all the grand sources’, Mill wrote, ‘of human suffering are in a great degree, many of them almost entirely, conquerable by human care and effort’ (U 266) Nonetheless, the great majority of mankind live in misery, and if this is due largely to human incompetence and lack of goodwill, that itself counts against the idea that we are all under the rule of all-powerful goodness Mill’s essay Theism concludes as follows: These, then, are the net results of natural theology on the question of the divine attributes A being of great but limited power, how or by what limited we cannot 298