Omnipotence

Critically assess the belief that God is omnipotent. (40)

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Omnipotence is a central attribute of the Christian God; as the Nicene Creed affirms

“we believe in One God, the Father, the Almighty…”

Nevertheless, Christians struggle to agree on precisely what it means.  Broadly, there are two approaches to understanding God’s omnipotence.  Classical Theists, including many Roman Catholic scholars, argue that God exists eternally in the sense of being outside time and space and so wholly simple.  By this definition, God’s omnipotence means that he caused everything, even time and space, to exist but it does not necessarily mean that God can act directly in time, such as by performing a miracle in response to prayer.  By contrast, Theistic Personalists reject the timeless-eternal model of God because it makes God too remote for most Christian doctrines and practices to make sense.  If God is wholly simple, how can he also exist in three persons?  If God is beyond time and space, how can he know when He is being worshipped or understand the contents of peoples’ hearts, let alone speak to or appear to people through mystical experiences?  As Nelson Pike observed, the actions of the God of the Bible are “unavoidably tensed”. For Theistic Personalists, including many Protestant Christians, God must be everlasting but within time.  This means that God has the power to act responsively and directly to change aspects of creation, but this comes at the price of making God’s understanding of the world and his actions depend on time and space and events within them, seemingly making him less than supremely powerful.  It is clear, therefore, that both approaches to understanding God’s omnipotence entail God’s power being limited in some way.  Either God’s power to act responsively in time is limited by God’s timeless nature, or God’s power is not supreme because his actions are bounded by time and dependent on events outside of God.  In this way the belief that God is omnipotent is incoherent.

Controversially, Rene Descartes argued that God’s supreme perfection entails omnipotence to the point whereby God could make 2+2=5 if He so wished, suggesting that God can do the logically impossible, such as by creating a stone too heavy for him to lift… and then lifting it anyway.  Descartes wrote, “God could have brought it about … that it was not true that twice four make eight” (Descartes 1984-1991: 2:294).  Nevertheless, even Descartes had to accept that God’s power is limited in the respect that God cannot lie or will his own non-existence.  Tacitly accepting St Anselm’s argument, He wrote to a correspondent “God does not have the faculty of taking away from himself his own existence.”  Later proponents of the Ontological Argument Leibniz and Ross both developed this point, arguing that God exists necessarily in any possible world.  Further, as well as not supporting God’s omnipotence entailing unlimited power, Descartes position suggests that the laws of logic and nature are arbitrary, raising questions about God’s goodness.  As Plato pointed out in Euthyphro and as Bertrand Russell later argued, a God who decides what is good and bad arbitrarily, going on to reward and punish people eternally for jumping or failing to jump through a meaningless moral hoop, is no better than a tyrant and certainly not worthy of worship.  In this way, believing that God’s omnipotence means that he can do the logically impossible is both incompatible with the Christian belief that God is all-good and incompatible with God’s supreme perfection.  This demonstrates that the belief that God is omnipotence is incoherent when defined in this timeless-eternal sense.

St Thomas Aquinas argued that God is eternal in the sense of being wholly simple and outside time.  In this way, God’s creative action must be single, limiting God’s power to what is actually possible, logically possible and compatible with God’s timeless nature.   Much as Descartes later did, Aquinas argued that God could not act in a way that conflicts with his God-like nature, such as by doing what is evil.  For Aquinas, God’s actions are also limited by what is possible in this world, so it is not possible for God to create a square circle or make 2+2=5 within this world. Because his creative act is timeless and so single and simple, God cannot do x and not x in the same timeless act of creation.  Nevertheless, Of course, Thomist scholars like Gerry Hughes SJ have reasoned that God’s omnipotence means that He could have created another world in which different logical rules apply, but only if such a world was consistent with what Richard Swinburne has called the Best Possible World Type. It would not be actually possible (consistent with God’s nature) to create a substandard world, so God’s power to create a world with different logical laws in which 2+2 could =5 depends on that world being equivalent to this in terms of fulfilling God’s purpose for it.  Aquinas’ argument is problematic in this respect.  How could God create more than one world if He is indeed timeless and spaceless?  Multiple acts of creation imply a separation in time and space that is inconsistent with God’s timeless nature, making it not actually possible for God to have created any other world.  In the end, Aquinas’ argument is no better than Descartes when it comes to defending God’s unlimited power.  For both Descartes and Aquinas then, God’s power is significantly constrained by His own nature, making the belief in omnipotence, when understood to mean having timeless-eternally unlimited power, uncoherent. 

