War & Peace Quote by George C. Williams

Job doesn’t come off here as a saint; he comes off as a realist. George C. Williams strips the Book of Job of its usual moral varnish and reframes it as a raw power dynamic: obedience not as reverence, but as strategy. In Williams’s telling, Job’s restraint isn’t evidence of God’s goodness, or even of Job’s exemplary faith. It’s the grim logic of asymmetry. When the opponent is omnipotent, “rebellion” stops being a noble option and becomes a category error, like suing gravity.

That reading lands with particular force coming from a scientist who spent his career puncturing comforting stories in biology. Williams was famous for arguing that nature isn’t benevolent; it’s indifferent, driven by selection rather than purpose. He applies a similar skepticism to theology: don’t smuggle in ethics when the text is also about force. The line “or anything like that” is doing work, dismissing centuries of attempts to rescue God’s reputation through wisdom, justice, or hidden plan.

The subtext is almost anthropological: human piety may be less a response to the divine’s moral character than to the sheer scale of its leverage. Job’s famous refusal to “curse God and die” becomes less a triumph of virtue than a refusal to waste breath. Williams is not trying to make Job smaller; he’s trying to make the reader less naive about why submission happens, in scripture and in life. Power doesn’t need to be good to be obeyed.