The Sage Forge

Omnipotent God

Good science is humble. It plays with ideas about how the universe works and seeks to devise ways of measuring the world to answer the question of whether or not those ideas really explain anything. Creation science is not humble. Its objections to the answers these measurements suggest are based not in the data themselves, but in assumptions founded in what may be both badly flawed understandings of scripture and an assumption that an inexplicably insecure God feels the need to be known beyond the shadow of a doubt.

The mechanisms of evolution in genetic code are not difficult to understand. We have evidence of their functioning in the natural world and we can witness evolutionary pressures in the world of nature, business, technology, and politics. That there is a form of natural selection at work in almost every manner of process is a function of entropy. It is natural. God ordained that it should be so. How do I know this? Faith.

One of the fundamentals of Christian faith is the concept of the omnipotent (all powerful) God. That is a big concept. Most people of faith, because they live in a world where powerful people are more impressive for the harm they can do than for the good, think of omnipotence in terms of the damage God can do. They seldom consider it in terms of the creator God. As a result they never challenge the boundaries they tend to draw around their own concepts of God. Without realizing it people define God, place the definition in a box, and then worship at their box.

If Christians and other monotheists would ask themselves a few frank questions about their beliefs and prejudices their understanding of faith would change dramatically.

No. 1. Can God participate in this world? If you don't believe he can you're not a Christian, or a Jew, or a Muslim.

No. 2. Is God creative today? If you are a Christian, Jew, or Muslim dare you say "no"?

No. 3. Can the God who, by breathing the Word, created the world create history? I'll bet you never asked that question before! Human beings do so all the time in literature. People in my unpublished fiction have heritages stretching back hundreds of years. So, am I greater than God in that regard?

No. 4. Imagine that God created the universe and then set it in motion. How recently could the moment at which he set the clock ticking have been? 13 billion years? Ten thousand? Well, why not five minutes? Roll that over in your mind. How could you tell?

No. 5. If we accept that God could have set the universe in motion five minutes ago what would that make of all your memories of people, of suffering, of the biblical creation stories, or of contrasting scientific creation scenarios? Would their existence not then fall within His will?

Christians have traditionally been pathologically afraid of giving God too active a hand in the world. They fear that if God is an active participant in our world of sin and suffering his perfection is somehow broken. Such a fear, however, is born not of our faith in God's power. It is born of the boundaries we imagine constraining that power. If we accept full and complete omnipotence on the part of God the fact that the clock of the universe could have been set in motion only moments ago, and with it all our memories and experience, becomes part of the most intimate imaginable relationship.

That relationship includes dinosaur bones in the rocks beneath our feet and a human genome separated by less than one part in 50 from the genome of chimpanzees. At a single stroke evolution becomes both a part of God's will and largely irrelevant to the most intimate relationship in our lives. If you accept the omnipotent God your relationship with God can't be threatened by any bit of fact in His world. Instead, all those facts become part of His challenge to, and preparation for, you. They also serve, when considered together, to display the majesty of Creation, its depth of detail, and its vastness in the face of such detail.

Mind you, I don't require that God created all that is fifteen minutes ago. On the other hand I do believe in the omnipotent Creator God, not some flaccid hands-off former creator contrived by the angst-filled to keep Him distant enough to remain "holy". If this is the price modern believers must pay to keep God clean it makes a purchase of such sterility that nothing of value can be made to grow in what they have won. If good science, asking God's creation questions and humbly measuring for the answers, presents us with a world that challenges our understanding of Scripture perhaps our understanding of Scripture is wrong.

Perhaps Genesis is not about the establishment of all creation and all of mankind. Perhaps that story is about you and your personal relationship with the Creator who could have set the whole world in motion as you began to read this essay. Poof! You were, along with your whole back-story (to use a literary term). Now what will you do in this new creation from this moment?

From the burning bush God told Moses "I Am that I Am". He defines Himself. The first two commandments warn us against creating our own images of Him or any other god. He refuses to fit in our boxes. He does, however, give us a universe that, through scientific examination, answers our humble questions when we’re clever enough to frame them very well. Most of all, He is not so insecure that he will make His presence certain and thus negate the need for faith.

Even an atheist scientist, carefully measuring the universe to see if what he thinks should be there really is, is living by a form of faith. We’ll talk more about that later.