Nasor said:
If we believe that God is all-powerful, wouldn't that mean that he implicitly consents to everything that happens, since he chooses not to intervene? If so, does that mean that God 'wants' people to suffer from natural disasters etc?
Part the First
If God is all-powerful, then yes, God is responsible for everything that happens. However, we should put aside notions of whether God "chooses not to intervene."
Traditionally, though not exclusively, an all-powerful (omnipotent) god is also all-knowing and all-seeing (omniscient). In Christianity, for instance, these factors have led to assertions of the Immutability of God's Will, which is in itself an argument I accept:
• If God is omnipotent and omniscient, what is the purpose of implementing a flawed plan and adjusting as one goes? Is the point of advent representative of "the best God could do"? Inevitably, we presume that had God wanted things differently, God would have done things differently. It's not an airtight case; but if God's going to be as magnanimous as we humans tend to presume, it seems almost as if we
must necessarily conclude that the "plan" as such is exactly as God wants it. There is no better way, or other way, inasmuch as this is the way God has chosen.
Part the Second
As humans anthropomorphize the mysteries of the Universe into a not-so-neat, relatively little package, the compression of ideas creates tremendous distortions. In a Universe as vast as this, some dare pretend that God is such that there is conscious, caring decisions behind the happenings of the Universe.
• One throws the frisbee, and if you're an acute physicist with a supercomputer for a brain, you can tell from the moment you let go of the frisbee exactly where it's going to land and what course it will take. What God "wants" is not so implausible in this sense; God casts the Universe and what comes of it is the result of God's actions. Omniscience and omnipotence suggests that God knows exactly what the outcome of Its actions are. Where humans screw things up is that after the frisbee leaves our hand, it's supposed to fly fifty feet and explode. This works well enough if you attach a bomb to the thing, but not if you decide halfway through its flight that it must explode and decide to bring the explosion via telekinesis.
We seem to expect, in phrasing certain questions about God, that It
will in fact, reach out its hand like Darth Vader and make the frisbee explode. Why would God do this if It could simply design the frisbee to explode with no second effort? It seems rather problematic, from the mystical perspective, for something all-knowing and all-seeing to decide late in the process that something needs to be changed. It's
at least one degree too many of anthropomorphization (I suspect it's at least thirty-degrees off-course, but we need the first twenty-nine degrees in order to arrive at the present question, as such).
It's not so much that God "wants" little Billy to die specifically, but rather that the earthquake is a necessary part of the plan, and therefore little Billy's being crushed by falling debris and then suffering for two days under the pile while he slowly dies is inconsequential to the intended outcome of God's "plan."
We can't judge "true" good and evil unless we know the dimensions and attributes of that against which we compare it.
• If a tree falls in the forest ...?
There is an old joke in which a guy goes to God and says, "Excuse me, father? I hear that a million years is like a second to you." And God says,
Yes, my child. It is true. So the guy says, "And a million dollars, is that like a penny to you?" And God says,
More or less. So the guy asks, "Hey, Dad, can I have a penny?" So God responds,
Sure, son, just a second ....
Combine that with a classic
Far Side frame in which God, as a child, unsuccessfully attempts to create a chicken, and it occurs to me that since Crucifixion, God's been on a five-minute coffee break.
Of course, there's always the possibility that God just isn't there and never was.
Or there is the fairly evolved (yet forsaken in Abramism and other "modern" religions) idea that God simply is, and does nothing. An unmoved mover, or unnamed namer. And
that idea is the relevant point of the tree falling in the forest. If the tree falls in the forest, and there's somebody there to hear it, and that somebody is too busy to pay attention or care, what difference does it make?
I had been thinking of a note on Lovecraft, but it's convoluted and I will have to do some reading to get back to it.
But yes ... God is responsible for whatever results from Its will.
