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).
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).
Not necessarily. I think that Mill is trying to come to an understanding of the nature of God by examining His handiwork - essentially, he's looking at the creation, and trying to come to understand what sort of creator would create this thing. And I think he would probably find the answers you suggest to be wanting, but let's see...
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.)
This is perhaps the easiest to address, since Mill himself considered exactly this sort of response when he said "They have exhausted the resources of sophistry to make it appear that all the suffering in the world exists to prevent greater---that misery exists, for fear lest there should be misery: a thesis which if ever so well maintained, could only avail to explain and justify the works of limited beings, compelled to labour under conditions independent of their own will; but can have no application to a Creator assumed to be omnipotent, who, if he bends to a supposed necessity, himself makes the necessity which he bends to." (my emphasis).
What Mill is essentially saying is that it doesn't make sense to call the creation of inherently good and virtuous and obedient men "cheating", since it's only "cheating" because God Himself made it that way! In other words, a God who made such a rule must have had the ability to not make that rule if He were truly omnipotent - when you get to make all the rules, something is only "cheating" if you make it that way. And thus He, were He truly omnipotent, must have easily been able to make good and virtuous men, but for some reason chose not to. So saying that such a thing would be "cheating" doesn't rescue an omnipotent God from the responsibility for creating wickedness - it's only "cheating" because He wanted it that way.
And the same sort of rationale applies to the other two points as well. If such a relationship isn't really a "holistic" relationship with God, that can only be because an omnipotent God declined to make it a holistic relationship with Him - if He is omnipotent, He could have just as easily chosen to allow that sort of relationship to be holistic, and yet he chose not to. If none of us would choose to be fully obedient, then that's because an omnipotent God must have wanted us to choose disobedience, since an omnipotent God has the power to make us obedient, and yet chose not to. And of course He must have wanted all these things - there are no unintended consequences for an omniscient being, who knows in advance every single consequence of His every single act.
1. God expressed his morality to us, but that didn't make us good.
IOW, as Mill posits, He chose not to make us good - He, being omnipotent, must have had the power to do so, and being omniscient, knew that His expressions of morality would fail to make us good. What other conclusion can we reach but that things are the way they are because that's exactly how God wanted them, if he is truly omnipotent?
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.
But Mill would object that you are positing a God that is merely "empathizing" with the consequences of evil that He is ultimately responsible for in the first place! I suspect Mill might become a bit exasperated at this point, and suggest that mere sympathy for the helpless victims of evils that you created and are responsible for is hardly adequate redress, and not the hallmark of a perfectly good being - why would a perfectly good being permit evil and suffering in the first place, especially if we are to believe that He is omnipotent, and thus has it easily within His power to eliminate it, or to not create it at all? Is that really what we mean when we think of "perfectly good" - a being who freely and willfully chooses to cause evil to occur? Or is it possible, Mill asks, that He really is perfectly good, but is of limited power, and so is thus not responsible for the existence of evil?
Consider an analogy for a moment, related to the doctrine of sins of omission. We can both, I think, agree that it would not be accurate to call a person who has the power to stop some evil from taking place, and yet does not, as being "good", especially if that evil can be stopped at little or no risk to oneself. If you're walking down the street some afternoon, and you see a toddler playing in the street, but you choose to walk on past despite the fact that you could easily have removed the child from such a dangerous position, then I think we would both agree that you bear some responsibility if that child should be struck and killed later on - by your conscious and willful failure to act, you have permitted a bad thing to occur. And we call this a sin, as per James 4:17 - "Therefore to him that knoweth to do good, and doeth it not, to him it is sin," - and sins are posited to be objectively evil acts. So what are we to make of a being who consciously and willfully permits all the evils in the world to occur, especially when He could prevent them all with infinite ease? Does it make any sense at all to call such a being "perfectly good"?