Can the recent tsunami and innocent suffering in Libya be compatible with a God who is both all powerful and loving?

I will begin with a remark that many will find as difficult to accept as when I said that God cannot know the future. The hostile reaction to that statement is due to misunderstanding what it means to say that God is omniscient, that is, knows everything.

It is no defect of knowledge but, on the contrary, a sign of sanity not to know that which does not exist. For instance, no reasonable person will claim to know the last digit in the square root of 2. It does not exist. Likewise, God cannot know the future because the future does not exist, yet.

Nevertheless it is possible for God or even others in some circumstances to predict the future.

For instance, my father, who was the first chess champion of Malta, would predict he would checkmate me when I was a small boy with a particular pawn at a given move. He could do that because of his ability to bring about the predictable result.

In the same way, God can foretell any future event that He can bring about because of His power.

However, a similar problem arises about the word ‘power’ applied to God as with knowledge.

In the Creed we address God as our omnipotent Father. But St Augustine himself pointed out that the Latin word omnipotence does not accurately translate the Greek word, used by the Council of Nicaea, pantocrator.

Augustine was not an erudite scholar in the Greek language and he only pointed out the difference because he saw an important difference in meaning.

Pantocrator literally means all-sustaining rather than all-powerful. This word tends to evoke in our minds the figure of a political despot or a human being with the strength of a horse or some other wielder of physical might.

On the contrary, the term pantocrator is closely wedded in the thought of the Church fathers who inspired the Council’s language to the word ‘Father’. There is, of course, an implicit reference to power, but it is simply a power of love.

The only kind of power attributed to God is that which results in the most manifest works of love. Such are the Creation and the Redemption, both of which the very Trinitarian-minded Church fathers saw occurring through the Son, with the kind of power involved being attributed in particular to the Holy Spirit.

If this is kept in mind, then one will have a different picture of God’s omnipotence as one needs to have a different picture of His omniscience if one recognises that the science part of the word does not have the same meaning as when we study general science at school.

But doesn’t the problem put to you become even more acute the more you identify power and love in God?

Just as God knowing everything does not imply that He knows the non-existent future, so too God’s omnipotence does not imply that He can do what is self-contradictory, or absurd.

The question: ‘Can God ride a bicycle?’ should be rejected, because God does not have a body with which to ride a bicycle, or even a donkey for that matter. It is difficult but necessary not to think of God in human shape.

So, when I am bitten by some persistent mosquito in summer, it is very tempting but not very reasonable for me to ask: ‘Would it not have been much more clever and kinder to us human beings, more loving, if God had not created mosquitoes?’ He would have had to alter the whole course of evolution and indeed the complete structure and functioning of our world in order to avoid mosquitoes being generated.

To prefer that alternative to our world as it is would be reasonable only if one adhered to a current of Buddhist thought which holds that nothing is better than the existence of anything.

Short of holding that anomalous metaphysics, or in simpler words if one holds that the world is on the whole more good than bad for us to live in, then logic requires one to accept even with a certain amount of distaste the stinging presence of mosquitoes. One is not logically bound to agree with Leibniz that ours is the best of all possible worlds.

So much for natural calamities. As for the man-made and sometimes even more horrific evil undergone by the innocent sometimes apparently even more than by the guilty, the possibility is consequent upon God’s loving gift to humankind of freedom.

In this context, the strong temptation is to think, for instance, when a child is being butchered through some kind of natural or human action, ‘why does God not step in and prevent it if need be by a miracle?’ Jesus Christ is said to have done such things in His lifetime, and similar supernatural interventions are still cogently claimed to occur on very rare occasions.

If, however, God systematically intervened to stop the evil that human beings do, it would be just as inconsistent with His gift of freedom as it would be frustrating the workings of creation if tsunamis were supernaturally prevented from occurring, or if, let us say, wolves were not allowed to kill and eat lambs (which would be good for the lambs, but very bad for the wolves).

Do you really find these philosophical explanations satisfactory?

Not fully. The Word of God does not provide what has come to be called, after Leibnitz, theodicy (the justification of God’s ways to man). The Gospels present us with the way and the strength to fight it with the kind of love shown by Jesus Christ Himself.

Fr Peter Serracino Inglott was talking to Miriam Vincenti.