Theistic Personalists such as Richard Swinburne and William Lane Craig have sought to make sense of the belief that God is omnipotent by arguing that God is everlasting in time.  They reject the Classical Theist argument that God can be timelessly eternal on the basis that such a God is inconsistent with the Bible and tenets of Christian doctrine like God existing in three persons or becoming incarnate and because, as Sir Anthony Kenny argued, the idea of God existing or acting in a timeless way is “radically incoherent” given that the matrix which makes existence and action possible is time.  The idea that God is everlasting in time is supported by the Bible, in verses such as

“The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary” Isaiah 40:28

In this case, God’s omnipotence entails being able to do everything that it is logically possible to do from a point in time.  As Swinburne wrote in 1973

“[God] is omnipotent at time t = if  [God] is able at t to bring about any state of affairs p such that it is consistent with the facts about what happened before t that, after t, [God] should bring about p…”

By this analysis, given the facts the go before the present moment t, in this moment God could not create a square circle or create a rock too heavy for him to lift and nor could God do something evil or act so as to bring about a worse result.  Also, God cannot change the past or, arguably, know the future outcome of free actions. Despite this, both Swinburne and Leftow argue that God is omnipotent.  They reject the claim that not being able to do something logically impossible or inconsistent with one’s nature is a real limitation on power.  Nobody thinks Donald Trump is not powerful because he cannot fly, give birth or make square circles!  By this definition, God being omnipotent entails him having power in much the same way as human beings have power, only to a much greater degree.  Nevertheless, surely this univocal interpretation of God’s omnipotence is unsatisfactory.  Not only does it seem to anthropomorphise God and sell short the belief that he is supremely powerful, but it is also inconsistent with the Bible, as in Isaiah 55:8

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the Lord.

In this way as well, believing in an everlastingly omnipotent God is incoherent. 

Further, when it comes to an everlasting God in time, what evidence is there to support belief in the existence of a God who exists and acts like an invisible superman?  The arguments for God’s existence do nothing to support the existence of such a God and, if William James’ analysis of genuine mystical experience is to believed, neither do Religious Experiences.  It is true that the everlasting God of the Theistic Personalists makes far more sense of God’s actions as recorded in the Bible (if not all of God’s words) than does the eternal God of the Classical Theist tradition, but what is the rational basis for accepting the Bible as the primary, in fact almost the only, authority for the existence of such a God?   Given the insights of Biblical Criticism, it seems that having faith that God exists – and is omnipotent – on the basis of scripture alone (Sola Scriptura) cannot be rational.  Further, even if faith is “assurance about what we do not see.” Hebrews 11:1, the Bible is inconsistent in what it suggests about God’s omnipotence.  In Genesis 2 God searches for a helper for Adam, trying out each animal before settling on making woman out of Adam’s rib… not even very competent!  Yet, in Matthew 19:26 Jesus affirms that “with God all things are possible.”  It seems that believing that God exists and is omnipotent in a way that is everlasting in time on the strength of the Bible is incoherent. 

In conclusion, believing that God is omnipotent remains a central part of Christian doctrine and yet is it an incoherent belief.  This demonstrates the extent to which faith is not a rational position to hold.  Of course, this makes little difference to those believers who understand faith to be non-propositional, constituting…

“confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.” Hebrews 11:1

Yet, for those looking for propositional faith, faith that is well supported by evidence and argument, the incoherence of omnipotence as a key attribute of God and its lack of compatibility with either God’s goodness or the Bible will make it difficult to remain a Christian. 

