Why would someone ask "If God is omnipotent, how can he be good?" or "If God is good, how can he be omnipotent?"
Because he was looking at the state of the world around him, essentially. In brief, what Mill does is he looks around and observes that the world is far from being perfect, and who can really disagree with him on that? So he asks himself, if God is omnipotent and perfectly good, as He is usually regarded to be, why is the world such a mess? Surely a perfectly good being would want to create good, and not evil - why would a being that was perfectly good create evil, as God must have done if He were the omnipotent creator of everything? Surely a being that was perfectly good would want to create good and virtuous people, so why are there so many bad and wicked people about? After all, if He were omnipotent, He certainly had the power to create people who were some other way than what they are, right? Surely a being that was perfectly good would want to bring about justice, so why is there so much injustice in the world? Surely a perfectly good being would not want to cause suffering, so why is there so much suffering in the world, especially when an ostensibly omnipotent being must have had the power to prevent it?
So from that, Mill concludes that you have two choices, really - either God is in fact omnipotent, and He created this world exactly as He wanted it, with all the evil and wickedness and injustice and suffering there is. But in that case, He must be less than perfectly good, given the sort of world He chose to create. Or, God is in fact perfectly good, but is less than omnipotent, and therefore He created the best world he could. But being that He is less than omnipotent - albeit much more powerful that you or I could ever be, naturally - He couldn't create a perfect world, or one that was as perfectly good as He was. And given the choice, Mill opts for a perfectly good, but limited creator, and suggests that most people unconsciously do the same thing as well, through their various rationalizations about why the world and their personal affairs are in such a state.
Who is being presumptuous, Mills or me?
I don't know. Do you still think that omnipotence and perfect goodness can be reconciled?
I think it tends to be good to go to bed earlier on a Saturday night.
I wasn't really asking for a 21st Century commentary to the dead Brit's ;-` work, but thank you. What I'm saying is looking at the world and trying to learn such a thing about God from it is, well, why bother? And my point especially is that while the answer to your question is it, with all due apologies, is a non sequitur. But then I'm one of those guys who reads things like Job and Ecclesiastes and Ephesians and believes that God inspired the messages He means for us, through the writing that was done therein.
My further point is that since we know the world all too well but don't know God well enough, we might give him the benefit of the doubt as we doubt, by looking more closely into just what we're doubting about him. If he is good and omnipotent, surely he wants to see the suffering put to an end and surely there is a reason it's here and a reason God, who may just be suffering most from it lets it stick around awhile, and if he's really, really, good, he may have just devised a way to tell us what we really need to know about him, in spite of it all, which may just be the most important thing the knowing of which ultimately clears it all up.
But since betty boop hasn't answered and since there seems to be such an axiomatically 'philosophical' motif to this thread, I wouldn't want to through a wet blanket on the matter, by explaining what I think he tells us. That would be starting with the premise that God is good enough to reveal himself to us all, and all-powerfully able to make sense to us, even if through a glass darkly. You know. It would be Chriatian.
gre: Do you still think that omnipotence and perfect goodness can be reconciled?
l44: Well, why not share, dude? You and God got some insider deal going on?
I'm going to try to give a very skeletal answer to my rationale.
This appears not to be a question of someone who is looking for God, but of someone who is looking toward God from an egocentric point of view (which is antithetical to the way we may communicate with God). God is prime. Because of this, sense is made about God, albeit to very alienated minds and hearts, by considering him from a Godcentric view. This may e done not by a kind of sycophantic sympathy, but by yielding to God and allowing ourselves the benefit of having empathy toward him. In so doing, one can ask, "If God were good and omnipotent, might he be good and powerful enough to reveal himself and his truth to humans, so we can see things his way?" This presumes (acknowledges) that a good/omnipotent God may also be omniscient and therefore know fully while we may know only in part;
If we look into the various ways that God is purported to reveal himself in history, we find quaint, culturally derived anthropomorphic pantheons, we find quasi moralistic but legalistic gods, we find unknowable, frustrating gods in hierarchical mazes, and we find one who purports to have created man so he can have people created in his image to "walk with," ones created to share in his nature and ones whose individual and corporate natures in return may be shared with him. If God were all good in every sense, including delightful, that certainly sounds best.
