A God Who is Good but Not All-Powerful

by Bertil Falk and Don Webb

Challenge 278 asks how theodicy — the attempt to reconcile the concept of an all-good, all-powerful deity with the presence of natural evil — might correspond to the philosophies of idealism, naturalism, and materialism. Bertil Falk cites a different solution: dualism. Don Webb offers a rebuttal.

I would like to comment on Mel Waldman’s most thought-provoking essay “Reflections on Evil,” where he takes up the problem of theodicy; that is, how can God be almighty and good, when we see the Holocaust and the evil in the world? In Judaism and Christianity this problem has caused a lot of obsession.

The problem is discussed in the book of Job, where God permits Satan to kill Job’s children in order to test Job’s faith in God. It seems as if very few commentators have asked why innocent children should be killed like that and what happens to them after being killed, sacrificed for such a strange reason. Later on Job gets new children, a gesture from God that is even more cynical. The book of Job does not solve the theodicy problem, it rather deepens it.

There are three great founders of monotheistic religions: Moses, Pharao Echnaton (Amenhotep IV) and Zarathustra (Zoroaster). In connection with the problem of theodicy, the Parsee religion of Zarathushtra is most interesting.

The Parsees have no such problem, for the simple reason that God, called Ahura Mazda, is not omnipotent according to the story of the creation in Fargard I of the holy scripture Zend-Avesta. I cite from the translation of James Darmesteter (1887), where Ahura Mazda speaks to Zarathustra saying:

The first of the good lands and countries, which I, Ahura Mazda created, was Aryana Vaego, by the good river Daitya.

Thereupon came Angra Mainyo, who is all death, and he counter-created by his witchcraft the serpent and the river and winter, a work of the Daevas.

The Parsee story of creation continues like this. For every good thing Ahura Mazda creates, the counter-creator Angra Mainyu creates something evil. This dualism separates the Parsee faith from Judaism and Christianity. At the end it is said that Ahura Mazda will be victorious, but Ahura Mazda is not the only creator, and even though he is all good, he is not all-powerful, while his counterpart Angra Mainyu is all evil (all death) but not all-powerful, either.

The theology of the Parsees is not much observed or discussed, probably because Zarathustra has very few followers nowadays. At the most there are 140,000 Parsees in the world. Others say that there are less than 100,000.

The dualism of their faith excludes the problem of theodicy, and that is the point I want to make in connection with “Reflections on Evil.”

I bought my copy of Zend-Avesta with “Fargard I” many years ago in New Delhi, where it was published as Volume 4 of The Sacred Books of the East, edited by F. Max Müller.

Bertil Falk

Copyright © 2008 by Bertil Falk

Thank you for the discussion, Bertil; it’s every bit in the spirit of our Challenges.

In the spirit of discussion, I must argue the opposite: the book of Job does not portray God as either cynical or uncaring. Rather, you cite it correctly as saying that God — the principle of good — permits evil to exist. God is thus completely logical: neither good nor evil can exist without one another, much as stars cannot exist without the emptiness of space to hold them, and space cannot exist without something to contain.

God does not kill Job’s family; Satan does. At the end, God repairs Job’s losses. That may be cold comfort, if you will, but the point is that life is good while death and destruction are evil. God is on the side of life; Satan, death.

Job thus agrees implicitly with the Genesis story, where Adam and Eve — who are emblematic of mankind generally — acquire the knowledge of good and evil by eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge or, if you wish, by acquiring a moral conscience as they become adults.

Dualism is a logical response to the awareness of evil. However, dualism has no place in either Judaism or Christianity, because it holds that the principle of evil is equal to the principle of good. The practical consequence is moral ambivalence: dualism logically justifies your choosing — by the toss of a coin — nihilism and criminality rather than good.

It’s quite common to doubt one’s faith in God or even the deity itself. That happens when people focus exclusively on details — and we know the old saying that “the Devil is in the details.” In practice, I consider a moral conscience as a sign of faith; a religious or philosophical allegiance — or even an absence of one — may be adduced to explain it. Otherwise evil or nihilism, rather than good, would be the norm.

Don