Can God act in the world? [40]

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This question is of huge significance for religious faith and goes to the heart of issues arising from the concept of God. If God can act in the world, this implies that He is in time, which raises questions about his perfection because acting in time suggests that God depends on the passage of time to frame His action. Further, if God can act in time and chooses not to, then can He be all good… and if God can and does act in time, can He justly hold people responsible for moral evil? On the other hand, if God cannot act in the world (either because He is outside time or because he is limited in His powers, by His own nature or by his decision to allow human free-will) then can God be understood to be omnipotent? Also, can a God who cannot act in time be the God of the Bible or the object of Christian worship? How could an inactive God answer prayers, be addressed by Jesus as “Abba”, care if people attend Church-services or be understood to work miracles and Religious Experiences? It seems that either answer to this question will cause problems for believers. Further, there is no way to know the answer definitively. Nevertheless, the claim that God cannot act directly in the world is easier to sustain philosophically than the claim that God can act in the world as this claim would usually be understood.

The rational arguments for God’s existence from observation – the cosmological and teleological arguments – point to a God who is eternal in the sense of being outside the space-time universe we inhabit. As St Thomas Aquinas argued, a God who is the Prime Mover, uncaused cause and necessary sustaining cause of the universe is “neither something nor nothing.” The God of Classical Theism is not a person or object and has no physical presence within space and time, yet God is the necessary creator and effects everything. If God is timeless and space-less, then God must be wholly simple and unchanging. This supports the idea that God is perfect and all-good in the sense that He must be 100% whatever it is to be God and containing no evil (understood as potential, falling short). If God is timeless and space-less, God cannot be other than He is. Yet if God is the wholly simple, timeless being that Aquinas’ arguments suggest and support, there are natural questions about His ability to act. Action implies time – a time before the action, a time during it and a time after it. Action might also imply some choice to act or not to act, or to act in different ways. Clearly, if God is timeless and unchanging, the degree to which “action” is compatible with the concept of God, God’s nature, is unclear. St Thomas Aquinas argued that the word “action”, when applied to God can only be understood analogically. What it means for God to act is not the same as what it means for a person to act. Certainly when a person acts, it implies time and choice, but these cannot be part of God’s action because they are excluded by God’s necessarily timeless, wholly simple nature. For Aquinas, God’s timeless action can be understood to mean only that God is the original cause of everything in the universe. As in the Cosmological Argument, God is the Prime Mover, the uncaused cause and the necessary sustainer of the universe and everything in it. For Aquinas, God can act in the world only by causing it through his single, simple creative act, and not by responding to events as they happen in time. Aquinas’ understanding of God’s action being timeless and limited to a single, simple creative act is consistent with his definition of God as eternal and wholly simple. This God, in turn, is relatively well-supported by rational arguments, in a way that an everlasting God-in-time – who might more reasonably be said to act in time – is not. It follows that strictly limiting God’s action in the world to his general providence in creation is easier to sustain philosophically than a claim that God can act in the world.

In addition, Aquinas argued that God can – and as the Scriptures reveal, did – create beings who can act directly in the world on God’s behalf. Firstly, God created angels, who repeatedly deliver God’s message to Prophets. In addition, God ordained that Saints can also work miracles and later respond to petitionary prayers. Further, as is affirmed in the Nicene Creed, Christians uphold that God became incarnate in the Virgin Mary and was made man. The Incarnation was part of God’s general creative action but made it possible for God to act very directly in the world for a time by self-limiting. John Macquarrie and later Peter Vardy argue that God’s omnipotence must include His ability to enter time and act in the world, even though that appears to compromise God’s perfection by making him and his actions depend on the passage of time. Remember, an eternal, timeless God created all natural laws, including the laws of logic. Our understanding of natural laws and logic depends on partial, subjective experience and can never be complete or 100% certain. It is, therefore, possible that God’s single, simple creative act included some occurrences “not commonly seen in nature” which appear to break the laws of nature and logic to us, but which are within these laws when seen from God’s point of view. One such unusual occurrence could have been the Incarnation, where God took temporary human form to act in the world, making sure to limit His own powers so that they did not cause too much disruption to the usual operation of nature and logic. Other such occurrences could include miracles, religious experiences and even instances of extreme beauty, all of which could have been built-in to God’s single, creative act with the intention that these would point people back towards the existence of God. In this way, maintaining a belief that God acts in the world only through general providence and not directly by “breaking” the laws of nature or logic, is consistent both with Christian precepts and with the concept of God as eternal and wholly simple. St Thomas Aquinas was careful NOT to argue (as Hume later did) that a miracle must breaks the rules of nature by particular volition of the deity. Not only did Hume’s definition of miracles block the possibility that any event could legitimately be called a miracle – because nobody has certain knowledge of the laws of nature and nobody can know of or observe God’s particular volition – but it also pushes believers to choose between believing that the existence of God is supported by the existence of natural laws and believing that God can act in the world. Aquinas’ definition allows for extremely uncommon events to be called miracles and does not demand that they result from a special act of God. Through Aquinas’ argument God can “act in the world” without responding to events in time or doing anything other than the simple, single original act of creation, so God can both be eternal and wholly simple – and so well supported by arguments – and be the object of Christian faith – able to act in the world. Aquinas showed that it doesn’t have to be a choice. It follows, therefore, that Aquinas’ position in limiting God’s direct actions to those ordained as part of the single, simple, creative act is easier to sustain philosophically than the claim that God acts directly in the world in a more spontaneous and responsive way.

