John Rawls on religious belief
The political philsopher John Rawls, author of the very highly regarded A Theory of Justice, seems to have been a devote Lutheran in his youth. When he was a soldier in World War II, though, he lost his faith. Recently a paper he wrote when he was an old man and near death (aged 76) has been published. Its title is "On My Religion." In this paper he says the following:
How could I pray and ask God to help me, or my family, or my country, or any other cherished thing I cared about, when God would not save millions of Jews from Hitler?
To interpret history as expressing God’s will, God’s will must accord with the most basic ideas of justice as we know them. For what else can the most basic justice be? Thus I soon came to reject the idea of the supremacy of the divine as... hideous and evil.
The paper is discussed in an article in the New York Review of Books. The author of the article (Kwame Anthony Appiah) concludes, "I know there are paths around this conclusion. But I confess I find something bracing in Rawls’s straightforward refusal to take them."