Is God Omnipotent?

One of the arguments of the nonbelievers is the old refrain upon which we all have pondered at some moments in our life: if God is good and almighty, why does He allow so much suffering?

The professional atheists call God “incompetent” because of the world He gave us, as if they knew how a better job could have been accomplished in creating the universe. But it’s very easy to invent a world without any suffering in it. In God, A Guide for the Perplexed, professor Keith Ward writes that we simply don’t know how much control over things a perfectly good and rational being would have.

“From a Hegelian point of view,“ he goes on, “God is not omnipotent in the sense that God can choose to create absolutely any state we can imagine…God is omnipotent as the one and only  sourcee of all being, From God flows…the dialectic of darkness and light, negation and affirmation, conflict and reconciliation. God is good in that what God intends is the final reconciliation.”

Modern science has discovered the elegant laws of nature. The Fine Tuning is synonymous of perfection, yet nature is imperfect and often immoral. Mathematical constants allowed organization to emerge from chaos, together with the primal chaotic aspects of a developing  organism. As an argument against a Creator it has been said that, if these constants were different, different life forms would have developed, and they would be marveling at their own Fine Tuning just like we are. But this is exactly the point! For life to appear on a planet, some physical laws MUST be tuned. And so to say that this can happen by chance is just as improbable as it is to say that God did the tuning.

                                                                                                                                                    

Earthquakes and tsunamis occur as a consequence of plate tectonics, the giant plates that move under the surface of the earth and the ocean floor. Without them, the land would be submerged and the temperature would be either scorching or freezing. On a planet subjected to this kind of environment, mammalian life would have been impossible. Therefore, natural disasters are the toll to pay for the development of our species.

Is God watching us to see if we make it, as a scientist would observe his guinea pigs? One might think that God doesn’t care about what’s happening to His creation, but Christians believe that, on the contrary, He’s so passionate about its out coming that He would give His life for it.