Of course, Aquinas’ understanding of God as wholly-simple and eternal, limited to timeless action, is not without problems. As Nelson Pike observed, the Bible refers to God in language which is “unavoidably tensed”, so claiming that God cannot act in the world makes it impossible to use the Bible as evidence for his existence and nature and undermines using the Bible as the basis for other aspects of Religious faith and practice. Further, if God is eternally wholly simple and his actions – including the Incarnation, miracles and religious experiences – are limited to the single, simple act of creation, then the course of the world and of human lives seems determined and there can be little room for free will. Aquinas recognised this and sought other explanations for the existence of suffering than that it resulted from free human actions. He argued that evil is only a lack of goodness and that creation benefits from it, in the way that “the silent pause adds sweetness to the chant.” In addition, Aquinas saw no necessary contradiction between God’s goodness and his creating a world that included suffering, because God’s goodness is not moral goodness but only that goodness compatible with His wholly simple nature, the goodness that comes from God being eternally simple and unchanging, being 100% whatever it is to be God and not falling short in any way, and from God being the source of all good things in the universe, remembering that as evil is a lack and not a substance, a function of how we experience God’s creation through time and space and not a property necessary to the universe as seen from God’s timeless perspective, then God cannot reasonably be held to be the source of it. Nevertheless, Aquinas’ explanation of evil and suffering and the lack of room for genuine human freedom within his philosophical system is problematic. It leaves God choosing to send miracles and religious experiences to affect some people and situations but not others and God sending some people to hell for choices that were largely determined. Aquinas’ understanding of God’s goodness is a very long way from the understanding held by most Christians, so although his position might be easier to sustain philosophically than the position that God is everlasting in time and more directly active in the world, it is far from being the easiest position to sustain theologically, let alone pastorally. The sheer length of the Summa Theologica, which tries to reconcile Aquinas’ concept of God with the precepts of Christian Theology, is a good demonstration of this.

Nevertheless, even if God is not seen to be timeless and unchanging, but is understood to be everlasting in time in the way that Theistic Personalists such as Richard Swinburne have argued, there could be problems with claiming that God can act in the world.

Firstly, in the absence of sufficient rational arguments for the existence of an everlasting God in time, a lot depends on taking the Bible as evidence for both the existence and nature of an everlasting God. The Bible undeniably claims that God acts in the world but offers no clear or conclusive explanation of why God sometimes does not act and how God holds people eternally responsible for actions he could ultimately have prevented. Baruch Spinoza pointed out that if God CAN act, but CHOOSES NOT TO prevent the worst suffering, then it seems that God cannot be omnibenevolent. Surely it would be better for a Christian to believe that God is constrained and cannot act in the world than to believe that He chooses not to and consciously allowed the Holocaust to happen. Maurice Wiles, a leading Anglican Theologian, certainly thought so, along with many Protestant thinkers who have preferred to see God as limited in power than limited in goodness. Jurgen Moltmann is a classic example of this approach, arguing that God can act sometimes but cannot always do anything to stop suffering. Moltmann’s God expresses His perfect knowledge and love by suffering with people, although this raises fair questions about whether such a God, if also held to be the creator, would be worthy of worship. Would a teacher be praised for suffering along with her students even if she organised the trip down the mine which led to their suffering?

