A New Question

I had a chat with someone today and the question came up: “Is it possible that God created the world and actively sustains it moment by moment, can observe events and people in the world, but refuses to take any ‘divine special action.’” I have to admit that I immediately realized this is the modernist image of the deist’s god, but it never before struck me as so absurd. In fact, I realized the idea was abhorrent to me. My God is definately not that god. My mind immediately fixed on the idea that God was capable of observing everything, but unable, or worse unwilling, to act in any way other than to sustain the existence of the creation. However, at the same time, I have to admit that I do believe in a God who has the power to remedy all evil–and yet does not do so. There must be a lesser price paid by the continued existence of evil and gross suffering in the eyes of God for a greater ‘good’ that is not obvious to us. In fact, it seems that God, in some sense of wisdom, has chosen not to make it obvious to us. What could that greater good, or perhaps more importantly, the reason for concealing it, be? Something in this line of questions strikes me as fundamentally flawed. There is a false conundrum here, or perhaps a covering concept unecessarily confuses the issue. Anyway, my mind immediately fixated on the idea of observation. A God who sustains creation is obviously omnipotent–at least in any sense that is intelligible to humankind. Any such sustaining God is also omniscient, so the real evil of the world is evident and substantial to such a being. So, such a God could act in a ’special’ manner in the created world. To use some theological ethicists claim that such a God would never act in a ’special sense’ on behalf of any one person because it would be immorally preferential is for me smuggling in a lesser covering concept of minor morality on top of the true issue of impotence, or even more disturbingly, the real acceptance of the presence of evil–which amounts to the promotion of it in some manner. Of course, we have once again run into the issue of the problem of evil. We will not solve it here.