With John Ankerberg, Dr. Norman Geisler, author of If God, Why Evil?, and Rabbi Harold Kushner, author of When Bad Things Happen to Good People.
(continued from Part 2)
Dr. Norman Geisler: If God is infinite in love, and that’s part of His nature, how can He be infinite in love and only finite in power, if both of them are attributes of His nature? It seems to me if God is infinite and love applies to Him, He would be infinitely love. If God is infinite and power applies to Him, He would be infinitely powerful as well. I don’t see how you can take one attribute and reject the other one.
Rabbi Harold Kushner: Because, Norm, love and power are incompatible. You can’t control somebody and love them. If you love your child, you’ve got to give him the space to do things that you don’t particularly want him to do. If you need to have a child who only does what you want him to do, if you need a wife who will always be compliant and do what you want her to do, you don’t really love her. You love yourself as reflected in that wife or child. If God were flawed, if God were immature, He would need all the power to control us. Because He doesn’t, because God is the perfection of love, He can give us scope to mess up our world. God doesn’t need all the power, because if He had all the power, there would be no room for us to be loving, to be freely choosing to obey, to be moral.
Dr. Norman Geisler: It’s not a question of whether God needs it or not. It’s a question of whether He has it. I think you have an internal problem if you say that God is infinite but that His power is only finite, because then the power doesn’t apply to His nature, which is infinite. Plus, you have the problem of showing how love and power are incompatible. Just because God wills to give us freedom doesn’t necessarily limit His power, except that He freely chose to give us freedom. So, what you would have to show is that there is some internal contradiction between God being all-powerful and all-loving. I haven’t seen that particular argument.
Rabbi Harold Kushner: First of all, I think that’s only a problem for philosophers. For real people in a real world, I don’t think it’s a problem to define God as the infinite of everything.
Dr. Norman Geisler: Which you don’t believe. You don’t believe He’s infinitely powerful?
Rabbi Harold Kushner: No, I don’t.
Dr. Norman Geisler: What I’m trying to find out is how you can hold He is infinite and powerful and yet not be infinitely powerful.
Rabbi Harold Kushner: Because that’s a word game.
Dr. Norman Geisler: Well, I would think it’s more than a word game. You hold that God is infinite and loving and that’s He is infinitely loving. We wouldn’t call that a word game.
Rabbi Harold Kushner: Because I see God as the source of our own ability to love and therefore God has to have an inexhaustible capacity for love, for compassion, for growth, for discipline, for learning, for all the things which are manifestations of divinity in our lives. I don’t necessarily see power as a divine characteristic. I can understand why the writers of Scripture did. They grew up in a world where potentates, pharaohs, and emperors had power, and they were the heads of the government, and they translated this to their concept of God. I think we have evolved beyond that. We understand that power is a very mixed blessing and so we don’t have to see God as the epitome of power, because we don’t have to see power as a divine quality. I have real doubts about power.
Dr. Norman Geisler: Are you saying that all of the attributes that God has are attributes that we have just attributed to Him, or do you think that they’re intrinsic to His nature?
Rabbi Harold Kushner: No, no. I think it works the other way around. That is, I think certain things are found in God and that’s why they are desirable for us.
Dr. Norman Geisler: Well, that would be true of power too, wouldn’t it?
Rabbi Harold Kushner: No, I’m not sure. I’m not sure that power is a divine quality. Maybe, to a certain extent.
Dr. John Ankerberg: Let’s take it the other way, though. That would be the fact of, is there a problem with the fact of saying that He doesn’t have power, in a sense that, then, how can we trust Him to do anything for us?
Rabbi Harold Kushner: Give you two answers; you can choose whichever one you like better. One answer is that God is in fact all-powerful and has voluntarily limited His power to make some room for us. It’s an old 15th century Jewish cabalistic idea. If God filled all of reality, there would be no room for us, so God has withdrawn and left a part of the universe which is non-God and that’s where all the trouble comes from.
The second possibility is that maybe you can’t count on God to provide happy endings; maybe we have to. Maybe one of the lessons of Auschwitz, of Hiroshima, of Vietnam, is that you can’t count on God to prevent us from messing up our world. And if we are not God’s agents on earth, earth is going to get messed up.
Dr. John Ankerberg: Norman.
Dr. Norman Geisler: Just let me suggest a biblical approach. Isaiah said, “God knows the end from the beginning” [Isaiah 46:10], and Job said that “He can do anything that He wants” [Job 42:2], as Job himself discovered. I think as you look at the scriptural record you see a God who intentionally created or intentionally gave man freewill, who had deliberately rebelled against Him, and in spite of that a God who is working out His purposes through history to bring the greater good in the end. Because as Joseph acknowledged... do you remember when his brothers had sold him to Egypt? He said, “You meant it to me for evil, but God meant it for good” [Genesis 50:20]. And in spite of our evil, God can bring a greater good.
Dr. John Ankerberg: What difference does it make if God is all-powerful or not?
Dr. Norman Geisler: Well, I think, as William James put it once very well in his book, The Varieties of Religious Experience, “The world is better for having the devil in it, provided we have our foot on his neck.” But the one thing we cannot be sure of, if God is limited in power, is that we have our foot on his neck. I feel much more assured knowing there is an all-powerful God who has His foot on the neck of the devil.