If we imagine that there exists a being which we call God
which is omnipotent, omnipresent, and omnibenevolent, we can
also examine whether or not there can actually be such a being.
To begin with all at once, we may ask how there can be an
omnibenevolent being (one which desires and brings about only
good) when there is so much suffering and destructiveness in
the world. The Lisbon earthquake killed 80,000 people; the
black plague killed millions of people; by far the most of
earth's inhabitants have always been poor and hungry and
riddled with disease. In our own time the '89 earthquake in
the East Bay across the Bay from San Francisco killed an
unknown number of people when a double-decker freeway collapsed
and the upper deck of concrete and steel fell on the lower deck
and crushed those people, literally squashing them flat. How
can these things be consistent with an omnibenevolent being?
The theologians try to explain these things by saying that
there are some things that even an omnipotent and omnibenevolent
being cannot do. But that is the same thing as saying that the
being under discussion is not omnipotent. A being that was both
omnipotent and omnibenevolent being would actively cause only
good to exist in the world; the existence of suffering disproves
the omnibenevolence, and the existence of harmfulness and
destructiveness disproves the omnipotence of even an
omnibenevolent being. There remains the possibility of an
omnipotent being which is not benevolent, however.
Buddha offered the formula that the end of desire is the
end of suffering, which was echoed by Epictetus six centuries
later, and by Ken Keyes, Jr. in our own time. But the
conditions we call suffering still exist, and the harmfulness
and destructiveness of earthquake, fire and storm, disease and
accident, lions and tigers still exist, and Buddha's teachings
only claim that one can attain a state of being tranquil
peaceful, and even happy in the face of all these conditions
and events. But the conditions don't disappear.
You might suggest that perhaps the omnibenevolent being
allows the conditions to exist as a test or training ground
for us to attain this state of tranquillity, or for our own
good. But that still disproves the omnibenevolence, since the
harmful conditions are allowed to exist. There is no escape
from the conclusion that even if there is some being more
powerful than human beings, and more benevolent towards
living creatures, that being cannot be both all-powerful and
all-benevolent. This was expressed by Archibald MacLeish
in his play
J.B. in the little jingle:
If God is God he is not good;
If God is good he is not God.
As to whether this being can be omnipresent, that is
everywhere at once, we can note that the size of the universe
has steadily increased throughout recorded history. Seven
thousand years ago a god or superbeing was conceived of as
governing only a single tribe or group of tribes; by 600 BCE
the ancient Judeans could conceive of one God over all human
beings; and by the year 1600 this being had become expanded
so that the whole of the earth was under its governance. In
that year, or in about 1604 exactly, Johannes Kepler discovered
that the planets move in fixed elliptical orbits around the sun
and each orbit was millions of miles in diameter, so that it
could be doubted whether even a superbeing who could be called
the "God" of the planet Earth could also be "in charge" of all
of the planets in their orbits hundreds of millions of miles
from the sun. Or else this "God" had to be enormous, occupying
quadrillions of cubic miles of mostly empty space.
By 1690 Olaus Roemer had computed the speed of light from
the size of the orbit of the planet Jupiter, by observing the
times of the transits of the moons of Jupiter when the earth
and Jupiter were on the same side of the sun and when the earth
and Jupiter were on the opposite sides of the sun. This speed
is now figured to be just under 300,000 kilometers per second.
Then with further telescopic study of the stars beyond
the planets, it became clear that the so-called "fixed stars"
were at unbelievable distances from the sun and its 9 planets
measured not even in billions of miles but in billions
of a new unit of distance called the "light-year", which is
the distance that light travels in a year, at the rate of
300,000 kilometers per second. Here is the calculation:
1 light-year = 365 days x 86,400 sec./day x 300,000 km/second
= 9,460,800,000,000 kilometers
= 9.46 trillion kilometers
and some stars are millions of light-years from the
earth! Could even a superbeing which was the "god" of the sun
and all its planets ALSO be the god of all these stars at such
great distances and any planets and life forms they may
have? Can anyone really believe that?
Therefore the size of the universe compels us to believe
that no "god" could possibly be omnipresent, that is
everywhere. So we conclude that there is simply no being that
can be all at once omnipotent, omnipresent, and omnibenevolent.
But to come back down to earth, so to speak, it is equally
doubtful that there is any superbeing which is in charge of the
whole earth. A being over only the earth could not have created
that earth, since all planets throughout the universe are formed
by the same physical laws, and physical laws have nothing to do
with suffering and morality. Furthermore, in different climes
and times species have evolved which are inimical to each other
so that it is more likely that different "gods" were over these
different times and climes as far as the evolution of living
species is concerned, if you want to suppose that.
The true believer no doubt, in spite of this disproof of
the existence of the properties of omnipotence, omnipresence
and omnibenevolence, will wish to maintain the belief in the
existence of a limited being or presence or force in the affairs
of humanity and possibly of all life and all nature which they
think of as "God". But this is no more, perhaps, than the belief
in "Mother Nature" or the "Goddess Providence", and is still an
unwarranted personalization of physical or natural processes. And
in fact it is also wishful thinking, that there is some agency
which is watching over us, and may intervene on rare occasions
to save us from harm. Therefore it is still true, as my friend
Findlay Cockrell once put it, that "First there was the world
and then there was man, and then there was God." So that, far
from there being a God that created us and watches over us, it
is we who have created the concept of God; but it is ultimately
up to us, we ourselves, to manage our lives and bring about the
conditions of good and to discover the means of bringing it about.
Q.E.D.
miriam berg
(p.s. We may possibly choose to believe that the conditions
of ethics and morality are the same for all planets, even for the
stars and galaxies most remote from our own; in fact it is
difficult to conceive of a consistent and useful morality which
does not embrace the principles embodied in our own, of caring
for members of our own species and respect for all other species.
No intelligent species can fail to see that, for its own species
at least, we should do for each other as we would be done by, and
that since we are all beings of the same species we should treat
each other with consideration and fairness. Species which
depend for their survival on strength and physical contests to
elevate a leader still need to watch out for the members of their
own group. But then the highest level of intelligence begins to
realize that other species have just as much "right" to exist as
its own; however this opens up a whole new subject about rights
and obligations and freedom, moral concepts which may be unique
to the human species.)