Omnipotence?

or ‘Can God be all-powerful?’

I sometimes forget what I write and publish - and where. This is the ‘most public’ of my ‘publications’ - it’s advertised to all my Facebook friends, and is accessible to anyone on Substack who knows the link and cares to look. I do write other stuff, and sometimes ‘publish’ it in other places where the audience is more restricted, or at least smaller. And then, being the fallible human that I am I forget, invariably, what I’ve published where!

This is one of those moments. I could have sworn that I had written, somewhere within the virtual pages of this Substack, a piece regarding my recent struggle to believe - occasioned, largely, by my struggles with theodicy (by which I mean the problem of how a good, and loving, God creates and sustains a world containing so much suffering which (in the short term at least) They appear to do nothing to alleviate); but I can’t find it, so here goes - with sincere apologies to anyone who’s already read some version of this!

A sort of ‘TL:DR’ summary of my current position: it has become increasingly difficult for me to believe in the God espoused by (a large part of?) the christian church: namely a God who is at one and the same time perfect love, perfectly good, and all-powerful. My problem is that this God does not step in to end evil and suffering forthwith. There is, of course, the argument of ultimate good (contained within a belief in Αποκατάστασις πάντων (apokatastasis panton - the final restoration of all): that in the end, in the words of the medieval anchoress Julian of Norwich:

“All shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.”

But that doesn’t really answer the problem of evil and suffering in the ‘here and now’. Future ‘hope’ can seem very distant and scant comfort at times when this life is proving to be irredeemably miserable.

The argument I end up circling around goes roughly like this: if God is perfect love, ultimate good, and all-powerful, how can evil and suffering continue to exist? Surely a god who was all those things would ‘snuff out’ all suffering in an instant - if indeed that god created a world in which suffering was possible in the first place. One is left with the bitter possibility that, given that we live in a world in which suffering is undeniable (indeed practically universal), at most two out of those three ‘attributes’ can be true at the same time…

Take your pick.

Personally, if forced to choose, I would pick ‘all-powerful’ as the attribute it is least unpalatable to discard. That would mean accepting that God would like to eliminate suffering, because They are good and by Their very nature love all Their creatures, but (for some reason unknown to puny humans) They simply can’t step in and stop their suffering. That, it has to be said, is not particularly satisfying: we end up in a position not unlike that of the eighteenth century deists - whose belief was in a God Who was not directly involved in Their creation. That, for me, is only one short step away from atheism - and induces in me a feeling of ‘why bother?’ - why worship a God who is too weak (or can’t be bothered, or something) to be involved with Their creation?

At this point, almost the only thing sustaining my belief is the knowledge that God chose to become involved within creation - in the form of Jesus Christ, who came and dwelt among us, as one of us. Jesus truly was Immanuel - God with us. He not only lived among us, He died as one of (the worst of) us; and then He rose again. That is what keeps me going. That is virtually the sole remaining thing maintaining my belief in an omnibenevolent creator.

I am still somewhat ‘uncomfortable’ about ‘ditching’ the notion of God being all-powerful (at least in the way I’ve always understood it), but right now it seems to be the ‘least worst’ position when it comes to explaining the persistence of evil and suffering in our world.

This belief in a God who ‘can’t’ flies in the face of what the churches I have belonged to for most of my christian life believe: namely that God is ‘involved’ directly (via the Holy Spirit) in the world and in Their creatures’ lives (or at least in the lives of those who acknowledge Them as Lord); that God performs miracles, small (like finding us a parking space at the supermarket on Christmas Eve) and large (curing our friend’s inoperable brain tumour). We humans are very poor at judging between ‘cause and effect’ and ‘coincidence’, and we are suckers for having our biases confirmed… Pray for a parking space, and find one, and it’s a miracle (except that it’s probably just coincidence - drive around a carpark and the chances are a space will be, or will become, free - that’s how carparks work!). Actually, given that God hasn’t stepped in and cured my friend’s inoperable brain tumour, it’s pretty arrogant to assume that They love me so much more than him that They to step in to ‘reserve’ me a parking space!

Actually, the harder I look for ‘evidence’ of miracles, the less evidence (of God’s direct involvement) I see. Oddly, the harder I look the more I see the hand of humanity ‘obeying’ Jesus’ ‘second greatest’ commandment:

You shall love your neighbour as yourself. Matthew 22:39

I think too, that we fail to ascribe to God’s provision much that perhaps we ought - such as the miracles of modern medicine (including the cure of my atrial flutter and atrial fibrillation some years ago, and more recently, the cure for my hyperthyroidism). These ‘miracles’ remind me of words attributed to St. Teresa of Ávila (which I am, perhaps, overly fond of quoting):

Christ has no body but yours,

No hands, no feet on earth but yours,

Yours are the eyes with which he looks

Compassion on this world,

Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,

Yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world.

Yours are the hands, yours are the feet,

Yours are the eyes, you are his body.

Christ has no body now but yours,

No hands, no feet on earth but yours,

Yours are the eyes with which he looks

compassion on this world.

Christ has no body now on earth but yours.

I think that, with regard to the problem of evil and suffering, I need to learn to be grateful for the miracles of modern medicine and to be patient, to accept that I cannot truly understand God - acknowledging the words of Augustine:

“Si comprehendus, non est Deus” (‘If I understand it, it is not god’)

and to accept that there is a great mystery here. At the heart of the mystery though, is a God whose very nature is love. It is that Love in which I must learn to trust.