Secondly, if God CAN act and DOES act, then again the extent to which human beings are free and can justly be held responsible for moral evil must be in question. It is not a simple choice between Aquinas’ eternal God and determinism on one side and Augustine’s everlasting God and Free Will on the other; whether God is in time or outside it, it is impossible to reconcile God’s ability to act in the world – whether just through general providence or through direct interventions – with genuine human freedom and so with moral responsibility. St Augustine places God in time, if observing it from a great distance – as though from a mountaintop – and still struggles to explain how genuine human freedom is compatible with God’s absolute power and creative action and has to resort to calling how this works a mystery. Placing God in time and claiming that He can act directly in the world is incompatible with any idea of human free will or divine justice, so it remains easier to sustain Aquinas’ timeless God and very limited understanding of divine action.

Further, if God can act because he is in time and has the sort of knowledge that enables him to respond directly to events, then God’s detailed knowledge of events, even if God does not interfere in them, makes believing in human free will and the justice of human beings being held morally responsible difficult. Through the “Consolations of Philosophy” Book 5 Boethius attempted to dissolve the tension between God’s knowledge and human free will, suggesting that God’s knowledge of events is conditional on those events taking place, that God’s knowledge does not necessitate events happening as they do. However, suggesting that God is not only in time, but that his knowledge depends on events and thus changes continually is a long way from any idea of divine perfection or immutability. Is the object of Christian worship any more comfortably said to be contingent and ever-changing than He is said to be wholly simple and impassive? It seems that defining God as everlasting and placing Him in time fails to resolve either the philosophical or the theological problems raised with claiming that He acts in the world, so although Aquinas’ wholly simple eternal concept of God and limitation of God’s action to what can be considered timeless and part of His single, simple act of creation comes with significant theological problems, it is still easier to sustain than the claim that God is everlasting in time and able to act directly in the world.

In conclusion, the claim that God cannot act directly in the world is easier to sustain philosophically than the claim that God can act in the world, at least as this claim would usually be understood. Nevertheless, limiting God’s action to what is timeless and part of a single, simple, general act of creation is difficult to reconcile with the Bible and precepts of Christian faith as outlined in the Nicene Creed, let alone with apparent acts of special revelation like miracles and religious experiences. St Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica is a masterful attempt at such a reconciliation and was rightly hailed as being every bit as good as a miracle at his beatification, however his explanation of how God can be both eternal timeless and have been Incarnate and Immanent through history remains contentious. Perhaps, in the end, Christians need to accept that both God’s nature and how God acts in the world must remain a mystery, however unsatisfactory this is for Philosophers of Religion.

 

 

“An omnipotent God could have created free beings who always choose what is right!” Discuss [40]

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With this point atheist philosopher JL Mackie rejected the classical Free Will Defense theodicy, relied on by generations of Christians to defend God against charges of creating and/or allowing evil and suffering.  Going further, in his article “Evil and Omnipotence” (1955) Mackie argued that the absolute logical contradiction between believing that God is omnipotent and acknowledging the reality of evil in the world He created demonstrates that God cannot exist.  Considering a range of classical theodicies, Mackie notes how each limits the meaning of an essential divine attribute to the extent that faith becomes difficult.  For example, he argued that saying that evil is a necessary corollary of good limits what God’s “omnipotence” means to the extent that God is limited by the laws of logic and seems compelled to create anyway, despite the fact that what he creates will result in horrendous suffering.  It is difficult to reconcile this with faith based on God being the Father “almighty” and also benevolent, caring about human beings and seeking to minimize suffering.   Mackie’s article is persuasive.  His argument that an omnipotent God cannot be understood to be limited by the laws of logic while remaining true to what it is that theists believe in is difficult to deny.  Yet it is still possible to believe in the existence of an omnipotent, all-good God, in a way that is rational, despite the evil in the world. It is not necessarily correct to claim that God, though omnipotent, cannot do what is logically impossible and create free beings who always choose to do what is right .

