“Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?
Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing?
Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing?
Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing?
Then why call him God?”- Epicurus
God’s 3 Omni’s
There are many issues with God’s 3 Omni’s: omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence.
The famous rock paradox beckons the question, can omnipotence actually be achieved? Can God create a rock so heavy, He Himself cannot move it. If yes, He cannot be omnipotent, if no, then He still isn’t. Also, to add omniscience into the equation; can God create something about which He knows nothing?
Once again, either yes or no works against omnipotence and omniscience. But paradoxes aside, under the assumption that He is, in fact, omnipotent and omniscient, is He really worth the time?
If He can do anything imaginable and doesn’t help humans to the extent that He could, then He isn’t worth the worship. If He knows about everything before it happens and never warns us, He isn’t worth the worship. Of course, interfering would eliminate our freewill but that’s exactly the point. If the omnipotent and omniscient God does not do anything, then why should we praise Him? When a person does nothing, we call them lazy, a couch potato, useless, etc so why is it that God can get away with it?
Fearing God’s omnipotence and omniscience
The only sensible theory would be that we worship Him because we fear His omnipotence and omniscience but worshipping for the sake of getting on His good side wouldn’t work since He would know that it isn’t faith from love, but from fear, right?
To what extent could we attribute anything good or bad to God? If He can do anything but has only done what He has so far, who’s to say it’s enough? He could always, always do more for us. So essentially, He is worshipped for mediocre work when the humans are destined to constantly do their hardest; to give 110% and if God is seen as the perfect being, shouldn’t He be doing better than that? All of this is to come back to what Epicurus said. If He decides to hold back on us and constantly provide us with evils, than by what extent of the imagination is He a good or just god?
Omnipotence and omniscience may sound like powerful qualities that a god must possess but when thoroughly examined, they make the deity even less deserving of our love, reverence, and worship.
