Dawkins inveighs against ‘the interventionist, miracle-wreaking, thought-reading, sin-punishing, prayer-answering God of the Bible, of priests, mullahs and rabbis’ (19): that is, he attacks the supposed religious view that God is omnipotent. But that is to oversimplify enormously the religious view of God. As John Macquarrie says, in creating others, God
• Limited his power and committed himself to his creation, leading to the incarnation and passion
• Gave a share of the responsibility to the creatures
• Made himself vulnerable
because there cannot be love, sharing and freedom ‘without the possibility of suffering on the part of him who loves and shares and confers.’ (The Humility of God, 1-4)
In Michelangelo’s ‘Creation of Adam’, God withdraws his hand, not seeking to control or possess, but allowing a space into which Adam can reach and grow. God’s left arm is resting on the Son who will endure the suffering that is a necessary consequence of creation.
In fact, it is through this very renunciation of power in creation that God becomes God – without that, he would be just formless energy.
It is in coalescing into matter and form that individuals arise and God enters into relationship with his creatures in time – God is a word that implies relationship. Can Einstein’s famous equation E = MC2 be reconfigured: God (energy) = matter and time/speed/movement?
God is not omnipotent, but rather, as William Langland says in Piers Plowman (c.1386), he became man in order to know our suffering.Elie Wiesel’s Account of Auschwitz, from his novel, Night:
Later, during the hanging of a child, which the camp is forced to watch, [Wiesel] hears someone in the crowd ask: Where is God? Where is he? Not heavy enough for the weight of his body to break his neck, the boy dies slowly and in agony, "struggling between life and death." Wiesel files past him, sees his tongue still pink and his eyes still clear, and weeps. Behind me, I heard the same man asking: Where is God now? And I heard a voice within me answer him: ... Here He is – He is hanging here on this gallows.
Later, during the hanging of a child, which the camp is forced to watch, [Wiesel] hears someone in the crowd ask: Where is God? Where is he? Not heavy enough for the weight of his body to break his neck, the boy dies slowly and in agony, "struggling between life and death." Wiesel files past him, sees his tongue still pink and his eyes still clear, and weeps. Behind me, I heard the same man asking: Where is God now? And I heard a voice within me answer him: ... Here He is – He is hanging here on this gallows.
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