Examining this further, one finds that in order to walk with man as a being created in his image, he created him with the qualities of, yup, free will as yeah, yeah, eternality. I won't belabor this, since I presume it has been examined before by the reader and especially since it's been so often given as a rationale for God's prescient allowance of the choice by man to know evil as well as good.
This historical record indicates that God created us as relational beings, first and foremost, to be relational with him. However, disagreement with God became our nature instead of Godliness being our nature and consequently, God could neither find man a suitable vessel for sharing of his own nature, nor would it be conceivable to share in man's corrupt nature anymore (A = A) where A is God's nature (and maybe our Hank reads this - Hank if God wants to have a nature, he's allowed to and there's nothing you can do about it, bless your heart).
Who's asking this?: But God knew this would happen; why wouldn't he just create those people who would obey? Giving God the benefit of the doubt, some of the answers could be:
1. God doesn't cheat and that would be cheating.
2. That wouldn't really be a holistic relationship between God and creation, especially when creation is the entire means of God sharing his loving nature with free beings.
3. None of us would choose to be fully obedient (Shoot, bunches of angels even messed up.)
We are taught further in this historical record such things as:
1. God expressed his morality to us, but that didn't make us good.
2. But this did adequately demonstrate to posterity, certain basic facts of morality and the fact that God has it and we can't get nearly all the way to it, from here.
3. God is less impressed with our trying to be perfect morally, which of course cannot be done, than he is impressed with our yearning to know him relationally and thoroughly. The chief exemplar of this was David, at times a Clintonesque sinner, but one who sincerely turned to God, and by his will truly tried to empathize with God and was thus called by him, "a man after God's own heart."
4. God found a way (through someone of David's lineage as well as his own) to fulfill God's law and its consequences of disagreeing, disobeying man's alienation from him. It cost. It also demonstrated that God empathized with every bit of our suffering the consequences of our evil, and in ways that are just about as fathomless as he is, himself. God's very being of the fused natures of God and newly regenerated man became utterly separated from God, somehow, and somehow took up both our evil and its consequences and took up all who would sincerely empathize with God and his having done so
5. God is omnipotent to provide this new nature, of man with God, fused in a way which fulfilled the very bad consequences of having "the knowledge of good and evil" concluded in our nature. Omnipotently, he has shown himself good for us, good to go, if we're willing to "take part in the divine nature" with him instead of our corrupt egocentric nature, a new nature that knew evil and has been enabled to thoroughly know good.
6. That doesn't mean that partakers become perfect in effect on earth. It means that this new nature is encapsulated in the core of the regenerated beings in ways that can renew their/our earthly lives while not being corrupted by it. This new nature waits to be released so as to transform the regenerate's entire being, and revealed so as to be a part in the transformation of all of creation, at the time(s) God appoints.
I could go on and I'm sure there are gaps of communication left unfilled, but that's my sense of it, where I yield and submit to God and allow an empathetic understanding to develop, and feed what in me develops relationality with God. I'm sure there are inadequacies in my expressions here, but once again, don't blame God. And yes, to address something Mr. Mill pointed out about how we may be prone to look for a tidying up of the entire situation (and why not?) the historical record of God's revelation further indicates that we who accept this divine nature are the first fruits of all creation, along with the primary being of that eternally God-man fused nature, and we'll be good testifiers to future ages of the sufficiency of God, so as to spare other beings in the future from evil, presuming there will be other beings in the future/eternity, however that may work.
"Here I stand..." and sit and lie and "live and move and have my being," and have certainly taken up space lately in this thread, and here I would walk with God (instead of demanding him to submit to my means of measurement).