The Goodness of God and the Power of God: Part 1

Christians (and indeed, traditional theists of various stripes--including traditional Jews and Muslims) are faced with an issue: if God is all powerful, and God is all-good, why does He tolerate evil in the world?

I cannot presume to solve this riddle in a mere blog, nor can I hope to state something original that no one has ever considered.  This is an old, old theological conundrum, and strong believers have come to differing conclusions on this matter.

Perhaps there is no fully coherent answer to this question; though it's clear that some answers are less coherent than others.  At some level, any attempts to answer the question tend to qualify one or more of the statements.  For example:

• "All powerful" doesn't mean what you might think it means
• "All good" doesn't mean the same thing as what you might think it does
• "Tolerating evil" isn't exactly what is happening

Some atheists or deists will say we're trying to square the circle with our explanations, that we should just admit that at least one of these assertions (if not all three) are false.

But the Bible (and the Quran, for that matter) makes statements that support all three assertions, and if we believe that God has spoken to us, then we should try to address it while doing justice to all three propositions.

To begin with, what does it mean to be "all powerful"?  Well, at an absolute bear minimum, it should mean that God is able to do more than the most powerful human.  If a human being can reach the moon, for example, it would be foolish to claim that God cannot.  If human beings can organize violence against evil doers to defeat Hitler (nod to Godwin), then it would be folly to claim that God was too weak to defeat Hitler.

When you assert that God is Creator of all that is, seen and unseen, this minimal standard needs to be magnified by near-infinite orders of magnitude.  If God can create life, create human beings, form the nuclear furnaces of stars at His command, breathe and have galaxies appear--well then, that's a pretty high standard of power, one that humans never can conceivably achieve.  (Maybe a few things that impress us around the edges--make nuclear weapons, send probes to distant planets, defeat age-old diseases--but in the vast scheme of things, our accomplishments on this pale blue dot are less than dust.)

Some have tried to assert that God isn't all-powerful, rather, He is "Omni-competent", not Omnipotent.   Some open theists, for example, are fond of this term.  God can't do impossible things, like make a square circle or make something both exist and not exist at the same time.

However, this "Omni-competence" really doesn't get God "off the hook" as it were.  Even if you assume that God cannot know future events (a dubious position if one accepts the Bible), once they happen, the open theist will acknowledge that God is not ignorant of current events.  So, let's say God didn't know Hitler was to arise and cause such evil.  Fine, absolve Him from creating a monster because He didn't know he would be a monster.  But the fact remains that Hitler lived for many years and did much evil, and yet God did not strike him down.  An open theist did not address why it took several years to do so.  Did he need the Soviets and allies to defeat Hitler?  Or could He have done it Himself?

Saying God could not have defeated Hitler is patently ridiculous.  Even a good old-fashioned pagan god had some pretty cool powers, and a god who couldn't defeat a mere mortal is a pretty lousy god.  Heck, he's not even a good superhero.

So others will say well, stop for a moment--maybe God is powerful, but he's opposed by other powerful forces--an anti-god, or a different version of the devil.  The faith of Zarathushtrianism traditionally held such a view, known as cosmic dualism.  God is pretty awesome, Creating all good things like the sun, humans, and dogs (one reason to really like this religion--dogs have a prominent place), but the evil spirit also creates and is also powerful--he made stuff like disease, darkness, and certain harmful animals.  The cosmos is a battlefield on which these forces fight, and we need to chose which one to follow: light or darkness, good or evil.

Much as I admire Zoroastrianism, it is not a theistic system and is antithetical to the Bible.  Isaiah ironically addresses one of the most admired non-Jews in the Bible, Cyrus, with these words:

5  xI am the Lord, and there is no other,

besides me there is no God;

yI equip you, though you do not know me,

6  zthat people may know, from the rising of the sun

and from the west, that there is none besides me;

I am the Lord, and there is no other.

7  I form light and create darkness,

I make well-being and acreate calamity,

I am the Lord, who does all these things. --Isaiah 45:5-7

I don't think this was an unintentional slight on Cyrus' Zoroastrian faith.

In the end, I don't think dualism is viable, nor does the universe as it is bears out that there are two opposing forces duking it out.  Rather, things like disease and death seem wholly baked in to the cosmos as it is today--life cannot exist apart from death, disease is just another name for a creature feeding off another to survive and reproduce.

So...briefly, I think it's safe to claim that the God of the theists is all-powerful, and could stop evil if He wanted to.  But, looking around us, He doesn't.  So we have to look at the other two components of the dilemma.  And I'll address these issues in future blogs.