Omnipotence means having the power to do anything. This seems straightforward, but it is important to appreciate that there are different ways of understanding what this entails precisely. Rene Descartes  is usually held up as the example of a Philosopher who claimed that God’s omnipotence involves His power to do what is impossible – create a square circle or a rock that is too heavy for Him to lift to use Avicenna’s famous example. He did write “God could have brought it about … that it was not true that twice four make eight”, but putting this claim in context reveals that Descartes’ position on Omnipotence was more sophisticated. For Descartes, ultimate reality is metaphysical, in the world of ideas.   He famously wrote “I think, therefore I am”, pointing out that there is no way to know that the world I experience through my senses is how it seems. The senses frequently lie and I could be dreaming after all. The only thing, Descartes claimed, that I can know with any certainty is that I am thinking and therefore that I must exist. From that tiny basis of certainty, Descartes extrapolated to the limits of possible knowledge using reason and mathematics. Clear and distinct ideas exist, confused and contradictory ideas do not. God necessarily exists because existence is a perfection and is an undeniable property of the supremely perfect being . Because God IS existence for Descartes, He doesn’t do the impossible as much as determine what is and what is not possible. Of course this means that God might make things possible that seem to us to be impossible, but not within this world. God exists through eternity while human understanding is bounded by a particular place and time and is limited. From our perspective now it seems that 4×2=8 is a clear and distinct idea, containing no contradiction, but for all we know God might have made 4×2=9 instead or in some other reality. Either way, this understanding of God’s omnipotence does not have to support Mackie’s conclusion that God cannot be all good. Human freedom and always choosing what is good are indeed contradictory, yet there is nothing contradictory about God being all-good in the sense of being supremely perfect as Descartes understood it and God’s including both freedom and the ability do evil in His plan. To reject the idea that a good God could wish human beings to be capable of evil and causing suffering is to interpret God’s goodness as moral goodness. This makes no sense if God is supremely perfect, because God causes moral laws to exist and cannot be bound by them. Of course, this raises its own questions about whether a God whose goodness is not moral and includes wishing human beings to be able to choose what is evil and cause suffering is worthy of worship, but it does not support Mackie’s conclusion that God cannot rationally be held to exist .

Secondarily, in his Summa Theologica (1264) St Thomas Aquinas took a different approach to establishing God’s necessary existence and supreme perfection. Aquinas reasoned inductively from observations of movement, causation, contingency, grades of perfection and teleology in the universe to the necessary existence of a being “which everybody calls God“.  Aquinas went on to reason that God must be the Prime Mover, absolutely uncaused and unchanged in Himself, outside even the framework of time and space, timelessly eternal.  In this way aquinas’ God – as the cause of everything – is omnipotent.  God is the originator of all movement and causation in the universe and what makes the existence of an infinite universe built entirely of contingencies possible. Further, Aquinas’ wholly simple God is pure act, 100% whatever it is to be God.  Outside of time (and space) God can have no potential and cannot fall short (be evil in the Aristotelian sense) in any way, so He is also all-good.  For Aquinas, God necessarily exists.  As the originating cause of everything, God’s omnipotence also contains His perfect goodness, since God caused the time and space required for evil and is not contained within it.  God’s attributes are in fact simple, single, indivisible. It is only because human language and comprehension is limited that we have to describe and try to understand God’s nature through multiple analogies. Mackie contends that God cannot be considered truly omnipotent if he cannot break the laws of logic in this world, but this seems to ignore Aquinas’ argument that God’s creative act was timeless and simple.  For Aquinas, God’s omnipotence extends only to what is actually possible.  God can do whatever is compatible with His nature and internally consistent within His single, simple creative act.  God cannot create a contradiction or create and not create simultaneously, because – as Richard Swinburne pointed out in “The Coherence of Theism” – that is not really possible and God’s omnipotence only means that he can do anything that is possible .

