Ch. 5 The Quest (continued)
Qualities of God
Issues: The qualities commonly ascribed to a Western theistic God were omnipotence, omniscience, omnibenevolence, and omnipresence. In regular words, God was all powerful, all knowing, all good, and present everywhere. Long, long ago Epicurus called out a logical flaw of God's possessing all of those qualities: “Either God wants to abolish evil, and cannot; or he can, but does not want to. If he wants to, but cannot, he is impotent. If he can, but does not want to, he is wicked. If, as they say, God can abolish evil, and God really wants to do it, why is there evil in the world? If he is unable to do either, then why call him 'God'?” (quoted in Lactantius's Treatise on the Anger of God)
My Take: I believed that God was omnibenevolent and omnipresent. Omnipresence was not vitally important to me but I had experienced God as immanent and it made sense to me that God would be everywhere. God's goodness was essential to me: If God were not good, I would not love God. End of story; quest over. To love a bad God, to kowtow to a tyrant, was to be a coward. I may have been pathetic during this quest but I was not a coward. The Epicurean paradox highlighted the logical inconsistency of God's being all good and all powerful. I had never been concerned with power but I could understand why some people might not like the suggestion that God was not all powerful. It is impossible to play in philosophical waters for long without diving into semantic issues so here we go: If God freely chose to give up power and foreknowledge, would God still be considered all-powerful and all-knowing? I reconciled discordant elements with this idea that God chose to allow us free will but that will would not really be free if God already knew the outcome and controlled the events so God freely chose to relinquish some power and foreknowledge so we could freely choose to live out God's will. Why would God choose to give up power and foreknowledge for us to have free will? Well, why God would have created anything at all was not a question that I could answer. Given the premise that God did create something rather than nothing, I could only assume that either creation was essential to God's nature or that God desired to achieve something through creation. What could God possibly want to achieve? Love. I believed in a good and loving God so I could see God's wanting to allow his creation the freedom to choose to be good and loving as well. I assumed that God did not need our love in any way but not needing was not the same as not desiring. God desired love. If God remained all powerful and all knowing, then our love would not be free so God gave us our freedom and let go of some power hoping we would choose to live in and out His love.
