Some
of us may still remember when in 1982, the courts
of Indiana allowed a mother and father to let their
baby boy
die from
starvation because he was born with Down's Syndrome.
As a result, some
babies died because
of unsterile water, bottles and nipples, and many others simply
died of starvation, while parents looked on helplessly.
Hasker's third proposition is that for the problem
of divine non-intervention to be a real problem, «we must be able to identify specific kinds
of cases in which God morally ought to intervene but does not» Many critics
of (traditional) theism probably already have a more or less vague list
of such cases, which might include genocidal events, such as the Nazi holocaust and the Rwandan massacre; wars; large - scale natural disasters; conditions
of chronic poverty, in which millions
of children
die from
starvation or are permanently stunted because
of inadequate protein; the sexual molestation
of children, which often leaves them psychologically scarred for the rest
of their lives; death preceded by long, painful illnesses, such as cancer or AIDS, or by mind - destroying conditions, such as Alzheimer's disease; and the kinds
of events described by Dostoyevski, such as the soldier using his pistol to get a mother's
baby to giggle with delight and then blowing its brains out.