Certainly, Aquinas’ wholly simple God cannot sin.  Being 100% actual and timeless, God is whatever God is and necessarily cannot fall short of His nature or be considered evil.  Further, since God creates timelessly, his creation must fulfil his purpose for it and be timelessly complete, 100% whatever God intended it to be from His point of view and so good.  Yet despite not being able to sin, not being in any way evil and producing a completely good world in relation to his intentions for it, Aquinas’ understanding of God’s goodness does not necessarily conflict with His wanting freedom to involve the ability to choose what is evil, with all the consequences that flow from that. By Aquinas’ model, time and space are functions of our perception and are not objectively real properties of the universe.   From my point of view time has passed since I started to write this essay and it now takes up more space than it did, but my perception of reality is just a partial, subjective view of the case.  From God’s perspective all time and all space are as-one, fulfilled as the universe is fulfilled and complete.  As Boethius put it in the “Consolations of Philosophy” (Book V) God sees everything “all at once as present”. To use a modern analogy, it is as if God is writing the source-code for a computer program.  Being a perfect programmer, the code is simple and elegant – he can see it all at once.  He has total power over the program and total knowledge of its capabilities.  The program does 100% of what it was designed for.  This is not the same as God sitting on the shoulder of people using the program in different places and over time, watching them use it in different ways more or less well. This means that (as John Macquarrie pointed out in “The Principles of Christian Theology”) God’s power is very different from our power, God’s goodness is very different from our goodness.  God’s omnipotence does NOT include his ability to do the logically impossible, create a square circle, or a free being who can only choose what is right, but this does not mean that he is constrained by laws of logic that exist prior to or above God.  God’s actions are only limited within this world and in relation to other aspects of the same single, timeless act of creation.  God can do anything that is compatible with His perfect nature and internally coherent within a simple, single act of creation. He can do anything that is absolutely, actually possible and that does not include creating free beings who only choose what is right .

Of course, for all we know, God might have created a different world in which square circles and free beings who always choose what is right are possible, but we know from the existence of this world that he created this world. This world must, therefore, fulfil God’s intention for it and at least be of the Best Possible World type (to use Swinburne’s phrase) with respect to that intention. Remember, it is not a case of God creating things – or laws of logic – individually over time.  Creation must be simple, single and complete from God’s timeless perspective.  Mackie asks: Surely it would have been better to create a world with laws of logic which allow for both freedom and 100% good choices?  Yet what makes him hang on to the idea that God’s goodness precludes the possibility of evil being part of His design.  As for Descartes, for Aquinas, God’s goodness refers only to his pure timeless actuality and should not be understood to imply a moral dimension. It is perfectly rational to conclude that a timelessly omnipotent, timelessly good God exists, even if we object to evil and to the suffering it causes us.  Mackie’s argument fails to demonstrate that belief in an omnipotent, all-good God is irrational in the light of evil in the world, although it does highlight the limited content attributes like “omnipotent” and “all-good” can have in relation to a timeless, wholly simple being .

To be fair, Mackie makes just this point.  “Evil and Omnipotence” concludes… “there is no valid solution of the problem [of evil] which does not modify at least one of the constituent propositions [i.e. God’s attributes] in a way which would seriously affect the essential core of the theistic position” Mackie is right to point out that Aquinas’ wholly simple God may be rationally satisfying, but it falls far short of the God most people worship.  The Bible records God acting directly in history and the lives of individuals; people claim to have experienced visions, voices and miracles directly from God.  When believers pray they hope that God can and will respond and when people are in trouble believers hope that God understands their plight and can act to help them.  Certainly, Aquinas tries to explain how these beliefs can still have content in relation to a wholly simple God, but his explanations are less than convincing.

  • Firstly, the idea that God’s actions are part of general, not special providence – that God always planned to bring the Israelites through the Red Sea, that God always planned that the Babylonians would take the people into captivity, that God always planned that Jesus should die on the cross – raises enormous questions about human freedom and resultantly, about God’s goodness.  If Adam and Eve being banished from the garden was factored into the single, simple act of creation, to what extent can they – and all human beings – rightly be held responsible for their original sin, be in need of Salvation or have the power to accept it?
  • Secondly, if creation is complete from God’s perspective, the end has already happened and it is difficult to see how anybody has any meaningful choice at all.  Small actions have big consequences, so every tiny decision we make might seem to have the potential to change the outcomes of creation… it follows, therefore, that human freedom must be, or be very close to, an illusion for Aquinas.  In this case, how can people be held morally responsible in this world?  How can an all-good God justly reward or punish people on the basis of choices that He Himself determined?  It is difficult to conceive of satisfactory answers to these questions.
  • Thirdly, Aquinas’ wholly simple God – although omnipotent – cannot be understood to act directly in response to events within the world, or even to have reflective knowledge of how his creation is perceived from within through the spatio-temporal framework.  This is not a God who can respond to prayers, as most theists hope that He can.  The idea that some of God’s actions are actually effected by intermediaries such as angels or saints is more convincing, but it is still hard for believers to pray to, worship or even respect an omnipotent God knowing that he cannot understand their plight or respond Himself.

