How can you believe in God they say. Don’t you live in the same world as us? A world full of pain and suffering. Yet you have the gall to say you represent a loving God who created the World and, is all knowing and all powerful! If this is so, why won’t God use these remarkable powers to alleviate the pain and suffering that charcterises so much of ‘creation’? What follows is in an attempt to answer this with very little recourse to glib references from the Bible. I will lean heavily on arguments from C.S. Lewis and commend his book, The Problem of Pain, that Fount publishing appear to continue to reprint at regular intervals.
Lewis begins his defense by suggesting the words impossible and unless are often linked together in “ordinary usage”. For example, It is impossible for me to know if my daughter is still on face book (when she should be in bed) while I sit in the lounge room blogging, that is, unless I get up and walk to the back room to check. I could say if the structure of our house remains constant and I am not able to walk it is impossible for me to see my daughter in the back room. My friends then say this is no impossibility for God as God could possibly, and magically, rearrange the architecture of the house or otherwise manipulate conventional notions of time, space and/or vision so my daughter could be seen from the front room. In this context ‘Could possibly’ refers to some absolute possibility that is different from the relative im/possibilities of seeing my daughter from another room. Consequently, such possibilities transcend the notions of im/possibility that we are used to. Like Lewis I don’t know the implications of ‘creating’ the ability to see round corners or manipulate inanimate objects (like walls). However laws of cause and effect appear to hold true for the universe and will have some corresponding reaction that may make them impossible. Lewis suggests that absolute possibilities could not be self-contradictory as this would render such concepts absolutely impossible. Such absolutely impossibilities could also be called intrinsic impossibilities in that they carry their impossibility within themselves. They are “impossible under all conditions and in all worlds for all agents” – God included! God’s omnipotence is limited to power to do things that are intrinsically possible not things that are intrinsically impossible. So miracles may be ascribed to God but not nonsense.
Lewis contends that all things are possible with God but intrinsic impossibilities are not things at all as they dont exisit. To say that God can do the intrinsically impossible is not saying anthing at all about God for;
“… meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly aquire meaning simply because we prefix to them the two other words ‘God can’” (p.15)
It is possible that even an omnipotent God cannot undertake two mutually exclusive alternatives. This is less a statement h about the limitation of God’s power rather that gobblegook remains gobblegook even with God.
