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.