 

Aquinas’ God is necessarily distant; His timeless omnipotence and His perfect goodness actually stands in the way of God being the God most Christians worship.  It follows that Aquinas’ wholly simple model of God does not definitively resolve the paradox of omnipotence highlighted by Mackie or defend faith against the possibility of having to accept that God caused or allowed evil and suffering, unless the Doctrine of the Trinity works as a means of explaining how God can be BOTH wholly simple and timeless AND active in the world and the lives of individuals, something it can never do on a purely rational basis .

Mackie’s argument boils down to the claim that if God is omnipotent, He must be responsible for evil and cannot therefore be all-good.  Either an omnipotent God knew about the horrendous consequences of creating free beings who can choose evil and chose to create anyway or God did not know, had to create or was otherwise constrained by the laws of logic and was not omnipotent.  Mackie presents omnipotence as a paradox; neither definition supports theism because few people would worship a God who is limited in power and fewer would worship a God who is malevolent.  Yet the possibility of God choosing to limit His knowledge of outcomes in order to make human freedom genuine remains open.  In “The Puzzle of God” (1993) Peter Vardy argued that God could have acted like King Cophetua, who hid his true identity so that the beggar-maid had the opportunity of coming to love him for himself rather than for his power. Vardy’s analogy was originally intended to make a point about how God could have self-limited with respect to his omnipotence, making the incarnation possible, and yet it might be re-purposed to explain Maquarrie’s broader argument that God could have self-limited with respect to his omniscience in order that human free will could be meaningful and support a genuine opportunity for people to choose what is right and earn salvation for themselves.  Recognising the inadequacy of Boethius’ understanding of God’s knowledge being only contingently necessary, this argument assumes that for freedom to be real, God could not know what it would lead to as then God’s knowledge of the end point would in a sense make that end point inevitable however free people may feel in the moment.  God might choose, therefore, to self-limit because human freedom was an essential part of the Best Possible World, as proponents of the Free Will Defence theodicy such as St Augustine and Alvin Plantinga have suggested. Nevertheless, this response to Mackie is not entirely convincing.  If God chooses to self-limit and as a result has no knowledge of the consequences of human free-will, he must have chosen to distance himself from His creation to a very great extent.  Is it worth worshipping a God who has no idea what is happening in history or in the lives of individuals?  Would such a self-limited God be able to work miracles or respond to prayer, when knowledge of the circumstances must involve His knowledge of at least some consequences of free will?  One possible way round this would be to suppose that God delegates the power to respond to crises to angels, saints or other intermediary beings.  Yet there is still a question over whether theism is supported by distant God who can only respond indirectly through general providence.  Take the analogy of Microsoft.  It designs Windows with regular updates, a troubleshooting module and has a FAQ page on its website, but if there was no helpline number to call when these proved inadequate, and no ability for the company to recognize and resolve improbable issues as they arise, few people would rate customer service highly, let alone regard the company as perfect !

In conclusion, JL Mackie raises important questions about the coherence of the Christian concept of God. He points out that there is no way that an omnipotent, all-good deity – as understood by most believers – can be excused from charges of creating or allowing evil and suffering by appealing to human free-will. Nevertheless, Mackie does not succeed in his aim of showing that it is impossible to reconcile the existence of an omnipotent, all-good deity with the reality of evil and suffering in this world and that atheism is the only rational conclusion. Mackie’s argument only highlights the superficiality of most believers’ understanding of what omnipotence and goodness could mean when applied to God. He is right that there is no way to sustain what he defines as “the essential core of the theistic position”, yet he does not establish that it is absolutely impossible either to base theism on a different core or to sustain deism. In the end, it is not true to say that “An omnipotent God could have created free beings who always choose what is right!” It would be more accurate to say that “For all we know, an omnipotent God could have created another, different world in which free beings always choose what is right”. Yet the fact remains that this-world, with all its limitations, exists and that if God exists, He must have created it. Further, it is unreasonable to speculate about what that world would be like or make facile judgements about which world-type would be “better”. The laws of logic by which we make these judgements depend on the world we live in and presumably don’t apply to other worlds or comparisons between worlds in the way that they don’t apply to a timeless God. Mackie’s conclusion, that atheism is reasonable position, is persuasive, but in the end it is not unreasonable to disagree .